In defence of doomscrolling - The Morning Context

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• When life did hobble back, we texted as furiously as our keypad phones allowed us. We raged, updated, reported and collaborated. We rinsed and repeated this after the 2006 train blasts and the 2008 Mumbai terror attack. Disconnecting was an option only for the fortunate. For the rest, it wasn’t so much about misery loving company as much as it was about a kinship of slumped shoulders.

• If you, like me, hail from a family that juggles between neuroses (psychological conditions) and neuroticism (personality trait), chances are that you witnessed primitive versions of doomscrolling long before social media and COVID-19 catapulted the word into dictionaries.

• What do we do when an indifferent state inflicts torment on languishing citizens? We form a kinship of slumped shoulders.

• The problem with well-intentioned advice against doomscrolling is it doesn’t acknowledge that cycling through negative news—especially in times like this—is more compulsion than choice.

• You probably already know about negativity bias, the psychological phenomenon where humans accord more attention and importance to negative, rather than positive news.

• Few events trigger survival-oriented behaviours as much as wars and epidemics do. View that in the backdrop of COVID-19, which also stripped us of the social connections that reward us with pleasure neuropeptides (endorphins, dopamine and oxytocin), and doomscrolling was a dam destined to burst.

• Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal once said that stress arises when something we care about is at stake.

• We catastrophize and worry about hypotheticals, because facts have ceased to matter. All this while we’re forced to utilize our energies for work since we have bills to pay in a faltering economy. The irony of that last line isn’t lost on me; I’m struggling to meet a deadline that seems insignificant in light of where this country is headed.

• One of the first things counsellors ask the anxious to do is to redirect attention to things that are in their control. Focus on the outcomes that are within your reach, they say; focus on routine, resilience and relaxation instead of other people’s decisions. But here’s the thing: what is in our control—wearing masks, washing hands, sanitizing surfaces, avoiding reckless behaviour—has ceded to what is not in our control; namely, the decisions taken by people in power. How does one remain stoic or even go about life per the usual in the face of callousness? I’d love to know.

• As social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson wrote almost a decade ago, “Social media is more than something we log into; it is something we carry within us.”

• We may log off, but we can’t tune out. We shouldn’t.

• India, where domestic violence complaints to the National Commission for Women nearly doubled during the nationwide lockdown, would do well to study the psychopathology of those who are trapped with their abusers yet again.

• I’d be remiss not to conclude by citing one of the most seminal papers in contemporary psychology. It’s called “Bad Is Stronger Than Good” (pdf), and at 20 years old and 47 pages, remains prescient for the times we’re living in now. The paper argues that the reason we seek bad news is simply because bad information is processed more thoroughly than good (evolutionary adaptation, remember?).

• Citing peer-reviewed psychological research over decades, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good” tells us that learning something negative about a new acquaintance (whether that acquaintance is a person or situation) is more impactful than learning something positive. For example, in one study in the 1980s, participants reported that their distress over losing money was greater than the joy that accompanied receiving the same amount of money.

• “A single traumatic experience can have long-term effects on the person’s health, well-being, attitudes, self-esteem, anxiety, and behaviour. In contrast, there is little evidence that single positive experiences can have equally influential consequences,” the paper notes.

• “Likewise, recall for emotional events appears to favour bad ones. Although both positive and negative emotional events were welcome and both were recalled, people reported far more bad than good events, by about a four-to-one margin across two studies.”

• Unbeknownst to us, this also applies to arts and culture. American literary critic Leslie Fiedler observed that “no one has ever been able to make a successful novel about a happy marriage, whereas marital problems have filled countless novels. The most widely read classes of writers—journalists and novelists—devote the bulk of their writing to elaborating bad rather than good events.”

• “Bad reputations are easy to acquire but difficult to lose, whereas good reputations are difficult to acquire but easy to lose… Unfavourable characteristics once acquired as part of a stereotype may be difficult to lose in part because a large number of observations are necessary for their disconfirmation.”