Researchers found that employees who “doomscroll” at work suffer hidden costs that extend beyond lost productivity.
Ian Hughes, assistant professor in the psychological and brain sciences department at Texas A&M University, led the study in Computers in Human Behavior, finding that employees who obsessively consume negative news during the workday are more likely to get stuck thinking about what they just read. As those thoughts linger, engagement with work tends to suffer.
“Doomscrolling, or the act of obsessively scrolling through social media with a focus on negative or otherwise distressing information, is something that is growing more and more common among all age groups, but particularly folks between the ages of 18 and 35 across the world,” says Hughes, whose research focuses on the intersection of organizational behavior and occupational health psychology.
Across two studies involving workers in the United States and United Kingdom, Hughes and his colleagues found a consistent pattern: employees who doomscroll at work are more likely to ruminate on the negative information they encounter, and that rumination contributes to lower work engagement. The relationship was especially strong among people with higher levels of neuroticism, a personality trait associated with anxiety and worry.
While doomscrolling is often dismissed as a productivity issue, the researchers found the consequences extend beyond the time spent looking at a screen.
“What we find is that workers who doomscroll on the clock are less engaged, in part because their mind is preoccupied, sort of replaying the images and messages that they encountered during their doomscrolling sessions,” Hughes says.
Hughes says doomscrolling can be a surprisingly difficult habit to shake as people often turn to social media not because they enjoy feeling distressed, but because they are trying to make sense of uncertainty.
“It’s something that people do oftentimes as a way of soothing their anxiety,” he says. “During very uncertain, rapidly unfolding social situations, whether it’s a pandemic or a war or some sort of armed conflict, a public safety threat, something like that, we see people turn to social media and really refresh their feeds constantly to stay informed and up to date.”
In that sense, doomscrolling is not simply mindless scrolling, it’s an attempt to stay informed during moments that feel consequential or threatening. The problem, Hughes says, is that this information-seeking behavior repeatedly exposes people to distressing content that can be difficult to stop thinking about.
“Doomscrolling is a sort of double-edged sword in that it is, at its core, an information-seeking behavior,” he says. “But it’s an information-seeking behavior that exposes people repeatedly to distressing or otherwise negative information.”
Modern workplaces may be especially vulnerable because employees carry the entire news cycle with them throughout the day. Smartphones, laptops and social media feeds make it easy to check the latest developments between tasks, meetings or emails.
“For a lot of people, it’s very hard to look away from those things,” Hughes says. “The world of work represents a unique area where people don’t leave their cellphones at home.”
Despite the findings, Hughes doesn’t believe organizations should respond with strict bans on phones or social media.
“The reality is, those policies often just make people upset and they don’t really work,” he says.
Instead, he recommends setting boundaries around when and where doomscrolling happens.
“If you’re going to doomscroll, try to contain that behavior to one physical location in your life,” he says. “Rather than doing it at work, maybe it’s at home in a comfy chair, maybe at a lounge or a coffee shop or a bar, someplace where you allow yourself to doomscroll and take in some of this negative information.”
That advice is unlikely to become less relevant anytime soon. Hughes says doomscrolling is a behavior that is here to stay because access to social media continues to expand and algorithms continually feed users a stream of attention-grabbing content.
“It is important to stay informed,” he says. “What is also important, though, is that you don’t let that information-seeking occupy every moment of your life.”
Source: Texas A&M University
