The Great Anti-Doom Scrolling Therapy Guide, Part I

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The other night, during this particularly horrible news week, a dear friend texted me.

I need some advice. I can’t stop doom scrolling and it’s really put me in a mood, feeling helpless, hopeless, and like it’s a losing battle. I know I can google what to do, but you always have sage advice (pun intended) I thought I’d go direct to you.

Photo: ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

As someone who has come to learn — the hard way — that caring about the world is not mutually exclusive to caring about yourself, I dashed off my quick, go-to advice in response. (Lightly edited, because texting):

1. Get offline

2. Throw yourself into something you can control - work, redoing your resume, whatever

3. Look for GOTV opportunities — letters to voters, something that will make a difference

4. Really, get offline. Watch movies. I’m bingeing Shameless right now. We watched The Shining with the kids last night. Totally changes your headspace

5. Know you’re not alone.

#1 makes a lot of us uncomfortable.

How can we get offline when there are breaking news stories all day long? And then analysis of those news stories? Op-eds responding to the news stories, then the analysis of the op-eds responding to the news stories? And then the backlash to the op-eds about the analysis of the news stories… ?

Rinse. Repeat.

Forever.

The issue is that “news” (current events) is not the same as “the news” (the programs and media channels that share it all day long, 24/7).

Since the advent of the 24-hour news cycle in the mid-’90s — you might remember when it started if you’re old enough to have a visceral response to the words “white Bronco” — we have been programmed to conflate “news” and “the news.”

If there is reporting on my screen all day long, it must be important.

I value the work of objective, dedicated journalists tremendously. I donate to causes that support their reporting and their safety. Their work is important. However our bodies and minds were not built to process constant fear, outrage, trauma, and strife all day, every day.

Then I am reminded of my own socially-conscious activist mom, and those like her who existed in the world before The CNN Effect and Al Gore’s Internet.

They were perfectly well-informed reading a paper or two each morning, the weekly news magazines when they arrived, then checking in with the evening news at night.

(Not that there aren’t incredible benefits to the widespread availability and democratization of more perspectives to more people today, but that’s another topic.)

And here I come back to what I referred to as the privilege to look away.

It sounds awful at first, but not all privileges are bad. Some privileges are yours to use for the benefit of something greater.

A few months back, I wrote that watching the news 24/7 is not in fact doing something.

Watching the same tragic footage over and over is not helping a single person in need. It’s not creating conditions for peace, it’s not bringing home hostages, it’s not ridding the world of terrorism, it’s not stopping a single bomb, it’s not supporting people in crisis, it’s not slowing the chilling rise in anti-Semitism, it’s not building more affordable housing, it’s not closing the pay gap, it’s not getting out the vote for sensible candidates, it’s not putting more kindness into the world.

Try this exercise

For those of you with big hearts, a commitment to doing the right thing, and more news anxiety than you would prefer, I’m begging you — us — to get out of the doom-scrolling cycle.

Here’s an exercise I learned, thanks to a lot of ideas from a lot of people who are far smarter than me.

When I find myself randomly scrolling a social feed for more than a few minutes, I make myself aware that I am. Then I stop and focus on the questions: What am I doing here and what am I looking for?

When I have my intention clear in my head, I can make a better choice.

• If I am looking for something I can do to help, I pick one and take action.

• If I am looking for ideas to help me form my opinions, I like/comment/share. In part to amplify for others, and in part to let the people who are putting it out there these days know that things they are saying are meaningful.

• If I am looking for in-depth analysis, I save the articles, videos, and long posts I want to read in a bookmarking site like The Pocket App. Then I set aside one period of reading time a few times a week to go through them. (Sometimes I don’t get to them as soon as I’d like, but they are ready for me when I am ready for them.)

• If I am looking for a reminder that there are good people in the world, I screenshot or bookmark to a “humanity” folder so I can come back to it when I need.

• If I am just bored or looking for a break from work or a quick distraction, I close the app and do something else. I’ll text someone I’m missing, call my parents, clean something (I have a lot of things to clean), listen to a short podcast episode, browse the Nordstrom sale (there’s always a sale), ask my kids to send me a funny meme, jot down some ideas for articles, organize some photos, or just play a quick Monday crossword from the NYT archives.

Funny enough, I think this last point is often the reason we get ourselves stuck in the infinite scroll in the first place.

It’s probably good to remember that we’re not going to get a break by immersing ourselves deeper in the very thing we need a break from.

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As for my friend, he texted again this morning:

Back to nighttime passive meditation, meal prep, and Suits. And trying not to doom scroll. Which is hard.

It is hard. But we keep trying. This world needs all the healthy, well-rested, big-hearted people we can get.

Tomorrow or so, I’ll be back with The Great Anti-Doom Scrolling Therapy Guide, Part II: Binge Watching. That should be fun.

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