When the Tide Won’t Turn: Why You’re Doomscrolling When Life Is Hard (and How to Drift Back to Shore)

12 Dec

When life is already heavy, it can feel almost impossible to put your phone down.

You tell yourself you’ll just check the news, scroll for “a couple of minutes”, or see what’s happening on social media. Forty-five minutes later your shoulders are tight, your brain is buzzing, and you feel more anxious, sad, or numb than when you started. That’s doomscrolling.

If you live close to the sea or spend time outdoors, you might notice a similar pattern: the mind feels like a stormy tide, waves of worry crashing in faster than you can catch your breath. Instead of turning towards the body or the land for steadiness, the thumb drifts to your phone.

So why does doomscrolling make so much sense when life is hard? Especially if you’re neurodivergent or living with chronic illness? And how do you gently shift the pattern? We’ll look at using nature, nervous system care, and simple supports like my Beach Rest meditation as a softer alternative to the late-night scroll.

What is doomscrolling (really)?

Doomscrolling is the habit of endlessly scrolling through negative, distressing or fear-based content online – news, comments, reels, threads – even when it leaves you feeling worse.

It usually starts with a reasonable intention:

“I just want to stay informed.”
“I need to know what’s happening so I can be prepared.”
“I’m too wired to sleep; I’ll scroll until my brain is tired.”

The difficulty is that we are wired to pay more attention to threat than to neutral or positive information. Add in social media algorithms that behave like digital rip currents, constantly pulling you towards the most emotive stories, and you have a nervous system that feels as if it’s standing in the surf with no solid ground.

Why doomscrolling gets worse when life is hard

If you’re going through a rough patch – grief, burnout, health flares, money stress, relationship uncertainty, global crises (or all of the above) – doomscrolling isn’t a random lapse in “willpower”. It’s your nervous system trying to cope.

1. Your nervous system is already on high alert

When everything feels uncertain, your body is scanning for danger. Doomscrolling can feel like a way of “staying ahead of it” – if you can just gather enough information, maybe you won’t be blindsided.

The problem is that constant exposure to alarming content is like standing on a cliff in a storm, staring straight into the wind. Your stress response never gets a chance to stand down.

Nature offers the opposite: repetitive, predictable patterns – the tide coming in and out, daylight softening into dusk, leaves moving in the breeze – that tell your body “it’s safe enough to exhale”.

2. Doomscrolling gives you micro-hits of dopamine

Every new post or notification offers a tiny hit of novelty – a micro-spark of dopamine. That’s especially compelling if:

you’re exhausted and don’t have energy for anything more complex
you’re bored but too depleted to start something meaningful
you live with ADHD and your brain is seeking stimulation

But this is shallow stimulation. It’s more like eating crisps when you’re starving: it keeps you going, but you never feel truly nourished.

By contrast, a few minutes watching waves, hearing birds, or even imagining yourself lying on warm sand can feed your system with richer, steadier input. That’s exactly what practices like the Beach Rest meditation are designed to do: offer simple, soothing sensory imagery (warmth, gentle waves, spacious sky) instead of relentless digital noise.

3. It numbs and distracts from pain

When life hurts, sitting with your feelings can feel intolerable.

Doomscrolling offers:

distraction from physical pain, fatigue or insomnia
a way to avoid difficult emotions like grief, fear, shame or anger
a way to bypass the awkward “what do I even do with myself?” questions

Numbing is a protective strategy. It just doesn’t bring much healing.

Nature-based practices can offer a different kind of distraction – one that gently brings you back into your body:

noticing the temperature of the air on your skin
listening to rain against the window
feeling your feet on the earth, or imagining that contact if you can’t go outside

This is why visualisations that take you to the shore – like Beach Rest – can be powerful for moments when getting to an actual beach isn’t possible. They invite the body to remember what calm feels like.

Why neurodivergent and chronically ill folks are especially vulnerable

If you’re ADHD, autistic, AuDHD or otherwise neurodivergent, doomscrolling often hooks into real needs:

Hyperfocus: you intend to look for 5 minutes and emerge 90 minutes later.
Rejection sensitivity & injustice sensitivity: content about injustice, cruelty or conflict can feel impossible to look away from.
Social connection: when in-person connection is hard, lonely or inaccessible, online spaces may feel like the only place where people “get” you.
Executive function: stopping, closing apps and transitioning to another activity are not trivial tasks for a tired neurodivergent brain.

For chronically ill and burnt-out bodies, the phone is often the most reachable object in the room. If you’re exhausted, in pain, dizzy or unable to get outdoors, scrolling can feel like the only way to “go somewhere else”.

This is where gentler, nature-based tools – especially audio – can be so helpful. A short, structured practice like Beach Rest gives your brain something to follow, but instead of drawing you into more threat, it guides you towards the felt sense of lying by the sea, listening to slow, rhythmic waves.

Signs your scrolling has tipped into doomscrolling

A few flags that your phone use has shifted from “normal scrolling” into doomscrolling:

You intend to check “one thing” and lose an hour or more.
You close an app, then reopen it again without really deciding to.
You feel more anxious, hopeless, angry or numb after scrolling.
Your body feels wired: tight chest, shallow breathing, clenched jaw.
You’re repeatedly reading about distressing events you can’t influence.
You’re ignoring tiredness, hunger or pain in order to keep scrolling.
You’re using your phone as the only way to wind down before sleep – and your sleep is getting worse.

If you recognise yourself in this, nothing has gone wrong. You’ve developed a coping strategy that made sense. Now, you get to gently evolve it – with nature and your body on your side.

How to gently shift the pattern (with help from nature and Beach Rest)

Cold-turkey approaches often backfire, especially for neurodivergent nervous systems. Think tiny tide changes rather than trying to force a full-season shift overnight.

1. Start with curiosity: what is doomscrolling doing for you?

Before changing anything, notice the function of the scrolling:

“Right now it’s helping me not feel how lonely I am.”
“It’s giving my brain something to chew on so I don’t have to think about money.”
“It makes me feel less alone in my anger about the world.”

You might imagine yourself standing on a shoreline, watching waves roll in:

“What am I hoping this wave of scrolling will bring me?”

There’s no right answer. The question itself brings more awareness – like switching on a lantern in the dark. If it is an emotion, like anger, you are avoiding, try to see this as useful information.

2. Make your digital “sea” calmer before you try to leave it

If cutting down feels impossible, first change what you’re actually seeing:

Unfollow or mute accounts that consistently leave you enraged, drained or despairing.
Follow regulating accounts – nature photography, slow living, gentle humour, body-neutral content, disability-positive voices.
Turn off push notifications for news and social apps where possible.
Move apps off your home screen or into a folder so you have to tap twice, creating a micro-pause.

Then, start adding nature-based content into your feed so that when you do scroll, you’re more likely to encounter trees, oceans, allotments and animals than constant crisis headlines.

3. Create “beach edges” around the start and end of your day

Instead of “no phone in the bedroom ever again”, experiment with softer bookends to your day that lean on nature.

On waking:

Delay opening news or social apps for the first 10–15 minutes.
Open a window, step onto a balcony, doorway or garden step if you can, and notice the temperature and light.
Look at something natural – a plant, the sky, a piece of wood, even a photo of a landscape – before you look at a screen.

Before bed:

Aim to switch from scrolling to something more soothing at least 15–30 minutes before sleep.
This is an ideal place to bring in the Beach Rest meditation: instead of your final doomscroll, lie down, plug your phone in away from your pillow, press play, and let the guided imagery of sand, sea and sky lead your system down a gear.
If you can’t listen with sound, you might simply imagine your own version of Beach Rest: feeling your body supported as if on warm sand, breathing with the slow rhythm of the tide.

Even a small daily ritual like this can start to retrain your body to associate bedtime with softness, not headline-induced adrenaline.

4. Swap some scrolls for sensory grounding using nature

When your brain is overloaded, your body often needs sensation, not more information.

A few micro-alternatives that lean on nature:

Look out of the window and name five things you can see in the sky or landscape.
Hold a mug of herbal tea (skullcap is especially good for nervous systems) and pay attention to the warmth, smell and taste as if it were a mini tea ceremony.
Gently touch a plant, a stone, a shell, a piece of wood. Notice texture and weight.
Listen to rain, wind, birds or recorded nature sounds for one song-length instead of scrolling.

The aim isn’t to ban your phone. It’s to slip nature back into the conversation your nervous system is having with the world.

5. Make alternatives as low-effort as opening an app

Helpful things have to be as easy as the scroll, or they simply won’t happen.

Set yourself up with friction-free supports:

Keep a small “nature basket” where you usually scroll: a shell or pebble from the beach, a feather, dried leaves, essential oil, a soft scarf or blanket.
Save the Beach Rest meditation and any favourite nature tracks somewhere obvious on your phone so they’re two taps away – not buried.
Have a notebook close by for a two-minute “brain tide” – letting worries wash out onto the page.

Think of this as building tiny, accessible “shorelines” you can reach for when the digital waves feel rough.

6. Use light structure, not punishment

Rigid rules are like trying to hold back the sea with your bare hands. Much more sustainable is creating gentle boundaries, like groynes on a beach that shape the current.

You might try:

App time limits that nudge you when you’ve hit your chosen amount for the day. You can override them, but the pause is what matters.
Grayscale mode after a certain time, making your phone visually duller and less compelling.
A charging station outside the bed (if your space and access needs allow) so you’re not physically curled around your phone.
Pairing scrolling with a “cool down”: e.g. “After I scroll, I will do three minutes of Beach Rest or look out of the window and take five slow breaths.”

The idea is to create channels for your energy, not cages.

7. When the world really is on fire

Sometimes the news is genuinely awful. Ignoring it completely might feel like a betrayal of your values.

Instead of abandoning yourself to the riptide, you can wade in more consciously:

Choose your windows: a set time to read or watch news, not late at night.
Choose your sources: a couple of outlets or newsletters you trust, rather than endless commentary.
Close the loop with action: a donation if you can, a letter, a petition, an act of care in your local community.
Follow it with repair: a walk, tending a plant, a shower, stroking a pet, or a meditation that brings you back to ground – again, Beach Rest is ideal here.

You’re allowed to care deeply about the state of the world and protect your nervous system so you can keep showing up. Read my blog on unplugging to focus for more tips!

A small experiment: replace one scroll with Beach Rest

Rather than trying to overhaul everything, you might start with one tiny experiment:

For one week, choose one regular doomscroll moment (eg. in bed at night, waking in the night, first thing in the morning) and swap 3 minutes of it for the Beach Rest meditation every day. Here it is:

Notice:

how your body feels afterwards
whether your mind feels a fraction softer
whether it’s easier to sleep, rest or transition to something else

No need for perfection. If you forget one day, you can return the next. Waves keep coming; you get many chances.

When doomscrolling is part of something bigger

Sometimes doomscrolling is just the most visible bit of a much deeper pattern: chronic stress, long-term trauma, grief, burnout, masking, medical gaslighting, systemic injustice.

It may be a sign to seek broader support if:

your mood is consistently low or hopeless
you’re struggling with self-harm thoughts or urges
anxiety is making daily life unmanageable
trauma memories or flashbacks are being triggered by what you read online
you’re living with chronic illness, burnout or neurodivergence and feel stuck in survival mode

In those situations, gentle digital boundaries and nature practices can still help – but they work best as part of a wider web of support (coaching, therapy, peer support, medical care, community).

Closing (less doomscroll-y) thoughts

If you’ve been doomscrolling more than usual lately, it’s probably because things are genuinely hard – in your own life, in the wider world, or both.

Your brain is not broken. It’s doing its best to keep you informed, connected and safe with the tools it has. You are allowed to reach for new tools: the feel of the breeze on your face, the sound of waves, the quiet holding of a guided Beach Rest practice, the steadiness of a tree or a patch of sky.

You don’t need to fix everything at once. Tiny experiments – a softer start to the day, a calmer feed, one extra grounding moment, one swapped scroll for a beach meditation – can make a real difference to how rooted and resourced you feel.

If you’d like support to rebuild your focus and energy, reshape your relationship with technology, and design rhythms that work with your neurodivergent or chronically ill body, this is exactly the work we do at Earth Coaching – often outdoors in parks, along the shoreline, or online if you’re further afield.

You get to stay awake to the world and rest in it. Nature is right here, ready to help you remember how.

If you’re ready to create a calmer rhythm this winter, you can explore burnout recovery coaching, or ADHD, autism or AuDHD coaching in the UK with me through Access to Work funding, or privately with Earth Coaching®. Sessions are available online across the UK and in-person in Southend.

Book a FREE Discovery Session

Please Note:

This website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute providing medical advice or professional services. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition before making changes. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this website.

Bex Harper