The Surprising Way Doomscrolling Rewires Your Brain

Columbine High School shooting when she observed an alarming trend—many of the parents and students she spoke to found it exceedingly difficult to cope with the journalists who interviewed and filmed them just hours after the tragedy.

But it wasn’t until the 9/11 attacks that Silver, a professor of psychology, medicine, and public health at the University of California, Irvine, began to understand just how harmful the media could be. She discovered, after tracking people for three years, that the more people engaged with news about the terrorist attacks, the more likely they were to report mental and physical health problems over time.

Two decades later, there’s now ample evidence showing that brutal news cycles can wreck the body’s stress response and lead to an onslaught of psychological issues in the days, weeks, months, and even years to come.