Doomscrolling, Mindless Scrolling, and What It Means for Digital Marketers

It’s past midnight. You told yourself, “Just one more video.” Maybe you picked up your phone to check the weather or reply to a quick text.

Now, twenty minutes later, your jaw feels tight. Your brain’s foggy. You’re not even sure what you’ve just consumed. You feel drained, anxious, and regretful about staying up late, yet somehow still glued to your device.

Sound familiar?

This loop is so common it has its own name: doomscrolling. But it’s no longer just about the news. These days, it’s about mindlessly sifting through digital content, often without walking away feeling any better.

And if you’re in marketing, this should matter more than ever.

What Is Doomscrolling and Why Does It Matter to Marketers?

As digital marketers, we’re trained to keep users engaged. Get their eyes on the screen. Keep them scrolling. Extend their time on site.

The longer they stay, the more metrics we hit. The more successful the campaign appears.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth. Many of the engagement loops we build may actually fuel this cycle of fatigue, anxiety, and digital burnout.

So we have to ask an honest question. What kind of mental space are we helping to shape for the people we want to serve? Because if the content we design leaves people feeling worse, we haven’t really succeeded.

Why It’s So Hard to Stop Scrolling

Doomscrolling starts off innocent. You have a few minutes to spare, so you open an app. You’re curious. The feed promises something new. Something interesting. Just one more swipe.

We all fell into this during the pandemic. Scrolling endlessly through grim headlines even though it made us feel worse. Today, it’s not just news. It’s:

Infinite social media feeds
Autoplay videos
Algorithms designed to keep you scrolling

These systems are built around variable rewards. You never know when the next post might hit, so you keep going just in case.

The result? You lose time. You lose clarity. And often, you walk away feeling foggy, overstimulated, and emotionally drained.

Here’s what research tells us:

Excessive scrolling is linked to higher rates of anxiety, stress, and depression
It can disrupt sleep and impair focus
It often leaves a lingering sense of wasted time, especially when the content lacks depth or substance

What Should Marketers Do Instead?

Let’s get honest. Our job is to capture attention. We write compelling headlines. We craft binge-worthy videos. We measure scroll depth and click-through rates.

But the metric we’ve chased for years, time on site, can be misleading. If someone spends time on your page and walks away feeling worse, was that truly a win?

Here’s a better approach. Aim for intentional attention.

That means creating content that:

Respects the user’s time
Gets to the point without fluff
Offers something of real value
Has a clear beginning, middle, and end

And just as important, it avoids emotional manipulation. No fear tactics. No outrage bait. Great content doesn’t exploit emotions. It earns trust by making people feel informed, supported, or simply better

Ask yourself:

Is this worth someone’s full attention?
Or is it just more digital noise?

What Real Value Looks Like Online

Think about the best thing you read or watched online recently. What made it stick?

Chances are, it respected your time. It probably gave you something useful, entertaining, or meaningful. And it likely had a clear structure, so you walked away with a sense of completion.

As creators, that’s what we should aim for.

Clear purpose. Clean finish. Real value.

Because let’s face it, the internet is full of content. The pieces that stand out are the ones people actually want to engage with. Not because they were tricked into it, but because it delivered on its promise.

And here’s the bottom line. Content that feels good to consume is content people remember. It builds trust. It drives loyalty. It gets shared. This is not just about ethics. It is smart, sustainable marketing.