Swipe right to connect, left to dismiss, up to save, down to refresh. Sound’s it’s like a play, doesn’t it? It is like an endless loop without an end. Have you ever noticed that when scrolling, you suddenly feel sad? And you don’t even know why. You feel that you have a mental fog, and difficult for you to fully focus and recognize it because you don’t know how to clearly tell what it is. This is what doomscrolling affects almost all of us: short-form content doesn’t give us time to process our own emotions.

 

The doomscrolling effect and emotion processing were not often discussed as something really connected. Rather, this could be an existing gap that affects how we view ourselves (actual self) and how we compare our (ideal self), which affects our self-esteem.)

We keep swallowing the world, as if it were ours to take. We map ourselves onto everything we see online, yet remain blind to the reality behind the screen. In the Philippines, this cycle plays out on a massive, national scale.  

According to E-konsulta Clinic statistics from last year, over 86 million Filipinos were active social media users at the beginning of 2024, averaging more than four hours per day—one of the highest usage rates in the world. Anxiety, depression, stress, and even sleep disorders have been connected to doomscrolling, the habit of constantly consuming upsetting content and bad news.  As a result, the Philippines became known as the “Social Media Capital of the World.” Social media provides information, entertainment, and connectivity, but there is a negative aspect as well: This is known as “Doomscrolling”

The ability to track, assess, and adjust emotional experiences in support of psychological adaptability and wellness is known as emotion regulation (Gross, 2015). 

Emerging evidence indicates that Problematic Social Media Use (PSMU) reflects the interplay of cognitive, personality, and emotional vulnerabilities. Excessive engagement seems to be sustained by maladaptive self-referential cognitions, such as compensatory online interaction and perfectionistic discrepancies (Fioravanti et al., 2020).

 

Negative news has a magnetic pull that draws us in and stays with us long after we’ve heard it. Social media users are much more likely to share negative news stories than positive ones, which makes this phenomenon especially noticeable (Watson et al., 2024). 

The connection between unprocessed emotions and digital overconsumption on mental health affects the 3 significant selves based on the self-concept in Psychology by Dr. Saul McLeod, PhD, which are the Actual Self,  Ideal Self, and Self-Esteem. These correlations are interconnected in how we consume content digitally and process it within ourselves.  The Actual Self and Ideal Self are also linked to our current state of reality and our desired future selves.

I myself have experienced the same thing. The interest behind this problem made me notice small details in how I behave and unconsciously affects my response to things around me. When I scroll on the internet, I laugh, get mad, get frustrated, and get sad. According to Burrow and Rainone (2017) and Ozimek and Bierhoff (2020), social media has become a major platform for people to create and express their identities, but its impact on self-esteem is frequently conflicting.