“Smartphone is definitely smarter than us to be able to keep us addicted to it.”
This is where it starts: the hypnotic grip of doomscrolling. You think you’re just “staying informed,” but what’s actually happening is far closer to a trance state. Once you see how engineered this loop is, the obvious next question becomes: can you actually escape it? That’s where my next post on social media detox picks up the story.
It’s 2 a.m., and you’re in bed doomscrolling. Your eyes are burning, and your thumb is locked in that familiar downward swipe.
Another tragedy. Another outrage. Another crisis that is entirely unrelated to your life. You know you should sleep. You know this is making you feel worse. And yet your thumb keeps moving.
Most people call this a “bad habit” or blame it on “weak willpower.” Here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s neither. What you’re experiencing is closer to a hypnotic trance. And I don’t mean that metaphorically.
You think you’re choosing to scroll. But when you’re in a trance state, there is no choice—only automatic response.
Your conscious mind isn’t driving anymore. It’s just watching from the passenger seat, helpless, as your thumb scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.
This isn’t another article telling you to “just put your phone down.” This is about understanding what’s actually happening in your brain when you doomscroll—and why it feels impossible to stop even when you desperately want to.
Because here’s the thing: The people who designed these platforms know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re protecting their kids from it.
Doomscrolling: the act of continuously consuming negative news online, even when it makes you feel terrible. The term emerged during the pandemic, but the behavior is far older than your smartphone.
In 2022, psychologists introduced the ‘Doomscrolling Scale.’ Their findings? The deeper you scroll, the faster your mental well-being quietly unravels. Shocking, I know. Who could’ve predicted that marinating your brain in digital catastrophe would make you feel like garbage?
Half of Gen Z and millennials doomscroll daily, studies say—rewiring their brains to process fear like entertainment. Translation: we’re stress-snacking on misery and calling it ‘staying informed’.
But here’s what should actually terrify you: The people who built these platforms don’t let their own children use them.
Steve Jobs famously didn’t let his kids use iPads. Bill Gates didn’t allow his children to have cell phones until they were 14, implementing strict screen time caps when his daughter developed an unhealthy attachment to a video game. Mark Cuban, Tim Cook, and Alexis Ohanian—all severely restrict their children’s access to the very technologies they created and profited from.
Think about that. The architects of social media raise their kids tech-free. What do they know that we don’t?
They know their platforms don’t just capture attention—they create something closer to a hypnotic state. And once you understand the mechanism, you can’t unsee it.
When hypnotherapists put someone into a trance, we’re looking for specific markers: narrowed focus, loss of time awareness, reduced critical thinking, automatic behavior, and heightened suggestibility.
Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s your Tuesday night.
Let me break down what these trance markers actually look like when you’re doomscrolling:
Congratulations, you’ve achieved the focus of a Zen monk—if that monk was exclusively meditating on disasters and outrage.
Your thumb moves without conscious decision. Swipe. Tap. Swipe. You’re not deciding to do it. It’s just… happening. In hypnotherapy, we call this “automatic motor activity.”
Your body continues the pattern while your conscious awareness is somewhere else entirely. You’re basically on autopilot, except instead of flying a plane, you’re flying straight into a mountain of anxiety.
The emotional hits bypass your rational filters entirely. You react before you think. You feel before you question.
Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, explains that smartphones trigger the same dopamine pathways as slot machines. The variable reward system— you never know what you’ll see next—creates a neurological loop that’s nearly identical to gambling addiction.
Pull the lever. Get the reward. Repeat. Except the lever is your thumb and the slot machine never closes.
But here’s what most articles about phone addiction miss: it’s not just the dopamine. It’s the altered state itself.
You’re not weak. You’re not lacking discipline. You’re trying to fight a trance state with willpower. That’s like trying to wake yourself up from a dream by thinking really hard about being awake. It doesn’t work that way.
Your conscious mind—the part that knows this is bad for you—is watching from the passenger seat while your subconscious drives the car straight into a ditch. Again and again.
So why does your brain keep doing this? Because from your brain’s perspective, doomscrolling is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: keep you alive.
Your brain evolved in an environment where threats were immediate and local. A predator in the bushes. A rival tribe is approaching. Paying attention to danger meant survival. Ignoring danger meant death. Simple math.
Fast forward to 2025: Your amygdala—that ancient alarm system—can’t tell the difference between “there’s a tiger in the bushes” and “there’s a crisis on your screen happening 3,000 miles away.”
It just registers: THREAT DETECTED. PAY ATTENTION. NOW.
Psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson describes the brain as “Velcro for negative experiences, Teflon for positive ones.” Research shows we process negative information faster, remember it longer, and react to it more strongly than positive information. This negativity bias is hardwired into your nervous system.
This made perfect sense when remembering which berries were poisonous could save your life. Now? It means your brain is engineered to pay attention to every disaster, scandal, and tragedy the algorithm can serve you.
And the platforms know this. Every engagement metric—time spent, scroll depth, how long you pause on specific content—gets fed back into the algorithm. The algorithm learns: negative content equals engagement. Outrage equals engagement. Fear equals engagement.
So what does it serve you? An endless buffet of threats for your amygdala to freak out about. It’s like an all-you-can-eat restaurant, except every dish is seasoned with existential dread.
You’re not addicted to your phone. You’re addicted to the feeling of vigilance. Your brain has confused “monitoring threats” with “staying safe.” Every scroll is your amygdala saying, “Just one more check. Just to make sure the world hasn’t ended yet.”
The cruel irony? The more you scroll looking for safety, the less safe you feel. But your brain interprets that anxiety as proof that the threats are real—which makes you scroll more. Which increases the anxiety. Which your brain takes as confirmation that scrolling was necessary.
It’s a perfect trap. The kind of trap that would be impressive if it wasn’t destroying your mental health. And the payoff? Misery on demand.
The University of Florida found that frequent doomscrollers showed significantly higher rates of anxiety, depression, and what psychologists call “learned helplessness”—the belief that nothing you do matters.
Here’s what’s happening physiologically: Your nervous system is treating every piece of bad news as if it’s happening to you right now. Your body floods with cortisol. Your heart rate spikes. Your breathing shallows. You’re in full fight-or-flight mode.
Except there’s no action to take. No threat to fight or flee from. Just… more scrolling.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s research on trauma shows that when your body activates the stress response without resolution, it gets stuck in chronic activation. You’re essentially giving yourself micro-doses of trauma, over and over, with no way to discharge it. Your body’s prepping for war while you’re lying in bed in pajamas.
Beyond the emotional damage, there’s the cognitive cost. Your attention span fragments. Your ability to focus on anything longer than a headline deteriorates.
You become what former Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris calls “chronically distracted”—unable to be fully present anywhere because part of your brain is always monitoring for the next hit.
And then there’s sleep. Doomscrolling before bed is basically telling your brain, “Stay alert. Danger everywhere. Don’t rest.” Then wondering why you can’t fall asleep.
Here’s the gut punch: You’re paying rent in your brain to strangers you’ll never meet, for problems you can’t solve, and in places you’ll never go.
Meanwhile, the actual problems in your actual life—the relationship that needs attention, the project you’re avoiding, the conversation you keep postponing— get ignored because your emotional bandwidth is maxed out on other people’s chaos.
The world’s problems feel urgent. Your problems feel avoidable. So you scroll. And slowly realize you’ve spent years worrying about everything except the things you can actually change.
People blame themselves. “I just need more discipline.” “I’m so weak.” “Why can’t I just stop?”
Wrong question. You’re not weak. Think about what you’re fighting:
That’s not a fair fight. That’s bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. You’re not scrolling because you lack self-control. You’re scrolling because thousands of engineers spent years optimizing every pixel to make sure you would.
As Tristan Harris puts it:
“Smartphones and social media by their very nature are like slot machines, enticing users to check for updates and news.”
And here’s the really insidious part: the guilt you feel about doomscrolling? That anxiety about wasting time? That feeds back into the anxiety that makes you want to doomscroll in the first place.
You’re stuck in a loop where the solution (stop scrolling) triggers the problem (anxiety), which triggers the behavior (scrolling to manage anxiety).
It’s not a habit. It’s a trap. And willpower won’t get you out.
You can’t think your way out of a trance any more than you can think your way out of sleepwalking. But you can learn to recognize when you’re in one—and use specific techniques to break the pattern.
These aren’t willpower strategies. They’re trance-interruption protocols. Actual tactics that work when your brain is being an idiot.
In hypnotherapy, we break trances by introducing unexpected stimuli that jolt attention back to conscious awareness.
Set a random alarm on your phone. When it goes off, stop and ask, “Am I in a trance right now?”
The question itself is the interrupt. Asking it requires conscious engagement. Trance equals automatic. Question equals manual override.
Don’t try to resist the urge. Make it harder to give in.
Move social media off your phone and onto the desktop, where it takes deliberate effort to check. At night, create distance—leave your phone in another room, use a phone storage box, or use timed blockers.
Here’s the principle: If you’re relying on discipline, you’ve already lost. These small barriers reshape behavior by turning an unconscious habit into a conscious choice.
Happiness researcher Shawn Achor found that increasing friction by just 20 seconds was enough to break automatic behaviors in 80% of participants. 20 seconds. That’s how fragile these “unbreakable” habits actually are.
Your brain needs something to do when it’s anxious or bored. If you remove scrolling without replacing it, you’ll just find another compulsion.
Keep a book on your nightstand. Or, even a Sudoku puzzle. Have a “boredom protocol” ready: Walk, journal, or call someone who won’t spend the entire conversation complaining about things neither of you can control.
The key: The replacement needs to be easier than resisting. Your brain is lazy. Work with that, not against it.
Before you open the app, ask, “Will this change what I do tomorrow?”
If the answer is no, close it.
Most doomscrolling content is anxiety without agency. You absorb the fear but have no power to act on it. That’s not staying informed—that’s volunteering for helplessness.
If quitting feels impossible, contain it. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Scroll all you want. When the timer goes off, you stop. No negotiation.
This breaks the infinite loop. The trance thrives on “just one more scroll.” Time limits kill that illusion.
None of these techniques work if you’re trying to implement them while in the trance. Decide now, while you’re lucid, what your protocol will be. Write it down. Put it somewhere you’ll actually see it.
Because the next urge will hit. And when it does, your willpower won’t save you. But your system might.
Doomscrolling feels unstoppable because it’s not just a habit—it’s a hypnotic state that hijacks your nervous system, exploits your evolutionary wiring, and keeps you locked in a loop of anxiety without agency.
You weren’t warned. But now you know.
Here’s your choice: You’re either living your life, or you’re consuming other people’s chaos on infinite loop. There’s no third option where you stay “informed” without paying the psychological toll. That’s not how this works.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s noticing when you’re in the trance—and having a rope ladder to climb out before you lose another hour to strangers’ emergencies.
You can’t control the algorithm. You can’t control the news cycle. You can’t control the dumpster fire that is the world.
But you can control whether you rent out your headspace to it.
The trance only works if you stay asleep. Time to wake up.
Still think a “social media detox” is your ticket out? Read: The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Social Media Detox Nobody Talks About
DISCLOSURE: In my article, I’ve mentioned a few products and services, all in a valiant attempt to turbocharge your life. Some of them are affiliate links. This is basically my not-so-secret way of saying, “Hey, be a superhero and click on these links.” When you joyfully tap and spend, I’ll be showered with some shiny coins, and the best part? It won’t cost you an extra dime, not even a single chocolate chip. Your kind support through these affiliate escapades ensures I can keep publishing these useful (and did I mention free?) articles for you in the future.
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