Opinion: ‘Doomscrolling’ is misery, but you can navigate to hope

People scrolling on their smartphones during the COVID pandemic File photo courtesy UC San Francisco My students tell me that they don t sleep They stay up all night endlessly scrolling their social media feeds Their attention has been captured but not by anything in particular not really they say Like a lot of us my students are chronic doomscrollers And like a lot of us they re miserable as a consequence Doomscrolling which psychologists define as the compulsive act of endlessly scrolling through negative or distressing news on social media often leading to heightened anxiety or stress turns our phones into misery machines And those misery machines are hard to turn off by design Developers engineer our phones and apps to capture and keep our attention to make us lose time by mindlessly moving from app to app This design attacks us where we re the greater part vulnerable by taking advantage of our innate need to scan our conditions for threats The apps and their algorithms are very efficient at exploiting the way that negative news polarized outrage and other negative emotions attract and keep our attention Spending all of that time on our misery machines cultivates our reality making us think that the world itself is miserable which is what media scholars like George Gerbner call Mean World Syndrome Those of us who are heavy media users tend to have a distorted view of how dangerous the world is often for the worse Consuming miserable content leads us to feeling miserable about the state of the world which makes us more likely to scan our setting for threats and so we continue to doomscroll It s a win-win-win situation for the misery machines and a lose-lose-lose situation for us But there may be hope The best way to disrupt the recursive loop of doomscrolling is to be more intentional about our media use Instead of doomscrolling we should hopescroll looking for positive news not threats I required my communication and journalism students to try it this year by creating class social media accounts devoted to sharing positive news Each week the students went online in search of good news ideally solutions journalism about efforts to solve real problems which research shows can help mitigate or balance a few of the negative effects of doomscrolling Students shared their finds online and wrote short reflections on the experience Our Hopescroll accounts didn t go viral our posts hardly got any attention at all The engagement with our accounts across all social media platforms was so pathetic in fact that I considered cancelling the assignment Stories of progress and problem-solving don t get a lot of attention or engagement alas But what my students stated me about their experience surprised me and gave me hope My students disclosed that they didn t care about the attention and engagement metrics They felt that spending time intentionally seeking out solutions journalism about environmental problems being solved human physical condition and welfare advances diseases being eradicated renewable ability adoption rates and advances in childhood training and more was itself joyful A large number of students communicated that they shared what they learned with their roommates on their family chat groups and in conversations with random folks throughout their week They liked having something positive to talk about and they uncovered that folks desired to hear about the good news A great number of of my students released that the experience was both illuminating and healing Before our Hopescroll project one wrote I really didn t realize the amount of negative content I consume daily I see scary news articles I see people being mean to one another on social media and I spend hours scrolling through posts that have no meaningful purpose Various students even noticed that their social media algorithms began to change as they started to see more positive content on their feeds instead of quite so much doom Intentionally focusing on solutions journalism once a week helped a few students to cope with the daily torrent of doom in their feeds I often felt overwhelmed one learner wrote but this gave me a sense of agency And it s exactly that sense of agency that can help us Consuming media about trauma immobilizes our brains which is why doomscrolling makes us feel overwhelmed and impotent One aspirant disclosed that shifting their attention away from institutions that benefit from people s fear and toward those who aim to heal made them feel more resilient Several students noted that they saw a shift in their moods that surprised them Honestly I did not expect that much would change however after reading about communities working together for a large cause individuals trying to make a difference in their own way and new innovations being made in hopes of creating a better future it readjusted my perspective that not all is bad and or lost in the world Reading solutions journalism also helped my students see that doomerism is a media strategy Specific determined themselves asking questions about negative news stories like What can be done or How is this being fixed Intentionally reading solutions journalism inspired my students to become better critical thinkers about the media content they consume and gave them hope that solutions to our problems are achievable They might even become problem-solvers themselves Jennifer Mercieca is a historian of American political rhetoric professor of communication and journalism at Texas A M University and a contributing editor at Z calo Masses Square an ASU Media Enterprise publication