Doomscrolling into the light

I learned a new word the other day: “doomscrolling”, defined as “the act of endlessly scrolling down one’s news apps, Twitter, and social media and reading bad news,” by Ariane Ling, PhD, a psychologist and clinical assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health in New York.

My name is Eric, and I’m a doomscroller. Twitter is my drug of choice. Well, I’m probably not a hardcore, down-and-out, gutter doomscroller - but guilty enough nonetheless.

The article correctly points out that doomscrolling during a pandemic / economic collapse / racial justice uprisings / assault on democratic norms is not entirely irrational: we want to know what’s going on, and feel reassured when we stay current. Nothing important will slip by us doomscrollers, right?

We’re in a crisis - or multiple crises - and this practice is reassuring - up to a point:

All that information can cause a constant, low-level panic that’s hard to peel yourself away from. 

“Many individuals experience cognitive distortions such as catastrophizing, and doomscrolling could lead to an increase in ruminative thinking and panic attacks,” Dr. Leela R. Magavi, a psychiatrist and regional medical director at Community Psychiatry, a psychiatric care network based in California, told Healthline. 

“A vicious feedback loop draws people back to news and scrolling yet again. This transient assurance gained by reading the news worsens anxiety over time,” she said.

This dynamic can also disrupt your sleep and make your attentiveness and overall performance suffer the following day, experts say.

In an effort to calm my mind (and this paradoxical attempt to cure anxiety by constantly dosing myself with grim news), I’m also taking the “21 Day Summer Sanity Challenge”, a series of talks and guided meditations hosted by the ABC reporter Dan Harris and his colleagues at the meditation app Ten Percent Happier. Harris is an anxious guy, a born worrier who took to meditation after suffering a panic attack on-air. In one of these “Summer Sanity” talks, he tells about how he challenged the great meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein about his chronic worrying. There were real consequences if bad things happened, he told Goldstein. No wonder he worried!

And Goldstein said, “Yes. But is it useful?”

That made Dan stop and think, and he’s taken that question with him in his journey to better manage his anxiety. Is it useful? I think the rational answer is: up to a point. It’s not crazy to worry, or to follow current events closely. The pandemic is real. Your work is real. Racism is real. Unemployment is real. There will really be a national election in the US shortly, with real consequences. So Dan Harris tries to distinguish between useful worry, and thinking which is obsessive, "the inability of a person to stop thinking about a particular topic or feeling a certain emotion without a high amount of anxiety.”

So “is it useful?” is a great question. But let me suggest a different question that may lead us in a different direction: “What work is this [behavior] doing - and for whom?” Psychoanalytic thinking teaches us that patterns of behavior that seemingly serve no rational purpose - obsessive worrying, addictive behaviors, workaholism, a wide variety of somatic complaints, our dreams themselves - are actually doing important work on behalf of something or someone in our inner life. There is a reason why these patterns persist, although the reason is unconscious rather than rational, and tries to stay hidden. I used to get migraine headaches the day before vacation ended and I had to go back to work. Good old fashioned work stress, like we all have? For sure…but I’m still working, and I don’t get such migraines anymore. It took many years before I came to feel that my body was telling me, “this work to which you are returning is not your work."

In my coaching and consulting work, I try to help my clients inquire about these patterns of behavior - or the inverse, a blockage from taking action that is clearly required - and try to understand the work that the behavior or blockage is doing for them. The scope of this inquiry is determined by the problem the client wishes to solve. In my work, that’s generally some workplace dilemma: "Why can’t I speak up in meetings?" "How do I stop checking my email late at night?” “Why are all of our leaders such disappointments?” "I can never feel prepared enough." "I need help in saying ‘no’."

Psychotherapy goes deeper and the scope is generally not confined to the workplace. In the midst of the several crises we face, there is more discussion about mental health  a good illustration of disruption opening another door to personal growth. I spoke today via WhatsApp to an old friend who has been stricken with a serious health issue that coincided with the pandemic, lockdowns and isolation. In the midst of all of that anxiety, he has started to use his enforced solitude to reflect on his career and how he wants to spend the next phase of his life. The lemonade has not yet been made from the lemons he was handed, but he’s working on it. He’s found some doors newly opened, among all those that have closed.

Quote of the Day: Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray. - Rumi