As missiles crossed the Persian Gulf this weekend and explosions were reported across the region, millions of people did the same thing: They reached for their phones. Within minutes, social media feeds filled with videos, breaking news alerts, and speculation about what might happen next.
The strikes followed the US-Israel attacks inside Iran earlier in the week, triggering a wave of retaliatory missile launches and air defense interceptions across several Gulf states.
Moments like this are when social media can quickly turn into doomscrolling—the compulsive consumption of bad news delivered through endless updates, alerts, and algorithmically amplified crises. A quick check for information can easily spiral into a stream of war updates, political instability, cyberattacks, and constant crisis coverage.
In the days since the first strikes, that stream has only intensified. Videos of missile interceptions, airspace closures, and cyber incidents (as well as plenty of misinformation) have circulated online within minutes of each new development. With confirmed information emerging slowly but updates arriving constantly, many users find themselves refreshing feeds repeatedly, trying to piece together events in real time.
What feels like staying informed can quickly become a feedback loop between the brain’s threat-detection system and platforms engineered to keep users engaged.
Not all scrolling works the same way. Alexander TR Sharpe, an associate lecturer at the University of Chichester, draws a distinction between doomscrolling and what some call “dopamine scrolling.”
“Doomscrolling refers to repetitive consumption of negative or crisis-related information,” he says. “It’s less about stimulation and more about staying locked into threat-related material.”
Why We Can’t Look Away
Cognitive scientists say the pattern is no accident. Humans are wired to prioritize threats, which makes negative news particularly hard to ignore.
“Human memory, as one component of the cognitive system shaped by evolutionary pressures, is biased towards prioritizing information related to danger, threat and emergencies in order to support survival,” says media psychology researcher Reza Shabahang.
“Consequently, memory processes are particularly effective at encoding and retaining negative news content, making such information easier to recall. Negative information, and the memories associated with it, therefore tend to be especially salient and enduring.”
A 2026 study by Sharpe found links between doomscrolling and rumination, emotional exhaustion and intolerance of uncertainty. Participants who reported frequent doomscrolling also showed higher levels of anxiety, depression, and stress, alongside lower resilience.
Shabahang says the behavior can resemble a form of indirect trauma exposure. “Trauma is not experienced solely through direct personal exposure,” he says. “Consistent exposure to images or reports of traumatic incidents can elicit acute stress responses and, in some cases, symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress.” The result is not always trauma itself, but a nervous system that struggles to return to a state of calm.
The Brain Keeps Checking
Experiments show people will tolerate physical discomfort to resolve uncertainty. In moments of crisis, refreshing a feed can feel responsible—even protective.
A 2024 report by Shabahang found that prolonged exposure to negative news was linked to increased anxiety, insecurity, and maladaptive stress responses. The issue is not that news itself is harmful, but that repeated exposure without resolution appears to keep stress systems activated.
Learning research suggests that emotional activation without closure strengthens stress responses rather than extinguishing them. Hamad Almheiri, founder of BrainScroller, an app that substitutes doomscrolling with microlearning, describes the effect viscerally: “The amygdala remains sensitized. Even without physical danger, the brain responds as if risk is ongoing.”
Sharpe, however, urges caution about overstating neuroscience. “The doomscrolling literature hasn’t yet done classic biomarker work,” he says. “But we do see consistent links to hypervigilance, rumination, and difficulty tolerating uncertainty.”
How Feeds Engineer the Scroll
Doomscrolling does not occur in a neutral environment. Social feeds are optimized to keep users engaged.
At a behavioral level, scrolling works on the same principle as a slot machine: unpredictability. Each refresh might reveal something new—a headline, a breaking update, a shocking video. That uncertainty is precisely what keeps people checking again and again.
Source: www.wired.com
