From Washington: In a development that will resonate with anyone who reached for their phone at 3am last weekend, new reporting by Wired has put a name to the psychological trap that millions of people fell into as missiles crossed the Persian Gulf. The strikes, which followed US-Israel attacks inside Iran, triggered a wave of retaliatory missile launches and air defence interceptions across several Gulf states, and almost immediately, social media turned into a vehicle for compulsive crisis consumption.
Videos of missile interceptions, airspace closures, and cyber incidents, alongside substantial quantities of misinformation, circulated online within minutes of each new development. With confirmed information emerging slowly but updates arriving constantly, many users found themselves refreshing feeds repeatedly, trying to piece together events in real time.
The phenomenon is well understood by researchers, even if social media platforms have little commercial incentive to solve it. Alexander TR Sharpe, an associate lecturer at the University of Chichester, draws a distinction between doomscrolling and what some researchers call "dopamine scrolling": doomscrolling, he says, is about staying locked into threat-related material rather than seeking stimulation. The cognitive science behind that distinction is sobering. Media psychology researcher Reza Shabahang explains that human memory, shaped by evolutionary pressures, is "biased towards prioritising information related to danger, threat and emergencies," making negative information particularly effective at encoding and retention.
Social feeds are optimised to keep users engaged, and at a behavioural level, scrolling works on the same principle as a slot machine: unpredictability. Each refresh might reveal something new, and that uncertainty is precisely what keeps people checking again and again. Digital media psychologist Assim Kalouaz puts it plainly: "Content that reliably triggers fear, anger, or sadness is more likely to be promoted because it drives engagement."
The result is a feedback loop: uncertainty drives scrolling, scrolling increases exposure to emotionally charged content, and emotional arousal increases the urge to check again. A 2024 cross-cultural study led by Shabahang found that doomscrolling correlated with higher levels of existential anxiety and, in some populations, more cynical attitudes.
The progressive left and digital rights advocates raise a legitimate concern here: this is not, at its core, a story about individual weakness. Sharpe cautions against framing doomscrolling as a failure of discipline. "Doomscrolling is often framed in the literature as habitual or compulsive, reinforced by platform design. People scroll to manage discomfort, including uncertainty, fear, and tension, but it doesn't reliably resolve it." Structural critics argue that platforms like Meta and X profit directly from this dynamic, and that voluntary user restraint can only go so far when the architecture of these products is explicitly built to prevent stopping. Calls for regulatory intervention, including mandatory friction features like timed reading prompts and limits on infinite scroll, have grown louder in the United States Congress and, to a lesser extent, in Australia's own parliamentary inquiries into social media harm.
That said, the evidence base for personal strategies remains solid. Hamad Almheiri, founder of BrainScroller, suggests structural interventions may be more effective than relying on willpower alone: "Beyond simply logging off, evidence suggests that adding structure, friction and recovery is what actually helps." Limiting news intake to specific times of day, turning off nonessential notifications, and avoiding infinite scroll formats can reduce continuous threat activation. Sleep is one of the clearest warning signs: when staying informed consistently disrupts sleep quality or delays bedtime, cognitive fog, irritability, and reduced emotional regulation often follow the next day.
For Australian readers watching a rapidly shifting Middle East conflict from a significant time difference, the temptation to scroll through overnight developments is understandable. Human threat-detection systems evolved to respond to immediate, localised danger; algorithmic feeds deliver global crises in perpetuity. The tension between those ancient survival systems and modern digital distribution may ultimately define the psychological cost of caring in the digital age.
The honest conclusion is that both the structural critics and the personal-responsibility camp have a point. Platforms that algorithmically amplify crisis content for commercial gain deserve scrutiny from both regulators and users. At the same time, research shows that doomscrolling may feed anxiety through what psychologists call intolerance of uncertainty, the uneasy feeling that drives repeated feed-refreshing, and the more people scroll to soothe that discomfort, the more anxious they become. Knowing that loop exists is, for most people, the first step to breaking it. The goal is not disengagement from the world; it is choosing the terms of that engagement rather than surrendering them to an algorithm.