Cost Of Doomscrolling

Photo credit: The Rising Nepal Garima Dhakal

Thu, 1 October 2026

Photo credit: The Rising Nepal Garima Dhakal

Thu, 1 October 2026

I went to check an email on my phone, but I got distracted by a notification and opened Instagram. There, I started viewing my friends’ stories and it was already one hour of scrolling through endless reels when I remembered I had to check an email. I’m sure most of us who use smartphones have experienced this. We pick up our phones, get distracted, and end up scrolling for an hour. But it doesn’t stop there. One hour leads to two and then five. This habit has a name; it is called doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling refers to continuously consuming media even when it makes us feel worse. We don’t care whether the media we are consuming is useful to us or not. We may tell ourselves that we are just trying to keep ourselves updated on the events happening around the world. But that’s not true. We end up wasting hours daily by consuming stuff that serves no purpose in our lives.