How to Stop Doomscrolling: Breaking the Pull

Doomscrolling is the habit of compulsively scanning your feed for bad news, unable to stop even as it makes you feel worse. Breaking the pull starts with grounding yourself, then working with the urge instead of fighting it: name what you’re feeling, then add a short round of bilateral stimulation (BLS), the technique behind EMDR.

It’s 11:47pm and you told yourself you’d put the phone down an hour ago. Your thumb keeps moving anyway, past one more headline, one more thread, one more thing that makes your stomach drop. You’re not looking for good news. You’re not even sure what you’re looking for anymore.

Why does the pull feel so hard to resist?

Two things are working against you, and neither is a character flaw.

The first is old wiring. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences measured people’s physical reactions to real news broadcasts across 17 countries and found that, on average, negative stories produced a stronger response than positive ones. Your nervous system is built to notice threat first. A feed that surfaces the most alarming story is aimed squarely at that instinct.

The second is the habit itself. A 2012 study in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing named this pattern a “checking habit”: brief, repetitive glances at a feed, reinforced every time something new turns up. The reward doesn’t have to be good news; novelty is enough to keep the loop running. That’s part of why boundaries alone, like app timers, often aren’t enough: the checking habit can keep firing even after its original trigger is gone.

Researchers have started measuring doomscrolling directly, as its own habit. A 2022 study in Technology, Mind, and Behavior built a scale for it and found it’s more common among younger adults and people high in fear of missing out, distinct from ordinary social media use. A 2023 study in Applied Research in Quality of Life surveyed 460 adults and found heavier doomscrolling was linked to lower life satisfaction and wellbeing, driven mainly by higher psychological distress.

Ground yourself before you try to break the pattern

Before you try to interrupt a habit that’s already running, get your body out of scanning mode first. Put the phone face-down, feel your feet on the floor, and take three slow breaths, a longer exhale than inhale. A quick grounding check, naming five things you can see or hear, works too.

Getting back inside your window of tolerance, the zone where you’re alert but not activated, is what makes the next steps possible. Trying to reason your way out of a scroll while you’re still mid-scroll rarely works.

Go slow: one scroll session, not your whole feed habit

Pick one moment, not your whole relationship with your phone. “The urge to check right now, in bed” is workable; “fix my screen time forever” is not, at least not tonight. Keep each round of what follows short, just a few minutes, and expect to practice it many times before it feels automatic. This habit built up over months or years, so it won’t fully unwind in one sitting.

Know your stop point

If your distress climbs above a 7 out of 10 while you’re working with an urge and doesn’t settle, stop. Ground yourself again, step away from the phone, and consider working with a professional rather than pushing through alone.

A short bilateral stimulation practice for breaking the pull

With grounding and a stop point in place, here’s how to work with the urge itself using bilateral stimulation (BLS), the rhythmic left-right technique at the center of EMDR:

• Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how strong is the pull to keep scrolling right now?
• Name what’s under it. Boredom, anxiety, loneliness, a specific fear. Just notice it, without judgment.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes smoothly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, tap your knees or shoulders left-right (the “butterfly hug”), or use alternating left-right audio tones.
• Pause and re-scan. What shifted, even slightly, in the pull or the feeling under it?
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking your 0–10 number between each one.
• Put the phone in another room once the pull has eased. Reaching for it again later is a decision, not a reflex.

Timing rounds and watching a number while the urge is loud is one more task than most people want to hold at 11pm. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same left-right technique for you with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, paced however you like, in the web app. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation covers choosing a method in more detail.

Does bilateral stimulation actually help with doomscrolling?

There’s genuine evidence for the underlying mechanism, with an important caveat about who it’s been studied in. EMDR clinicians have used a structured protocol called DeTUR, developed by A.J. Popky, for cravings and compulsive urges since the early 1990s. A 2024 meta-analysis in Brain Sciences, pooling five studies and 266 participants with substance use disorders, found EMDR therapy produced a statistically significant reduction in craving compared with control conditions.

That evidence comes from trained clinicians working with a diagnosed condition, not from someone running a few minutes of self-guided BLS against a phone habit at midnight. The practice above borrows the same rhythmic mechanism in a lower-stakes way: a plausible, low-risk tool for loosening an urge in the moment, not a proven fix for compulsive scrolling itself.

When is doomscrolling more than a habit?

This practice is built for the everyday version: a habit that’s uncomfortable and hard to stop, not a crisis. It’s probably not enough on its own if:

• It’s costing you sleep most nights. A 2026 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found 38% say reading news in bed makes their sleep worse, rising to 46% among adults 18 to 24. Lost sleep tends to make next-day anxiety worse, which feeds the next night’s scrolling.
• It’s tangled up with ongoing low mood, dread, or anxiety that doesn’t lift when you put the phone down.
• You’ve tried to cut back and can’t, even seeing it hurt your sleep, work, or relationships.
• It connects to thoughts of harming yourself. That’s beyond what this practice, or any self-guided technique, is built for. A licensed professional, or our crisis resources page, is the safer next step.

In any of these, a licensed therapist can help with what’s underneath the scrolling, not just the scrolling itself. If the habit shows up most in bed, parking worry at bedtime has a version of this reset built for that exact hour. The same rate-name-BLS shape works for other urges too: urge surfing walks through riding out a craving more generally, and emotional eating urges applies it to reaching for food instead of your phone. For the wider pattern this belongs to, our hub on habits and urges covers it in more depth.

You don’t have to fix your whole relationship with your phone tonight. Breaking the pull once, for one scroll session, is real practice, and it counts.