6 minuti
Elisabetta
Never as in this particular historical moment have we discovered ourselves fragile: the world we used to think of has dramatically changed, our habits have been violently disrupted to make room for a new normality, social distancing has forced us to replace physical presence with virtual presence, exponentially increasing the use of any device that could allow us to video call friends, take online classes or work from home. Our typical day has gone from ‘I wake up, have breakfast, go out, go to work, have lunch with colleagues, have a drink with friends and off to the gym’ to having to stay locked inside four walls for entire days. What if we told you that the sense of anguish and frustration you have experienced over these months is generated by the very thing that allows you to connect with the outside world?
We are talking about doomscrolling, a word that first appeared on Twitter in 2018 and became famous precisely during the period related to the Covid-19 emergency.
What does ‘doomscrolling’ mean
In a broad sense, doomscrolling refers to the obsessive reading of news, but in a narrow sense it means scrolling quickly through feeds and information from mobile, both in social media such as Facebook and Instagram, and on the web in general.
Most of us have found ourselves eagerly searching for any negative information or update on Covid-19, but without allowing ourselves the chance to stop and analyse with some criterion all the binges of negativity that were fed to us on a daily basis.
During times of crisis and uncertainty, we pay much more attention to negative information than to positive information, as our brains are designed to detect dangers and promptly warn us when risky situations arise.
Uncertainty triggers in us the desire to seek information in order to feel reassured but, when we are in this state of mind, the constant negative news we find only succeeds in confirming our fears and increasing our anxiety and need to know. This mechanism can cause stress, sleep problems, variable moods or even depression.
Some tips to avoid being overwhelmed by negativity in times of crisis
Can there be remedies to this information overdose? Here are some tips!
- Go on a sort of diet and thus limit your intake of negative news even by starting to impose time limits on yourself, for example you could decide to spend 20 minutes a day on social media and voluntarily log off once you run out of time, that way you won’t even have to doomscrolling.
- Another tip is to choose other means of finding information, e.g. getting your news from newsletters from reliable sources or from a good book written by a subject matter expert, and not just from social media.
This is by no means an article that tries to demonise social media, it just wants to emphasise that we are not machines, we cannot think of absorbing any information without paying the consequences, limits must be set. As with most things we enjoy, even with the use of social media we have to set a limit so as not to abuse it.
