Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my morning Instagram reel.

We all wake up and immediately reach for our phone to scroll for the latest news. We get home from school, lay down and immediately start swiping up and down, left and right, wasting away while staring at our screens. Doomscrolling is fun sometimes, just turning our brains off for a couple of hours and ignoring the outside world for a while.

However, doomscrolling is more than just watching edits back to back. It is spending hours reading and watching headlines and news that make us feel uneasy and upset. Doomscrolling is the act of continuously reading bad news. It’s a never-ending cycle.

I definitely suffer from it. Given the recent ICE raids happening across America and even some potential sightings in Fresno, it’s easy to get sucked in and enter a cycle of reading upsetting headlines. I find that I become more anxious and paranoid, wondering if I or someone I love will be killed.

While it’s good to stay informed and be aware of what is going on in the world, we shouldn’t have to sacrifice our mental and physical health in order to stay informed.

According to Harvard Women’s Health Watch, there are physical effects to doomscrolling that we might not be aware of. This includes nausea, muscle tension, headaches, neck and shoulder pain, low appetite, poor sleep and higher blood pressure.

Another physical symptom caused by doomscrolling is popcorn brain. While it’s scarier than it sounds, popcorn brain means that your brain is “popping because you’re being overstimulated online,” according to Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a lecturer in the Division of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Since our brains are constantly being stimulated, it makes real world interactions harder because the real world moves at a much slower pace.

Physical symptoms aren’t the only thing to worry about. There are mental health issues to be discussed.

“When people doomscroll for hours, they’re sedentary for a long time too,” Dr. Nerurka said.

Doomscrolling enforces the habit of searching for bad news. By keeping us further and further down a rabbit hole of uneasy headlines, it keeps us in one place. The mental effects of this are just as bad as the physical ones.

According to an 800 person study done by Reza Shabahang et. al published in May 2024, researchers found that doomscrolling does elevate the feeling of existential anxiety. Doomscrolling makes us realize we are going to die, and that’s terrifying.

So, what can we do? How can we stop ourselves from doomscrolling, and what alternatives are there?

Well, according to Dr. Nerukar and Dr. Richard Mollica, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, there are plenty of opportunities to cut back on doomscrolling.

This includes keeping our phones off our nightstand or away from us when we don’t need it, turning off certain notifications or even talking to a doctor.

What works for me is that when I realize I’m entering a never-ending cycle of bad headlines and existential dread, I put my phone down and I breathe. Now that sounds corny, I know, but it does genuinely help. If I try and ground myself, I realize that I am okay and that I am in control.

While it’s important to stay alert and stay informed, our mental and physical health shouldn’t have to be a cost. By opting out of doomscrolling and long screen time periods, we can watch the news, read it on websites or even in the newspaper.

However, Tik Tok and Instagram are two greedy apps that I can’t look away from. I can act like I am all high and mighty, but in reality, I get sucked into a habit of doomscrolling and I can’t stop. Tik Tok especially, given that its entire algorithm is built off of your views,likes and saves. If we continuously view bad things, we will only see bad things.

When I want to gain knowledge about what’s going on in the world, but I don’t want to fall victim to doomscrolling, I find that watching TV helps. By turning on and actually watching the news, whether it’s KSEE 24 or ABC 30, I find myself more relaxed and at ease.

The local news is also important, because it helps me stay informed locally rather than globally. When I realize how big the world actually is, that adds to that feeling of existential dread. But when I watch the local news, it makes me feel more connected at home and that helps with my levels of anxiety and dread.

By limiting our screen time and expanding our horizons like becoming more involved in school and its news, going outside and partaking in activities around town like Farmers Markets or catching up with a friend for coffee, we can be more vigilant and active members of society. It doesn’t hurt to watch an edit or two on Tik Tok, just be sure to limit it and go outside.