Getting
a nice early night is one thing, but how often have you gone to bed at 9pm, feeling all virtuous, just to spend the next three hours on your phone? Whether it’s plodding through your socials and making yourself feel inadequate, or scrolling endlessly through depressing news feeds, either way you can end up in a much worse state than if you’d just rolled into bed at 11pm and fallen asleep then.
The reality is, when there’s so much news around us all day long, it’s increasingly easy to get sucked into a rabbit hole of articles, memes and Tweets (or should that be Xs?). But what is this doing to our mental health? Should we consider setting limits on how much content we are consuming, for our own good? Here, Dr Sheethal Rajashanker, a consultant psychiatrist at Priory Hospital Cheadle Royal and Priory Wellbeing Centre Manchester, explains the consequences of ‘doom scrolling’, and shares some ideas on how to stop it affecting your wellbeing.