“I wake up in the morning with a certain feeling of restlessness, anxiety and reluctance. I prepare to read what has happened that day and I find myself trapped in several dozen news items with catastrophic and disturbing content. Number of fatalities, infected people, dangers. .. My mood gets worse, my anxiety rises and my need to keep reading is increasing. Hours have passed and I’m still stuck in this vicious cycle of negativity.”
This is doomscrolling: the obsessive search for the negative
The term “doomscrolling” has gained relevance due to what happened in this pandemic. There are many testimonies on networks and in psychology consultations, and several journalists have echoed them. The word comes from “Doom” which could be translated as doom, catastrophe, death, and “Scroll” which is the action of passing your finger across the screen downloading the infinite content of the network.
During this time we have seen, with amazement, the extent to which the feeling of urgency, danger, and fear can lead to highly addictive behaviors related to how we expose ourselves to information
What is this phenomenon due to?
We are evolutionarily prepared to respond efficiently to danger. Currently we do not have natural predators, but our nervous system, and specifically our limbic system, responsible for processing emotions such as fear, remain the same as when we had them. Our brains spend many more resources identifying the negative and the dangerous than the positive
And this makes sense! When our ancestors were in the middle of nature and observed a point on the horizon, their alert system was activated and they prepared to flee or fight. This point could be a fly, an optical effect or a predator. But being optimistic and being wrong in that context had a very high cost.
Furthermore, to improve their predictions and safety, our ancestors needed to have all the information possible about the predator: its appearance, its hunting areas, its way of behaving… This was absolutely vital.
For this reason the human brain is not a friend of uncertainty. We need that information to keep us safe Our brain knows this, and mobilizes certain resources to obtain it. Perhaps it is the reason why we have that urgent need to stop with the car in the event of a traffic accident in the opposite lane. Or watch the next episode of our favorite series when it stops in the middle of the action. Knowing calms us and gives security.
Scientists at the University of Maastrich conducted an experiment in which they came to the conclusion that we prefer to receive several electric shocks now, rather than just one but not knowing when. Certainty calms us. The problem arises when we try to look for those certainties in an uncertain reality
Thus, it seems evident that the software that came standard with us has been short-circuited. Our alert system has been activated but is not fulfilling its function, and there are two main reasons:
1. The pandemic
It is the closest thing to a natural predator that we will experience, invisible, lethal Our senses are focused on the threat. We need to decode what it is, how it is spread, where it is most infectious. And since we are not able to see it with our senses like our ancestors in nature, we need other means to give us that information: the media and social networks.
2. New Information and Communication Technologies (NTIC)
We know very well the advantages of new technologies. Its accessibility, immediacy, giving a voice to people from all over the world… but every face has its cross. And in this case we talk about overinformation, infoxication, fake news, addictions, polarization.
The algorithms of the social networks we visit are programmed to achieve a single objective: to keep us connected. This mathematical formula makes the news that appears most frequently on your smartphone negative and threatening. In this way, the technological gurus of Silicon Valley exploit an ancient warning system that was adaptive at the time and that leaves us trapped in a loop of anxiety and depression in the current moment
This formula is not new. Traditional media have known and used it for a long time. A Russian newspaper in 2014, City Reporter, decided to publish only good news for 24 hours. The result will surprise you: its audience dropped by up to a third.
We are attracted to bad news. Danger and fear capture our attention and this ends up being profitable for those behind the media and they enhance it.
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How does it influence us?
The effects of this constant hypervigilance towards danger are that we tend to overestimate it; Fear increases, it grips us, we become obsessed, we become depressed, we see ourselves vulnerable and unable to face threats.
Faced with this scenario, we try to resolve the situation through our atavistic response. The only way we know to calm down and feel safe, the one that served us in the past, is to keep looking for negative information We want to know more, we need to know more. Our circle of negativity becomes a spiral from which it is increasingly difficult for us to get out.
Imagine a sparrow that, from the safety of its nest, anxiously contemplated the sky indefinitely, day and night, fearing that a bird of prey would appear. Imagine that this little bird stopped going out to look for food, interact, and fly, due to the possibility of an attack. It would be something paradoxical, to avoid being killed, he would let himself die. It’s a behavior that’s hard to see in nature
“We have created something that exploits a vulnerability in human psychology,” confessed Sean Parker, first president of Facebook in a surprising speech in Philadelphia in 2018. And he added: “Only God knows what social networks are doing to children’s brains.” “… but not only that of children.
In the forums in which I speak throughout the year about the dangers on the Internet, we normally focus on adolescents who are the most vulnerable population when it comes to reproducing these problems. We usually conclude that one of the keys to not developing addictions or risk behaviors is education. Learn to relate to new technologies in a healthy way. However, on this occasion we would talk about a transgenerational problem that affects anyone who has NICT within their reach.
Doomscrolling is a failure in the alert system An unhealthy and maladaptive behavior that affects both young and old. Could this brain short circuit be an indicator that technology is growing faster than our brains are able to adapt?
