What do you think when you see someone smoke a cigarette? Often it’s a mix of judgment and concern, wondering, ‘Don’t they know that’s bad for them?’ Today, cigarettes are widely seen as a dangerous habit with many known health risks. But what if I told you that another habit, possibly more harmful, has made its way into our lives without raising the same concerns?

Doomscrolling is the act of spending excessive time online scrolling through news or other content. The term was first coined around the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown when uncertainty around the virus caused people to turn to social media for the most current information. However, the constant flow of negative information just made things worse, increasing people’s stress and anxiety.

Since then, this habit of scrolling hasn’t gone away—according to a 2024 survey conducted by Morning Consult, 53% of Gen Z adults doomscroll on a regular basis. With precise algorithms creating an endless stream of content tailored to your unique tastes, each video you see is selected to maximize the dopamine rush you get from watching it. For media companies, your endless scrolling is not an accident—it’s a carefully orchestrated strategy to drain your time and increase their profits. Apart from the rippling negative effects of being sedentary while doomscrolling like headaches or difficulty sleeping, it can also result in ‘popcorn brain.’ This makes it hard to engage with the real world, which seems to move much slower than the online world due to your brain’s overstimulation while being online. Doomscrolling distracts people from their problems, which is why it’s become so popular.

The act of scrolling activates the ventral striatum, a key part of the brain’s reward circuit, to release dopamine in the same ways observed in nicotine-dependent individuals while smoking. Moreover, the unpredictable nature of social media feeds can create a variable reward schedule, very similar to the intermittent delivery of nicotine from cigarettes, that is very effective at triggering dopamine release. Doomscrolling can also trigger the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, leading to a release of cortisol, commonly known as the stress hormone—and nicotine also stimulates this same cortisol release. Yet another similarity between the two is their marketing strategies used to target teenagers, who have complex psychological needs that are hard to understand. Historically, cigarette companies have portrayed smokers as “cool, sexy, independent, fun, attractive, and living on the edge” to appeal to a teenage audience. Similarly, social media companies use features like short-form video content and recommender algorithms to appeal to teenagers. For a lot of teens, doomscrolling has become the primary way of getting caught up with the latest trends and memes. These days, it’s cool to doomscroll—you’ll see all the newest happenings in the world of content creation before all your friends—for the same reason it was cool to smoke in the 1900s: everybody does it.

In the same way that cigarettes hooked a generation on cycles of pleasure and harm, doomscrolling is locking us in an endless loop of stress relief and anxiety. The brain’s response to each scroll mimics the neural patterns once triggered by each hit of a cigarette, bringing us a new habit that hides its permanent harm through temporary relief. Society may be trading one addiction for another, and the parallels are hard to ignore. So the question arises: are we repeating history?