Anxiety and the Social Media Doom Scroll

Anxiety And The Social Media Doom Scroll

Let’s talk about anxiety and the social media doom scroll and the negative impact it can have in your recovery. Learning to be a bit more mindful and intentional with your social media use can go a long way toward helping you get what you need while avoiding some of the more common traps and pitfalls that default scrolling without purpose can have.

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The Highlights

Using social media for entertainment or to take breaks when we just need to rest and be mindless for a while is totally fine. This is not a lesson about how social media is inherently evil.
Anxious people can often default to automatically scrolling by default when feeling anxious, afraid, uncertain, or vulnerable.
This default scrolling behavior can be a safety or avoidance strategy, or it might be used as an immediate soothing mechanism.
Default doom scrolling can also be part of a compulsive drive to learn, read, research, discuss, and otherwise gather anxiety and recovery resources.
While this might start off with good intentions, this default, purposeless scroll can lead to information overload, recovery paralysis, confusion in the face of mixed messages, and negative self-judgment about your recovery status and progress.
This pitfalls and traps can be avoided by making more intentional, mindful use of social media in your recovery.
Before scrolling, as yourself a few questions:
What am I looking for in the scroll right now?
How long am I willing to give myself to find it today?
Is this something I’ve been looking for for weeks or months without success? What are the odds that more scrolling today will get me what I want?
What else can I do other than scrolling that can move me even a little bit toward actual recovery?
Even if you don’t have clear answers to these questions, just taking the time to work through them before you launch Instagram, TikTok, or some other social app can help you be more purposeful, mindful and intentional with your scroll.
When you can veer away from default automatic scrolling and toward more intentional use of the social scroll, you have a better chance of being productive and steering clear of the common “doom scroll” pitfalls.