Why Doomscrolling is Secretly a Search for Hope

After finding myself in a doomscroll-spiral, I realised I wasn’t chasing disaster but reassurance – I was hopescrolling.

Photo by Jahanzeb Ahsan on Unsplash

Doomscrolling isn’t simply a bad habit, nor only an algorithmic problem. It sits at the intersection of human psychology, digital platforms designed around intermittent reward, and a historical moment defined by chronic fear and uncertainty.

It was on Wednesday night, the day that Renee Good was murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis, that against my better judgement, I found myself doomscrolling long into the night. My social media hygiene is generally pretty good, overall I’d give myself a B. In principle I finish with screens at least an hour before bedtime: in practice I don’t always succeed. Wednesday night was different, I spent hours on Instagram in bed feeding my brain with the myriad and growing world of horrors.

I got little sleep. According to my Oura Ring which tracks my sleep and stress levels, Wednesday night was the worst sleep I’ve had in ages, which consequently affected my stress levels and lowered my HRV for several days. By Saturday night I finally woke up. I put my phone down and asked myself,

“Why am I doing this?”

The answer did not come straight away – I was so dysregulated that I had to actively ground myself. I closed my eyes and reflected on what I was experiencing in that moment. I realised that I had been strangely transported away from myself in a state akin to dissociation. I identified the obsessively compulsive nature of my behaviour, quickly flicking away reels that didn’t satisfy my “need” (whatever that was); the more I tried to satisfy myself, the more unsatisfied I became.

Doomscrolling as a way to recover sanity:

Once I got away from the behaviour, the space for reflection opened more widely. I found that in my obsessive doomscrolling I was trying to recover my sanity by looking for others who reflected back my own shock and horror; I was seeking a shared reality. It was in unconsciously trying to answer the questions:

“How can this be happening?” and, “How can people let this happen?”

In the desperate aim to recover my sanity I found myself in an increasingly manic state – a situation fuelled by my unconscious need to confirm that my alarm and outrage was real alongside the need to see people actively pushing back against it.

In the end I found I wasn’t scrolling for doom at all. I was scrolling for hope. I was hope-scrolling.

By hopescrolling, I mean that while it may look like we’re actively out to consume a never-ending stream of bad news, we are unconsciously really searching for reassurance. My obsessively swiping had some sick logic to it, only my behaviour and the algorithms that amplified it over Instagram were not seeking to assist me in finding hope, but in worsening my anxieties. There were just enough hopeful images to keep me hooked amongst the overwhelming cacophony of horrors.

This approach was never going to solve my problem because I didn’t realise that I was hope-scrolling until I stopped and collected myself. I was in a pernicious repetition compulsion that kept me dissociated and out of control, rather than being still and grounded to choose my response.

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If you want to learn more about my perspective on the emotional contagion on social media, check out my interview with This Jungian Life in the video below.

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The repetition compulsion as a faulty solution for anxiety:

Freud taught that in repeating certain behaviours we are ineffectively attempting to control the uncontrollable. And while this might offer temporary relief compulsive behaviours don’t solve the problem, they make them worse. In Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), repeated checking behaviours are used to quell anxiety. In going back in checking the locks, you are temporarily relieved enough to leave the house – but that doesn’t resolve the underlying anxiety that’s sure to come back. The problem isn’t the locks, it’s the anxiety.

In my doomscrolling my sympathetic nervous system was so highly activated that I became somewhat dissociated – disconnected from my body and the world around me. Flicking to the next reel was a version of checking behaviour, seeking to resolve my growing anxiety by seeing an image or video that would give me some kind of reassurance. The trick, whether it’s compulsive checking of locks or scrolling reels, is to come out of the disembodied state and ground yourself. Only then do you have the faculties you need to make better choices.

The intermittent reinforcement of hope:

The default settings on all your tech is designed to keep you engaged through the very same logic that keeps people in front of slot machines and in casinos across the world, intermittent reinforcement. Whether it’s something as mundane as your email inbox, your phone’s notifications, or your social media use, this is the addicting dynamic that has us coming back for more. While most emails you open will be the opposite of good news (something to be done, a bill to be paid, a complaint), or just neutral, we keep looking for that 1 in 100 that’s a win. Same with our phone notifications and social media profiles.

Photo by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash

The sophisticated algorithms on short-form video content platforms like TikTok or Instagram is like intermittent reinforcement on steroids. You get just all the outrage and just enough hope to keep you coming back for more. The effectively plugs into our propensity to scroll through catastrophes to feel less alone while seeking signs that this madness will soon come to an end. When that relief comes, in the form of a small hope, it may be real but it is so fleeting that we keep scrolling. In the very way you feel the excitement of the $100 you win on three cherries on a Vegas slot machine, you’ll soon plug that right into the machine again seeking more. Invariably the house wins, and despite your small wins you go home with less.

Even more sinister is what we call the “near miss” effect whereby gamblers are found to be more motivated by near misses, say two cherries, than the three. That’s what keeps them coming back for more. We may see a hint of a public pushback before we’re immediately reminded of the scale of the disaster. We’ve learned that “flooding the zone” is one of the tactics of this administration – and it works very well for keeping us so flooded and distracted that the only option is to give up – to adopt what psychologists call “learned helplessness”. The activity of doomscrolling may be a form of learned helplessness, not because people don’t care, but because their care is co-opted by algorithms that pervert its capacity to manifest more usefuly.

Hope is good, action is better:

Having solved the mystery of my doomscrolling is just half the battle. Having fallen off the wagon so hard I can now get back on it. Compulsively seeking sanity and hope on Instagram is about as good as a solution as finding a salad at the bottom of a tube of Pringles. My upset, my lack of sleep, my hyper-regulated way of being for three days of doomscrolling did little to address my underlying anxiety nor did it, offer an iota of assistance to anyone in this world seeking justice or redress.

It wasn’t, however, a total wash. I did see my outrage being reflected back to me in a way that felt meaningful alongside the reassurance of seeing people taking to the streets from Minneapolis to Tehran. That Good was murdered in Minneapolis, that same beleaguered city that witnessed the murder of George Floyd resonated the most. While little can dispute that this tragic event ignited the fire under BLM and launched a full-scale re-evaluation about race relations is indisputable. And while what we are witnessing now does indeed appear to be an unravelling of all that, it’s not the end of the story. The pendulum is certainly swinging in the wrong direction, but pendulums swing back, and it’s the people that do the swinging. We are not disempowered.

What I’ve learned, what I’m learning, and what’s next?

My recent descent into doomscrolling/hopescrolling is yet another reminder that what I call “the digitally mediated self” isn’t just a matter of theory, it’s a matter of my lived experience; it was a symptom of what I care about and how I’m affected by world events. Sometimes, however, I struggle to know how to integrate my expertise with my care in ways that effect the bigger picture. The world doesn’t need another shrink offering obvious pointers about how to manage tech in an age of social disruption. In this rather more personal piece I’ve aimed to uncover a psychology of hope that springs beneath our conditions of collapse: how our pathological behaviours are, underneath, actually meaning-seeking ones.

My compulsive doomscrolling led me to think more deeply about the systems in which we live and provoked me to write this post. I may not always have the answers, but it feels right to try and find them together, and experiment with posts like these in the hopes that it resonates. The best that I can do is respond in the most authentic way I know how.

We are upset about the state of the world because we care about it, and that is something precious to hold on to.

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is an internationally recognised keynote speaker, psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer specialising in the psychological impact of technology on identity, relationships, and mental health.

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