You are what you eat, as well as scroll in the digital age and your mental health is a direct by-product of your online footprint. Now, it’s well established that we can’t live without social media, but we could compromise by setting clear boundaries.
I became my own case study once I realised that my digital diet came with excessive mental calories. I’d turn to my feed for a break, but it would always end in a wicked Uno reverse. Anushka Mehta, a mental health advocate working in the marketing space, resonates, “I doom scroll constantly. After posting something, I’d stay online to see how many likes and comments I would get. Everything had to do with validation.”
What doomscrolling does to your mind
The repercussions? Firstly, emotional blockage. “Feelings don’t get processed, but postponed,” reveals psychotherapist Sanam Devidasani. “It makes the gap between expectations and reality even larger. People feel more anxious without realising how much their inner world is influenced by what they scroll”. Next up is addiction. “Your fingers move across the blue screen and the mind obediently follows,” reveals counsellor and nutrition specialist Karishmma Chawla. “The scariest part is, it happens so quietly, we believe it is normal”.
Lastly, my sleep cycle deteriorated. I’d often wake up to a first thought that was last night’s doing, courtesy of content I’d fallen asleep to. “Your neurons don’t simply switch off; if the subconscious fills with negativity, conscious decisions are shaped by that lens. Add in the blue light and you’re now inviting shifts in your gut and your blood sugar behaves badly,” warns Karishmma.
The fix
For me, an evening spent walking versus doomscrolling feels entirely different. The former is physically rewarding, while the latter feels mentally taxing. To escape the social media matrix, I turned to selective consumption and gradually set boundaries. Clicking on “not interested” did help to an extent with cleaning up my explore page. Anushka’s digital boundaries were similar. “It cut down my usage drastically and I feel a lot more present in the moment.”
Meanwhile, my sisters gently held up a mirror: “You’re always on your phone.” They were right. I couldn’t realistically delete social media since I run multiple accounts for work and life, but I could stop letting it tuck me into bed. Now, I stay off my feed for at least a couple of hours before sleeping. Because I can’t log off completely, the boundary had to be mental. I stopped doom-scrolling stats at night and went back to a mantra I’ve always had for my professional page: focus on who is following me, not how many. It shifts everything from “how large is my reach?” to “am I reaching the right people?” Social media’s networking power is real, so I don’t find it useful to demonise it. It feels far more honest (and sustainable) to work with it, on my own terms, instead of pretending it’s the enemy. Karishmma agrees, “I come from a time when there were no mobile phones, life did not have OTT platforms filling every spare moment. If I had those options back then, I would have used them wisely to balance life instead of letting it distract me. Even today, social media has its benefits. It has connected me with the right mentors and opened doors to learning.”
