Since the COVID-19 outbreak, I’ve kept my distance from mainstream social media platforms. The constant feed of pandemic news pushed me away, as did the posts filled with hatred, loathing, and rage from idle minds worn down by isolation. The sadness, the anxiety, the deep numbness—I almost felt it all in my bones. So, I stepped away.
Later, I adjusted a small return, mostly for work-related networking and updates tied to my field of study, and just that. But lately, the same weariness has crept back in. Some days I find myself gripped by persistent anxiety, a restless mind, and what feels like a glitch in my ability to focus. Feeling anxious, sad, or overwhelmed isn’t unusual, unless no clear reason explains it. So, what changed this time? What did I overlook? Or was it something else entirely?
In hindsight, I see how an old habit slipped back in. Even without social media, I drifted into mindless, aimless scrolling through news portals, through YouTube videos.
In 2024, “brain rot” was the Oxford word of the year.
The dictionary defines the word as a “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” caused by excessive exposure to trivial or unchallenging content. Brain rot is associated with behaviors like doomscrolling and zombie-scrolling, which lead to endless screen-time and anxiety when separated from one’s phone.
Doomscrolling happens when we keep consuming negative, distressing, or anxiety-inducing news but still scroll for the next update, and then the next. Media outlets to some extent fuel this cycle with a disproportionate focus on fear, anger, violence, and sadness. Why? Because it’s clicked more, read more, rated more. Evolution has wired us to have a biasness for negativity as a survival trait to stay alert to threats.
Such distressing contents activate the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. It sends stress signal to prepare the body for a fight-or-flight response. As Prof. Susan Tapert from Dept. of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego explains, “Our body may respond to repeated bad news as if it were in continuous danger, involving changes like stress hormone surges, increased heart rate and feeling on edge or exhausted. Over time, this could contribute to anxiety or depression.”
Then why do we keep scrolling?
Why can’t we just stop after getting the highlights? Why do we keep chasing more-and-more “stress”? Here comes the devil in the dark, dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a crucial role in controlling feelings like motivation, arousal, reward and reinforcement. Neurotransmitters are basically small molecules act as messenger, allowing neurons to communicate with each other. Although dopamine is often linked with pleasure, it doesn’t directly cause it. Instead, dopamine is more about the anticipation – it drives us to pursue rewards that might feel good. Every time you encounter something new, surprising, or emotionally charged, your brain releases a burst of dopamine, motivates you to stay engaged.
Now imagine you’re going through outrageous news headlines, weird videos, memes, short reels – your brain keeps releasing dopamine in anticipation of the next interesting thing. That’s what keeps you, me, all of us scrolling endlessly, whether we actually enjoy it or not. The brain learns to expect a reward from scrolling, and that expectation turns into a habit – whether it’s doomscrolling or zombie scrolling (aimless scrolling through typical low-stimulation contents like memes, reels).
This dopamine-driven feedback loop works like bait:the promise of the next best thing keeps us hooked.
We take the bait, keep scrolling, and end up consuming more negative or meaningless content, pilling on stress and losing cognitive control along the way. Over time, like every addiction, the brain needs stronger stimulation to get the same dopamine hit. So, we shift towards more emotionally intense or more aggressive contents. The result? emotional flatness. Low-stimulating material no longer moves us. We scroll through hundreds of reels or news updates in minutes without feeling anything. Just staring. Just scrolling.
Research has shown that this mindless consumption of digital content through habits like zombie scrolling leads to a reduction in the brain’s capacity for sustained attention and focus, eventually resulting in overall cognitive depletion. It simply means, we start to lose the ability to think, learn, remember and understand things as effectively as we once did.
The social media platforms are designed to be addictive.
Constant notification system lures users back to distracting, irrelevant contents. This drives a compulsive cycle of checking, with an unsatiable urge to stay connected and informed. Just like a slot-machine, every time you refresh a social media page, you might get a reward—a new like, comment, or update, or nothing at all. But that unpredictability keeps us coming back, for another shot at your luck. Over time, this cycle raises the risk of brain rot, showing up as cognitive overload, reduced clarity, shorter attention spans, and emotional instability.
Cognitive overload simply means the brain is trying to handle too much information at once. And in the age of media multitasking, that’s hardly surprising. When you watch a cricket match while scrolling through Instagram, your brain keeps switching back and forth between focus points. This constant switching drains your mental capacity.
Studies show that heavy media multitaskers often do worse on thinking and memory tasks compared to light media multitaskers. One key area of difference is in the working memory (WM) performance. WM is brain’s short-term workspace that let us hold and use information momentarily like following steps in a recipe without checking them repeatedly. When working memory is weakened, even simple tasks that require short-term focus and recall become harder. Remembering something takes several steps: setting the goal to recall, using clues to find it, and blocking out other competing memories. (called mnemonic interference). But if attention lapses just before retrieval, the process breaks down, and the chances of forgetting what you actually know rise sharply.
So, brain rot is the price we pay for excessive and prolonged exposure to digital content.
It’s endless, overwhelmingly diverse, and constantly refilling. You can’t pause it, you can’t control it—especially when the craving to stay connected and the fear of missing out keep pulling you back in.
It’s worth noting, though, that not everyone scrolls only for mindless entertainment or emotionally charged content. Many of us are interested in contents that motivates us, sometimes sparks curiosity, or even broadens intellectual scope. So basically, the quality of what we consume is highly subjective—it varies from person to person. That’s why this scroll-to-rot phenomenon isn’t about the quality of the habit rather it’s about the habit itself, irrespective of What’s eating Gilbert Grape, and many of us too.
So, the question is: are we going to slow down a bit, assess the game and decide which side we want to be playing at? or are we content to simply hand it over?
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Very well-written article and highly relevant in the context of the rapid boom in social media usage. One question popped into my mind: repeated exposure to the same sensory stimulus often leads to sensory adaptation or habituation, whereas addiction involves developing a persistent urge for a specific stimulus. I’m curious how these two seemingly opposing brain functions interact and are integrated within the brain.
Ah! It’s an interesting question to explore. I think while habituation reduces sensory signals for repetative tasks or may be some stimulus, addiction adds value to it, rewards parts of the stimulus. May be we can think of the social media surfing example. When first time we did it, we used to go through the posts in detail that we’re scrolling through and then liked/disliked a few. Now, that we’re habituated, it makes the scrolling faster by filtering out the noise, i mean the not so interesting posts, and addiction is for the interesting ones that our dopamine system rewards and makes us hang on to it.
Excellent discussion! Qualitatively speaking, even contents of interest can lead to a different kind of brain rot when performed under stress. A recently laid off employee may find scrolling through job posts addictive, even if they apply to only a few. Regular investors scrolling through market updates are in a similar stressful yet addictive loop. The rewards are stronger in such cases, and the addiction itself fuels the sense of getting rewarded.
Yes, that’s a good point. Stress scrolling may indeed fuel some effects of brain rotting. However, I believe the adversity of this feedback loop can be easily be tackled with some degree of focus or awareness. If the goal of content search is clear or even with a simple acknowledgment of the act of scrolling, the user can become more mindful of its usage.