Morning doomscrolling: what bad news first thing actually does to your mood

It’s 6:40 a.m. You silence the alarm and, without really deciding to, open the news app. A war update, a market slide, an outrage thread, a wildfire video. You pull to refresh. By 7:00 you’ve learned nothing you can act on, you feel heavy and a little on edge, and the day hasn’t started yet.

That’s not the same thing as simply checking your phone when you wake up, which we cover in checking your phone first thing in the morning. It’s a narrower and costlier version: doomscrolling, feeding on bad news in the first minutes of the day. Here’s what the research says, sorted into what’s proven, what’s likely and what nobody has tested yet.

What is doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling means spending excessive time scrolling through online content, especially news, that makes you feel sad, anxious or angry. That’s close to Merriam-Webster’s definition; the dictionary added the word in September 2023 after tracking it for three years (Merriam-Webster). Oxford Languages had already listed it among the defining words of 2020 in its Words of an Unprecedented Year report (NPR, 2020).

Researchers have also tried to measure it. At the University of Florida, Sharma, Lee and Johnson built a 15-item Doomscrolling Scale, developed with 401 survey panelists across OECD countries and validated with 502 more. They define doomscrolling as a habit of persistently attending to negative information about crises, disasters and tragedies in your feed. Two findings stand out: heavy doomscrolling was less common than expected (average scores were low), and it was more frequent among men, younger adults and the politically engaged (Sharma et al., 2022).

What separates doomscrolling from ordinary scrolling is the content and the loop. You’re not looking for entertainment; you’re looking for reassurance, and every bad headline sends you looking for the next one.

Is doomscrolling bad for your mental health? What experiments show

The strongest evidence comes from experiments that randomly assign people to one kind of content or another. That’s the only design that supports talking about cause.

In two experiments published in PLOS ONE, Buchanan and colleagues exposed adults to real COVID-19 content. In the first (299 people), just 2 minutes of reading distressing tweets lowered positive mood compared with a control group. In the second (603 people), about 4 minutes of similar YouTube videos lowered both positive mood and optimism (Buchanan et al., 2021). Two caveats matter: negative mood didn’t rise significantly, and watching acts of kindness for the same time didn’t lower mood at all. It isn’t the screen that weighs on you; it’s what the screen shows.

Everyday life points the same way. In the Netherlands, 63 people logged the news they saw and how they felt five times a day for ten days. The more negative they perceived the news to be, the more negative their mood, especially when the story felt personally relevant (de Hoog and Verboon, 2020).

Does doomscrolling cause anxiety and depression over time?

Here the evidence changes character. These are surveys and diaries: they show links, not causes.

• Psychological distress. Across three samples (378, 419 and 460 people), Satici and colleagues found doomscrolling was associated with lower well-being, and that the link ran through psychological distress (Satici et al., 2022).
• Existential anxiety. Among 620 Iranian and 180 American university students, doomscrolling was associated with more anxiety about death, meaning and control over one’s life in both countries (Shabahang et al., 2024).
• Problematic news consumption. In a survey of 1,100 US adults, 16.5% showed “severely problematic” news habits. Of those, 73.6% reported frequent mental ill-being, compared with 8% of everyone else (McLaughlin et al., 2022).
• Day-by-day tracking. 61 young adults in Vermont logged their pandemic news sources and symptoms for 30 days. Days with more news through social media came with more depression and PTSD symptoms, especially among people with a history of childhood maltreatment. Traditional media showed no such link (Price et al., 2022).

The direction of the arrow is still open. In Price’s study, the people who were struggling most at baseline also used more social media. Anxiety drives scrolling as much as scrolling feeds anxiety: it’s a loop, not a straight line.

Why is doomscrolling so hard to stop?

Three mechanisms reinforce each other.

Negativity bias. Your brain weighs bad information more heavily than good, and feeds are built around that. Across roughly 105,000 headline variations tested on Upworthy (more than 370 million impressions), each extra negative word in a headline raised the click-through rate by 2.3%, while positive words lowered it (Robertson et al., 2023). An algorithm that optimizes for clicks will serve you more bad news almost by default.

Social comparison. Your feed mixes world disasters with other people’s highlight reels. In an experiment with 84 students, 10 minutes of passive Facebook use (scrolling without interacting) lowered mood by the end of the day, while 10 minutes of active use didn’t. In a follow-up, 89 people were texted five times a day for six days: passive use predicted drops in mood, and envy explained the link (Verduyn et al., 2015). One detail matters for mornings: the effect wasn’t immediate. It showed up later in the day.

Rumination and attention residue. Bad news doesn’t stop when you close the app. Sophie Leroy’s experiments showed that an unfinished task keeps occupying the mind and hurts performance on the next one (Leroy, 2009). Those studies used work tasks, not headlines, but the principle fits a crisis with no ending yet: your brain keeps the tab open.

Why is morning doomscrolling worse, and what hasn’t been proven?

Let’s be straight: no published study has compared doomscrolling right after waking with the same doomscrolling at noon. Articles claiming morning scrolling “ruins your day” or “spikes your cortisol” don’t cite a study that measured it; we unpack the cortisol claim in our piece on checking your phone first thing. Three findings still make the idea plausible.

Your brain is in passive mode. Right after waking, sleep inertia slows you down: performance typically returns to pre-sleep levels within about 30 minutes, while subjective alertness keeps improving for up to two hours (Hilditch and McHill, 2019). In that window, actively deciding to stop is harder. An infinite feed requires no decisions at all.

Your starting mood colors the day. In a US call center, 29 customer service reps rated their mood at the start of each workday and at two random times, over about three weeks. Start-of-day mood predicted how they perceived callers and how they felt after calls, and negative mood went with handling fewer calls (Rothbard and Wilk, 2011). The study wasn’t about phones, but it shows a bad start doesn’t stay in bed.

Negativity sets in within minutes. If 2 minutes of distressing posts can lower positive mood (Buchanan et al., 2021), fifteen minutes of scrolling at 6:40 a.m. is more than enough to set the tone before your feet touch the floor.

Put together: a brain that isn’t ready to decide, content engineered to hold you with negativity, and a mood that becomes the lens for everything after. That’s not proof, but it’s a good reason not to start there.

How do I stop doomscrolling in the morning?

At 6:40 a.m., with sleep inertia in full swing, willpower is at its weakest. What works is deciding the night before and letting your setup enforce the rule.

1. Turn off news alerts. Breaking-news pushes are the front door to a doomscroll. Keep messages from people you know; silence news and social apps.
2. Move trigger apps off your home screen. Buried in a folder on the last page, they take a deliberate swipe. That reflex tap, and the friction that breaks it, is the subject of our piece on opening Instagram without thinking.
3. Give news a slot. Fifteen minutes after breakfast, on a source you pick, not a feed that picks for you. You stay informed without being ambushed.
4. Replace, don’t just remove. Buchanan’s study shows content matters: a book, a calm podcast or a message to a friend doesn’t produce the same mood drop.
5. Cap the daily total too. In a trial with 143 students, limiting three social apps to 10 minutes a day each for three weeks reduced loneliness and depressive symptoms (Hunt et al., 2018). Our dopamine detox guide walks through that approach.
6. Block the feed for the first half hour. This is the most reliable rule because it asks nothing of you at wake-up time. Screen Time can schedule Downtime, but without a passcode it’s one tap to bypass; see how to block apps on iPhone for the details.

What if my phone is also my alarm?

That’s the classic trap: the tap that silences the alarm is the same tap that opens the feed. For exactly this case, Up, the iPhone app we build (iOS 26 or later), has an “On wake-up” block:

• The alarm only stops after a mission: 5 mental math problems, 3 color sequences to repeat, or 3 spoken words to recognize. It rings like the Clock app, even in Silent mode.
• As soon as you turn the alarm off, which means after the mission, the block arms itself and keeps the apps you picked (X, Instagram, TikTok, your news app) closed for the duration you set, 30 minutes by default.
• If you try to open one anyway, iOS shows Up’s block screen with a single button: “Close”. No “5 more minutes”.
• Strict mode stops you from editing or turning off an active block; leaving it takes a math mission.

Up is free to download, with a subscription and a free trial. You can see how it all fits together on the Up homepage. A plain alarm clock and a phone charging in the kitchen work well too. What matters is that your first half hour isn’t written by an algorithm.

If anxiety follows you all day or has been keeping you up for weeks, talk to a doctor or a therapist. Cutting back on scrolling helps, but it doesn’t replace real support.