Can apps stop you doomscrolling? Yes, but not how you think.

“Hi, are you doomscrolling? Our bodies were not designed to be anxious and stressed for this long.” Back in the very anxious year of 2021, a friendly little bot on Twitter — the Doomscrolling Reminder Bot — came along to offer mindfulness reminders like this. Created just after doomscrolling became the 2020 word of the year, the Doomscrolling Reminder Bot soon became a kind of anxiety index. It gained its largest bump in followers during Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter. The Bot quit posting new content in 2023, as a lot of the service’s less chaotic creators were heading for the exits; even so, its follower count has never dipped below 100,000 Twitter users.These days, however, you don’t need a bot to tell you you’re doomscrolling. If you’re on social media at all, you’re doomscrolling. With nightmare fuel coming thick and fast, with trolls in charge of the news cycle, even an aggregator like Google News or Apple News offers potential for doomscrolling. Heck, any feed featuring multiple photos of the world’s richest man doing a, uh, “Roman salute” practically screams doomscroll! And in 2025, even a cursory check in on Facebook — where Mark Zuckerberg has long been trying to lower the algorithmic importance of news stories — can turn into an hour of sad rubbernecking as your family appears to tear itself apart. You might think you have more productive ways to spend your time — at least, if you have any hope of being part of…Can apps stop you doomscrolling? Yes, but not how you think.