Doomscrolling vs Mindless Scrolling: What’s the Difference?

The difference between doomscrolling vs mindless scrolling comes down to what pulls you in. Doomscrolling is compulsively seeking out bad news and feeling unable to look away. Mindless scrolling is browsing anything at all on autopilot, without paying attention or remembering what you saw.

People use the two words as if they mean the same thing. They don’t, and the research on each is surprisingly different. I think knowing which one you’re doing is the most useful thing you can learn about your phone habit, because the fix for one barely touches the other.

What Is Doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling is the habit of persistently reading negative information in your feeds about crises, disasters and tragedies. That’s the definition Sharma, Lee and Johnson used in 2022 when they built the first validated doomscrolling scale, tested on more than 900 adults across OECD countries.

Their scale items read like a diary entry from 2020. “I lose track of time when I read bad news on social media.” “Even if my newsfeed says I am all caught up, I just keep scrolling for negative news.” “I am terrified by what I see on social media but I cannot look away.”

They found doomscrolling was closely tied to online vigilance, problematic social media use and fear of missing out. It had a moderate link with anxiety. Men, younger adults and people who follow politics closely did it more. It was also less common than the researchers expected, which is oddly reassuring. Most people dip in and out rather than living there.

What Is Mindless Scrolling?

Mindless scrolling is moving through a feed without really paying attention to what you’re doing. The content doesn’t matter. It can be cooking videos, memes or a stranger’s wedding. What defines it is the missing awareness, not the mood of the posts.

University of Washington researchers studied this in 2022 with a custom Twitter app called Chirp, given to 43 people for a month. They framed it as “normative dissociation,” the same absorbed, zoned-out state you get when you drive home and can’t remember the drive. Eighteen participants (42%) said at least once that they were using the app without paying attention. Interviewees described feeling “lost,” “all-consumed” and like a zombie.

Some of them said zoning out felt like a nice break. Others said they slipped into it passively, took nothing in, and walked away feeling they had wasted their time. Same behaviour, two very different endings. I’ve had both in the same evening. We cover the habit itself in more depth in our guide to mindless scrolling.

Doomscrolling vs Mindless Scrolling: Side by Side

The short version: doomscrolling is about the content and mindless scrolling is about the state. You can doomscroll with full attention, jaw clenched. You can scroll mindlessly through puppies. And yes, you can do both at once, which is how a lot of people spent spring 2020.

Which One Is Worse for You?

For mood in the short term, doomscrolling. Price and colleagues tracked US adults daily for 30 days early in the pandemic. On days people accessed pandemic content on social media, depression and PTSD symptoms went up, and the effect was strongest for people with a history of childhood maltreatment. Traditional media like TV news showed no such link. Something about the feed format made it worse.

McLaughlin and colleagues surveyed 1,100 US adults in 2022 and found 16.5% had severely problematic news consumption: absorbed in the news, preoccupied with it, checking it to calm anxiety, unable to stop, and letting it interfere with daily life. That group reported clearly worse mental and physical health than everyone else, even after accounting for personality and how much news they read. It was a one-time survey, so it can’t prove the news caused the problems.

That Ghent University study is worth a closer look. Guilt came mostly from goal conflict, the sense that you were supposed to be doing something else. People with lower self-control felt that conflict more. So mindless scrolling hurts less because of the content and more because of what it pushed out of the day. For more on the bad-news side, see the brain science of doomscrolling and our piece on news addiction.

How to Tell Which One You’re Doing

Ask yourself two questions the next time you catch yourself deep in a feed. They take five seconds.

If you’re not sure whether your overall use has tipped into a problem, our phone addiction test is a quick gut check.

How to Stop Doomscrolling

Doomscrolling is fed by a reasonable urge: you want to know if something bad will affect you. So trying to never read news usually fails. Give the urge a container instead.

• Pick one or two news times a day, and stay out of news feeds the rest of the time.
• Get news from something that ends, like a daily newsletter or a single news site, rather than an endless feed.
• Mute crisis keywords on social apps during a big event once you know the basics.
• Keep news off your phone for the last hour before bed. Anxious reading at midnight is the worst version of this habit.

The Price study found traditional media didn’t carry the same mental health cost as social feeds. The news itself matters less than the bottomless, algorithm-ranked format it arrives in.

How to Stop Mindless Scrolling

Mindless scrolling runs on autopilot, so the fix is anything that wakes you up mid-scroll. The Chirp study tested four features: custom lists, “you’ve already read this” labels, time-limit dialogs and usage stats. Every one of them reduced zoning out. You can copy most of that with what’s already on your phone.

• Move your feed apps off the home screen so opening one takes a deliberate search.
• Set app limits so a prompt interrupts you. Our guide to screen time limits explains how to set ones that hold.
• Check your weekly usage stats once. Seeing the number is a small shock that does real work.
• Have a short list of other things to do. Our list of what to do instead of scrolling is a decent start.

The other lever is making the screen itself less rewarding. Bright colors are part of what keeps feeds sticky. In a 2024 study by Dekker and Baumgartner, switching phones to grayscale cut daily use by about 20 minutes. Go Gray’s grayscale mode puts that one tap away on iPhone, with a 30-minute color break when you actually need a photo or a map. It works on both habits, but I’ve found it most useful against the autopilot kind. A gray feed is a lot easier to put down.

If you want to try it, get Go Gray on the App Store or read how grayscale mode affects screen time first. For the bigger picture, see our guide on how to stop scrolling.

The Bottom Line

Doomscrolling is a news problem wearing a phone costume. Mindless scrolling is a phone problem, full stop. The first hits mood harder and the second steals more hours. Most of us do some of both, so it’s worth fixing both: put a fence around the news, and make the feed boring enough that autopilot stops being fun.