Doomscrolling—everybody’s doing it! You’re lying in bed, on your phone, trying to fall asleep, but then you end up staying awake for hours as your social media timeline fills you with anger and anxiety. This isn’t just your garden-variety FOMO either. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and it can feel like there’s a fresh new calamity or setback every single day. Add displays of collective grief over racial injustice to the mix, and it can be even harder to look away. So how do you stay informed without growing enraged? How do you stay connected without spiraling into despair?
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior editor Angela Watercutter joins us to talk about our shifting relationships with social media and how we’re dialing back the doomscrolling.
Show Notes
Read Angela’s story about how doomscrolling is eroding your mental health here. Read more about digital well-being tools on Android phones here, and find all of WIRED’s suggestions and coverage of digital wellness here. Find Ram Dass’ Here and Now podcast here. Our guide to the best Kindles is here.
Recommendations
Angela recommends I May Destroy You on HBO. Lauren recommends The Netflix Effect: Land of the Giants by Recode/Vox. Mike recommends the music of Ennio Morricone and that you read John Zorn’s obituary of Morricone in The New York Times.
Angela Watercutter can be found on Twitter @WaterSlicer. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.
How to Listen
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Transcript
[Intro theme music]
Lauren Goode: Hi, everyone, welcome to Gadget Lab. I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED, and I am joined by my cohost, WIRED senior editor Michael Calore. Hi, Mike.
Michael Calore: Aloha. Hi, how are you?
LG: Hi. Aloha? Are you in Hawaii this week?
MC: It’s a state of mind. It’s like Margaritaville. It’s anywhere you want it to be.
LG: I have to take that into consideration since we’re not going many places this summer. We’re also joined this week by WIRED senior editor Angela Watercutter, who, I just found out, despite the fact that she has been at WIRED for many years and is one of our very esteemed colleagues, this is your first time on the Gadget Lab?
Angela Watercutter: Yes, yes. Hi everybody. I am both a Gadget Lab virgin and an aspiring parrot-head in these times of wishing I was in Hawaii. So.
LG: I really can’t believe that we haven’t had you on yet, but I’m glad we’re remedying the situation.
AW: I’m available anytime. I have more free time now than I normally would.
LG: We can’t promise remedies for everything these days, but we can have Angela on the podcast more. All right, today we’re talking about something you are probably all very familiar with by now. It’s called doomscrolling. I’m laughing when I say it, but it’s not funny. OK, maybe you didn’t realize that’s what it’s called, but that’s what we’re calling it. It’s that thing where you just stare at social media, you’re constantly refreshing and scrolling. You’re unable to tear yourself away from whatever fresh hell the world has cooked up in the past hour or two, and then suddenly it’s 2 in the morning and you’re so filled with anxiety that you can’t sleep. Angela wrote a story about this for WIRED.com recently, and so we brought her on to solve all of our problems around doomscrolling in about 30 minutes. Is that correct?
AW: Yeah. Again, we make no promises of cures here on the Gadget Lab podcast, I’ve been told, but I will do my best.
LG: OK. So take us through why this is such a common coping mechanism right now.
AW: I think it’s just a matter of, we feel like if we keep looking at the news and keep searching, there will be an answer, that there is some yellow brick road on Twitter that leads us to some better outcome. At least this is what is happens with me. I kind of keep scrolling and think eventually I’ll see some good news or some sort of something else. The things that I normally would go to social media for, I still keep going, but then you just kind of keep finding more and more, for lack of a better term, bad information or sad information. Then, once that starts, you kind of can’t stop going down that completely different, but entirely distinct and less optimistic looking rabbit hole.
LG: How is this different from our normal addiction to social media?
AW: We generally talk about social media addiction in the sense of like a FOMO kind of thing. In what I call the before times, before quarantines kind of set in around late February, early March, those of us who really went down these social media rabbit holes were checking our friends’ Instagrams and seeing a party we missed or a dinner we didn’t get to make it to or something, or we’re following celebrities or keeping up with whatever, the sort of Twitter argument of the day is. There was news of course. Obviously we keep up with social media because we want to just keep up with what’s going on in the world, but I think over the last five or six months, that’s really kind of evolved.
Now, we’re sort of diving in again and getting into this onslaught of information. At the beginning of the quarantine, obviously, back in March, it was coronavirus infection rates and what state was having a new hot spot and should I wear a mask, should I not wear a mask? All of these sort of things that were in the news every day. By the way, wear masks. And then a few months later, with the death of George Floyd, there was just so much more information about protests and videos of police brutality and things like that, and so it just became something that we were going to in a different way. I think that’s where the shift came. It used to be some bad news and then some puppy videos, but now it’s just a lot of … not even not necessarily bad news, but just hard-to-take news, traumatic news, things that normally kind of get broken up with other pieces of information, where now it’s ust traumatic to consume on a consistent daily basis.
MC: So you’re scrolling and scrolling, and you keep seeing bad news, and you keep scrolling because you’re convincing yourself that you are eventually going to encounter some good news or maybe find some sort of resolution. In the people you talked to for this story, what did they tell you is going on in your brain when you’re scrolling?
AW: Yeah. It’s a strange thing. I guess the addiction part of it is mostly us, I think, that it’s … in a weird way, we could stop, but it’s hard to fight that. But, yeah, I think a lot of it too isn’t necessarily even in our own brains. One of the folks I talked to researched social media and information tactics, and the thing is, the more we look at these things on social media, the more that social media knows to push them into our feeds. So there’s a cy