Death Scrolling
On Tuesday, I opened Instagram to pass some time. At first, I was laughing. The posts were funny, light and easy. I was enjoying myself. Then, somewhere in the scrolling, the temperature changed.
I did not notice the exact moment it happened. One minute I was amused, and later I was angry. Not mildly irritated. Angry. The shift had been so subtle that I had not clocked it while it was happening.
I must have been scrolling for two or three hours. I honestly lost track of time. My neck had started to feel almost locked in place from holding the same position, absent-mindedly consuming one post after another. My body was telling me to stop, but I kept scrolling.
That is the part that disturbed me.
I knew I was uncomfortable. I knew I had been there too long. I knew something had changed in me. Still, I kept going. My attention was no longer simply occupied. It had been captured.
The feed kept presenting the next thing before I had time to process the last thing. A joke. A face. A song. An opinion. An injustice. Something irritating. Something upsetting. Something designed to keep me watching.
Each post created a small reaction, but none of those reactions had time to settle before the next one arrived.
Even the good content was overstimulating.
Then the feed began slipping into material that made me angry. There was no clear boundary between the lightness and the outrage. No obvious point where I could say, this is where my mood changed. The feed changed gradually, and I changed with it.
When I finally managed to put the device down, it felt less like stopping and more like escaping. I went to bed, but the scrolling seemed to continue inside me.
I had one of the worst nights I have had in a long time. I felt detached and frightened. My mind felt stuck. It was almost as though I could feel my brain, overworked and unable to settle.
My body had been almost motionless for hours, but internally I had been repeatedly activated. I had been laughing, reacting, judging, absorbing, anticipating and getting angry while barely moving from the same position.
When the screen was gone, the activation remained. I became so restless that I was violently jerking my body, deliberately trying to regulate myself and shake off whatever had taken hold.
The next day, I was still out of sorts. I was irritable. I picked fights with my husband. I still felt slightly detached from myself, though not as intensely as the night before. The device had been put down, but the effects had not ended.
I turned to my crystals, candles and oracle cards to calm myself. They helped, but only once I could fully attend to them and myself.
That shit was hard. It was several hours later and I was still struggling to gather my attention, which had been pulled in so many directions that I could not immediately give myself to the things that normally ground me. I had to return to my own attention before I could receive the medicine.
It felt like fighting for my life.
I had also spent time that day in intense conversations with AI, which creates a different kind of current, ripping through attention, intention and agency with a subtle force. It responds immediately, expands whatever you bring to it and keeps the exchange moving. There is always another question, another answer, another interpretation, another frame that may or may not have actually come from your own thought process.
Between Instagram and AI, I had spent hours inside systems that do not naturally end.
A human conversation pauses. A book has chapters. A television programme finishes. A walk reaches a destination. An algorithmic feed has no conclusion. It does not know when you have had enough. It does not know when your body is hurting. It does not know when your mind is saturated. It only knows that you are still there.
I cannot say exactly what happened in my brain, and I am not trying to diagnose myself. But I knew immediately that the combination of Instagram and AI had triggered something.
There are recognised effects connected to prolonged digital exposure: cognitive overload, fragmented attention, mental fatigue, disrupted sleep and emotional agitation. There is also the pull to keep checking — reaching for the device, refreshing the feed, opening the app again, sometimes without even deciding to. That repeated checking can become part of the loop itself.
Prolonged exposure can also warp our sense of proportion. If the feed keeps placing anger, cruelty, conflict or catastrophe in front of us, our minds can begin to experience that narrow slice as if it is the whole landscape. What is repeated starts to feel widespread. What is amplified starts to feel normal. And without noticing it, we can leave the screen carrying a picture of the world shaped by what the algorithm chose to keep showing us.
When emotionally charged material is placed beside entertainment, beauty and humour, we can be carried from one emotional state into another without fully noticing the transition.
When the brain is constantly receiving new information, very little of it is properly absorbed. We are reacting, but not necessarily processing. We are consuming, but not necessarily understanding.
Over time, we may also become less able to notice when we are oversaturated.
That's what happened to me and it frightened me.
My neck had already told me that I had been there too long. My body had sent a clear signal, but the feed still held my attention.
The danger was not only that I became overstimulated. It was that I had become temporarily disconnected from my ability to recognise the overstimulation and act on it. My self-agency had taken a direct hit.
I do not usually scroll for long periods. I now call it death scrolling, because doomscrolling does not fully describe what I experienced.
It was not only the consumption of post after post. It was the gradual deadening of my awareness of time, my body, my surroundings and my ability to choose to stop.
It was the narrowing of my attention until the feed became my whole environment. It was the loss of proportion that made whatever appeared on the screen feel immediate and pressing.
It was the emotional accumulation of hundreds of small reactions with nowhere to go. It was the strange experience of being physically still while my mind and nervous system were being repeatedly moved.
The experience troubled me for another reason.
The weekend before, I had been at a music festival when I noticed a little girl who looked no more than three or four years old. She was holding a device very close to her face. She was completely fixated and barely moving. Her guardians were nowhere in sight. She was simply there, alone with the screen.
I remember noticing her at the time, but after what happened to me on Tuesday, the image returned with much greater force.
I am an adult. I was eventually able to recognise that something was wrong. I could put the device down. I had language for what I was feeling. I had a husband nearby. I had crystals, candles, oracle cards and other practices that helped me return to myself.
And still, I struggled.
What happens to a child who has not yet developed those resources?
A young child is still learning how to direct attention, recognise discomfort, regulate emotion and return to herself after becoming overwhelmed. She is learning through movement, touch, play, conversation, eye contact, imagination and interaction with the physical world.
What happens when a device becomes one of the first things teaching her how to hold attention, how to soothe, how to be entertained and how to respond to the world? What happens when her attention is repeatedly directed by a system designed to keep her watching?
A child cannot recognise algorithmic manipulation. She cannot understand why the emotional atmosphere has suddenly changed. She may not even know that leaving is an option.
I am not suggesting that what I noticed tells the whole story of that little girl’s life. I do not know what she was watching or how long she had been there.
But in hindsight, I recognised me in her. I noticed the captivation — a very young child, still and transfixed, while the living world continued around her. The child in me had been transfixed the same way.
And now I understand something else.
The danger may not always announce itself through obviously harmful content.
It may begin with laughter.
It may feel good.
It may seem harmless.
Then, slowly, the feed changes. And you change with it.
What Was Happening to Me?
What happened that night was not simply “too much screen time.” It was a loss of relationship with my own attention.
The feed had become the dominant environment. My body, the room, the passing of time and even the change in my emotional state had all moved into the background.
That is what concerns me most about prolonged exposure.
It does not only fill the mind with more content. It can weaken our awareness of what the content is doing to us while we are consuming it.
The shift from laughter to anger happened without a clear break. My emotional state changed inside the flow, and because the flow never stopped, I did not stop to notice it.
This is one of the dangers of algorithmic consumption: the system does not need to hold us in one emotion. It only needs to keep us responding.
Laughter works.
Curiosity works.
Outrage works.
Fear works.
Research has found that people can perceive more outrage and hostility in social-media posts than the people writing them actually report feeling. This can exaggerate our sense of how angry and hostile the wider environment really is.¹
As long as we remain engaged, the emotional direction may be secondary to the fact that we remain on the platform.
That means the experience can feel pleasurable and harmful within the same session. The enjoyment at the beginning does not protect us from where the feed may eventually take us.
In fact, the enjoyment may be what opens the door to the rabbit hole.
There is also no built-in point of completion. The feed does not reach a natural conclusion. It does not recognise saturation. It does not know that enough information, emotion or stimulation has entered the system. It continues until we interrupt it.
But prolonged exposure may make that interruption more difficult.
The longer we remain inside the stream, the less aware we may become of our physical discomfort, emotional change, mental fatigue and surroundings. The very capacity needed to stop can become weakened by the thing we need to stop.
Research by Mesfin Bekalu and his colleagues suggests that the effects of social media cannot be understood by measuring time alone. Routine use and a strong emotional connection to social media were associated with different outcomes, suggesting that our relationship with the platform matters alongside how often we use it.²
Social-media use—particularly problematic or compulsive use—has also been associated with poorer sleep, anxiety, depression and other forms of mental distress. These studies show association rather than proving that social media caused every individual experience, but they confirm that the effects can continue beyond the time spent looking at the screen.³
That makes sense of something I felt very clearly: I had removed the device, but I had not immediately removed its effects.
AI added another layer.
Unlike a social-media feed, AI responds directly to us. It takes our thoughts, questions and concerns and returns them expanded, interpreted and sometimes reshaped. That can be useful, but it can also blur the line between what we actually thought and what was introduced by the response. An idea can come back sounding so coherent, so complete and so close to our own language that we may begin carrying it as if it originated with us. There is always another angle, another answer and another possibility to pursue.
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Research into human–AI interaction has found that repeated exchanges with AI can influence human perceptual, emotional and social judgements, sometimes without people recognising the extent of that influence.⁴
Between Instagram and AI, I had been receiving stimulation from two different directions: one selecting content for me, the other responding to me.
Neither had a natural ending.
What I experienced may have been the point at which my ability to receive, react and process was exceeded, and the affects carried on long after the device was switched off.
For adults, that may mean noticing when scrolling stops being a choice and starts becoming a pull — when time disappears, the body is ignored, the mood shifts and we keep going anyway. Most devices already give us the option to set limits on how long we spend in particular apps, which can create a boundary before our own sense of time begins to disappear. Sometimes the reminder that we have been scrolling for an hour may be enough to interrupt the current and give us back the choice of whether we actually want to continue.
For parents, the stakes feel even higher. A child can be deeply captured by a device long before they have the awareness to recognise that their mood has shifted, their body has gone still, time has disappeared or they have simply had enough. If adults can struggle to pull themselves out of that current, it is worth asking what happens when a developing child is left to navigate it alone. Most devices and platforms offer parental controls that can limit screen time, restrict access and give parents some visibility into how their children are using them. With social media and AI becoming increasingly embedded in everyday life, that kind of awareness may be less about policing children and more about staying present to what is holding their attention, for how long, and what happens to them during the exposure.
References
William J. Brady, Killian L. McLoughlin, M. J. Crockett and colleagues, “Overperception of Moral Outrage in Online Social Networks Inflates Beliefs About Intergroup Hostility,” Nature Human Behaviour, 2023. (Nature)
Mesfin A. Bekalu, Rachel F. McCloud and K. Viswanath, “Association of Social Media Use With Social Well-Being, Positive Mental Health, and Self-Rated Health: Disentangling Routine Use From Emotional Connection to Use,” Health Education & Behavior, 2019. (PubMed)
O. Ahmed and colleagues, “Social Media Use, Mental Health and Sleep: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analyses,” Journal of Affective Disorders, 2024. (PubMed)
Moshe Glickman and Tali Sharot, “How Human–AI Feedback Loops Alter Human Perceptual, Emotional and Social Judgements,” Nature Human Behaviour, published online in 2024 and in volume 9 in 2025. (Nature)
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