ALEX LASSITER: Hello, lovely people! It’s Alex Lassiter with the Minnesota Daily, and you’re listening to In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota.

Let’s be real. When I have a free moment between classes, on the bus or during a meal, I—and probably quite a few others—have the instinct to whip out my phone and catch up on my social media feed. Call it the blessing and the curse of having something stronger than a 1980s supercomputer just sitting in your pocket.

I’m about halfway through the final semester of my senior year, so when the senioritis catches up with me, I can relate to the feeling of opening an app on my phone and not shutting it down until an hour, or two… or three later. This is the phenomenon coined “doomscrolling” by Twitter back in 2018. And I mean, yeah, a doom scroll definitely sounds like something the villain of an ‘80s action flick would want to use to take over the world. But the name has that menacing feel to it for a reason—it stems from negative habit reinforcement surrounding social media use.

KURT FRASER:  You can just be scrolling or posting and replying, and you’re not really even aware of how keyed-in you are because you’re so motivated to be doing that one given task and you’re getting all this little feedback right? Like, a little hint that you’re engaging the right way. Are you getting rewarded in the right way?

So for me, I try not to think of myself as just a large rat. But knowing how much I know, I may be a little bit more sensitive to thinking about, like, “I’m really just fully engaging right now in a way that is probably not great for me.”

LASSITER: That guy was Kurt Fraser. He’s an assistant professor of psychology here at the University, and he specializes in studying dopamine release. He actually works with animal models to determine how dopamine affects decision making and study what types of rewards will lead to repeated behavior.

Now, Fraser studies this relationship for a living, and he’s seen this type of behavior in animals. So you’d think he’d have a little bit easier of a time calling himself out on his own social media scrolling habits. But not quite.

FRASER:  I was very active on, quote unquote, “science Twitter.” Which was, there’s parts of Twitter that have, like, factions and I was very active on science Twitter. And I would spend more time on that than I probably should have been spending.

LASSITER: Now Fraser says he actually has deleted Twitter now (so he’s doing a little bit better than the rest of us), but when he still had it installed, it was a pretty easy escape for stressful situations he found pressing down on him in the real world.

FRASER:  They’re basically trying to dismantle the NIH which basically funds people like me to actually have jobs here. So everything we do is funded by NIH research and just sort of the constant deluge of, like, it’s bad on both the political and world scale. But also gives everyone a sense of our jobs, or potential ability to do our jobs, is also currently kind of at risk.

Which I had a day, two weeks ago on a Friday night where I just completely crashed out from news and was like, scrolling and couldn’t stop. Did not help in any way. It made me feel worse.

LASSITER: Now, it’s not just me, and it’s not just Fraser. Other people get suckered into the snare of scrolling, too. So I got geared up and I went into some of the public areas on-campus and, lo and behold, some of the students there were scrolling, too. So, I sat down and chatted with some of them—Eric Ferlauto and Sophia Carey—and I got to learn a little bit more about some of their own social media habits.

SOPHIA CAREY: Well, I just sat down and I have a paper for a class that I have to work on, but I just kind of needed a minute to check everything on my phone. Just, like, unwind for a minute before I really got into that.

ERIC FERLAUTO: It goes from 30 minutes at a time to, if I’m just brain dead at night, I’ll just be doom scrolling for an hour. I won’t even realize. Or just, like, if I have a quick 10 minute break in-between classes, just instant doom scroll.

CAREY:  I usually just will try to find a couple minutes to just remove myself from the work so that I don’t get super overwhelmed by it.

LASSITER: So, why? Why are we getting suckered into these same patterns over and over again? Well, again, Fraser studies this in animals. And even though something like a gopher probably couldn’t pick up a phone and start posting on Tik Tok, a lot of the behaviors that keep us humans coming back to social media are also mirrored in animal mannerisms.

FRASER:  We know that dopamine neurons in the brain are sensitive to reinforcement. So, they actually act as a teaching signal so that when you hear something unexpected, maybe get a free sugar pellet, if you’re an animal, afterwards. That reinforces learning about what that cue predicted.

Or if you press a lever or you, you know, open your phone and you get some reward or some satisfaction out of something, dopamine neurons probably are active in helping you learn about all the things that led up to that situation.

If you’re someone who gets a lot of reward out of looking at your phone and—they’re actually designed in a way, I think, to promote getting your attention and getting you into the app. And, you know, likes are essentially a reward, I think, for a lot of people.

LASSITER: So, basically, if you’re getting this reward of a dopamine rush every time you open the app, or scroll for a bit, or leave a like, or leave a comment or smash that subscribe button, it makes it easier for your brain to tell you to get back on the app. What you’re doing is, you’re essentially farming for minuscule amounts of dopamine.

I sent an email asking another professor of psychology, Vanessa Lee, if she wanted to talk with me, too. But unfortunately, she was just unavailable. However, in her response, she mentioned that doom scrolling is just a bad habit. It becomes addictive when we keep reinforcing it. Now, we hear people talking about “being addicted to your phone” all the time. But, what does that actually mean?

FRASER:  So like why can we say someone is addicted to a drug versus someone is not addicted, let’s say to food, maybe, or even to social media?

So we talk a little bit about that and sort of what might need to be there for these types of addictions to actually be an addiction versus, say, for substance use disorders, which have a much more well-documented set of features that go into a diagnosis.

Which is, you have to have some form of withdrawal, probably. So this would be like some very physical or psychological reaction to the absence of doing something. And withdrawal is tightly linked to a concept called dependence, where you feel like you need to be maintained on a level of a certain thing in order to achieve normal function, let’s say.

But then there’s also our later concept of, say, sensitization, where you’re more sensitive or you’re more reactive because of your experience to maybe lower units of the same thing you’re using.

LASSITER:  Now, these diminishing returns actually desensitize you a little bit and that’s why the illusion of timelessness seeps in. Where you’ve been scrolling forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, and then you just realize how long you’ve been sitting on the app. Sometimes, just opening up the app just becomes a compulsion you aren’t even fully aware of until you’re 58 reels down your explore page and you realize, “Oh, I’m scrolling again.”

FERLAUTO: I wouldn’t say coping, more just like the attention span. The short little 30 second videos. Most of the time I’ll just close the app, and then I’ll end up going back into it, like, two minutes later. 

CAREY:  There’s not really necessarily anything that I’m looking for. It’s more of just, “Oh, this is what’s right in front of my face. I’ll just go through the cycle of things.”

FERLAUTO:  I just don’t really stop myself, but some of the times I hardly even realize it. I’ll just be like, “Oh wow, I’ve been doing this for quite a long time.”

LASSITER: So, when it’s time to stop, and we realize it’s time to stop, how do we stop?

CAREY: Most of the times, I’ll just like get bored. And then in that one moment, I’ll be like, “Okay, I have to stop. This is already taking up too much of my time.”

LASSITER: Now recognizing you’ve been on the app too long and closing it down is just one part of the puzzle. As a matter of fact, it’s the easy step. The hard part is not repeating the cycle. It’s especially tricky when I personally use platforms like Instagram for work. So when it comes to getting off the app and not wanting to get back on, it takes a long-term fix to actually break down that compulsion.

FRASER: Think about why you use social media. I think, cognitively engage with what it is that you’re getting out of social media. And then, if you already come to a place where you want to reduce the time, like I think you’re already halfway there.

Maybe delete it. Take the step, or slowly—there are apps that maybe have programs, timers, right? Like you only get like an hour a day to engage with a certain app. I would start there. 

LASSITER: Now especially like we talked about earlier with Fraser, who used social media as a distraction to avoid stressful personal, work and/or global circumstances, it can be really hard to put it down. But, it’s a necessary step in breaking that cycle.

FRASER:  There’s ways to stay aware of what’s happening in the world that are not dictated by anyone else feeding you content, right? You can be actively involved in the world and not be doomscrolling. You don’t need—you shouldn’t feel the need to think that there’s only one way to get information in the world, and that’s through scrolling on an app.

LASSITER: For most people, it may not be an easy fix. I mean, look at me. I have screen time limits set on my phone—like an hour max per app, per day—and my screen time has still been hovering around 7 hours per day recently. Now you may be one of the lucky few who can go cold-turkey by sheer willpower, but to break the habit, many of us need to re-train our brains. And in a society that’s trained us to be dependent on our phones as sources of information and gratification, that’s tough.

But it’s us that control our phones, not the other way around. At least, that’s how it’s meant to be. And it’s up to us to make it that way, one less reel at a time.

This episode was written by Alex Lassiter, and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. As always, we super appreciate you listening in. So please, please, please feel free to send an email to the [email protected] inbox with any questions, comments, concerns or episode suggestions that you want to see us put out this season. I’m Alex Lassiter, and this has been In The Know. Take care, y’all.