New research suggests that doomscrolling during the workday carries hidden costs that reach far beyond the minutes lost to staring at a screen. A study led by Ian Hughes, an assistant professor in the psychological and brain sciences department at Texas A&M University, found that employees who obsessively consume negative news on the clock are significantly more likely to have their thoughts linger on that content, which in turn drags down their engagement with their actual job duties. The findings were published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
Across two separate studies involving workers in the United States and the United Kingdom, Hughes and his colleagues identified a consistent pattern. Employees who doomscroll at work are more prone to ruminate on the distressing information they encounter, and that rumination directly contributes to lower work engagement. The effect was notably stronger among individuals with higher levels of neuroticism, a personality trait often linked to anxiety and worry.
“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 said. He defines the habit as “the act of obsessively scrolling through social media with a focus on negative or otherwise distressing information.” It has become increasingly common across all age groups, particularly among people aged 18 to 35 around the world.
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Hughes says doomscrolling is a surprisingly hard habit to break, largely because people don’t turn to social media during crises because they enjoy feeling distressed. They do it to make sense of uncertainty. “It’s something that people do oftentimes as a way of soothing their anxiety,” he said. “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 light, the behavior is less about mindless scrolling and more about an attempt to stay informed during moments that feel consequential or threatening. The catch, Hughes explains, is that this information-seeking repeatedly exposes people to distressing content that is 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 said. “But it’s an information-seeking behavior that exposes people repeatedly to distressing or otherwise negative information.”
Modern offices are particularly vulnerable to this dynamic because employees carry the entire news cycle with them all day. Smartphones, laptops and always-on social media feeds make it effortless to check the latest developments between meetings, tasks or emails. “For a lot of people, it’s very hard to look away from those things,” Hughes said. “The world of work represents a unique area where people don’t leave their cellphones at home.”
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Despite the findings, Hughes does not think organizations should respond with strict bans on phones or social media. He argues that such policies tend to backfire. “The reality is, those policies often just make people upset and they don’t really work,” he said.
Instead, he recommends that workers set 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 said. “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.”
The advice is unlikely to become obsolete anytime soon. Hughes says doomscrolling is a behavior that is here to stay, given that access to social media continues to expand and algorithms constantly feed users a stream of attention-grabbing content. He emphasizes that staying informed matters, but it shouldn’t consume every waking moment. “It is important to stay informed,” he said. “What is also important, though, is that you don’t let that information-seeking occupy every moment of your life.”
