What if We've Misunderstood Scrolling?

A young person is sitting across from a psychiatrist, looking tired and withdrawn. He is scrolling on a phone in his hand.

The symptoms begin to line up, one by one. The boxes are getting ticked. "Too much scrolling. Too much screen time. Not enough control."

A diagnosis follows: "You are a scroller." And with it, a solution already waiting: a pill.

Scrollazax.

This may read as satire. And yet, it feels uncomfortably familiar. Recent research (Thorell et al., 2024) has begun to frame social media usage as meeting the same criteria as the Internet Gaming Disorder in the DSM-5, adding it to the lists of individual disorders.

In a different setting, in a sharing circle with parents, the same story unfolds: "My kids are always on their phones."

There are nods around the room. A few quiet sighs. A flicker of frustration. And then the words begin to gather.

"Addictive." "Obsessed." "Time lost." "Unsocial."

"A waste of their minds."

No one really questions it. It lands as something already known. Labelled. Boxed.

Two different settings with one consistent story: scrolling is the problem, and young people are losing control. The conclusion feels obvious.

But what if this framing is missing something essential? What might be getting lost when the story is already decided before the conversation has even begun? What might we be missing when everyday behaviours are quickly translated into symptoms?

Because in my work with young people, another story begins to emerge. One shaped by what they are living through.

The constant streaming of crises

Research shows that young adults are spending more than seven hours daily scrolling on their devices for non-academic purposes (Deyo et al., 2024). They are witnessing multiple wars, climate collapse, political instability, violence, and social injustice in real time, all through the little device barely held in their pockets. Global events that were once distant feel very present and immediate now.

There is growing evidence that this kind of repeated exposure is not without psychological cost. Engagement with distressing media content has been linked to heightened stress responses and emotional fatigue (Thompson et al., 2019). More recent work describes this as a form of ambient threat, a persistent sense that something is wrong, somewhere, all the time (Longpré et al., 2021).

Climate anxiety, for instance, has been widely documented as showing high levels of distress, worry, and uncertainty about the future (Pihkala, 2020). For many young people, this is not abstract. As a young man said in our exchange, "I prefer not to have kids."

In this context, scrolling begins to look a little different.

A way of coping

From a trauma-informed perspective, the nervous system may also be trying to find ways to regulate and stay within what is tolerable (Porges, 2011; van der Kolk, 2014).

Scrolling offers something immediate. It is repetitive. Tactile. Absorbing. Always within reach.

It can interrupt overwhelming thoughts. Fill a void. But that "empty space" may not be incidental. It may reflect a broader form of disconnection. Contemporary environments often lack the relational and ecological conditions that support human development, what Narvaez and Bradshaw (2023) describe as an ecological mismatch.

In that context, scrolling may be less about excess screen time and more about compensating for disrupted relations with the self, others, and the natural world.

Scrolling can bring moments of relief and joy through memes, funny videos, or quotes.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, young people described using social media to cope with isolation and uncertainty (Nagamalar et al., 2021). However, the relief is often partial. It can create brief moments of connection and distraction, reducing immediate distress, while also contributing to fatigue and further disconnection. It doesn't create a deeper sense of safeness. As Gilbert (2024) describes, safeness is not simply the absence of external threat. Safeness is a felt sense of safety within, of feeling connected and cared for. Scrolling can partially regulate, but it can rarely provide that profound physiological and psychological sensation. Which may be why scrolling is repetitive.

On top of that, the same environments that soothe can also overwhelm.

In my work with young people, one phrase kept returning: "We're spectators, powerless." As those global crises repeat and accumulate, they lead to a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness.

The powerless witnessing

What began to emerge as addiction alone or a problematic behavior may be something closer to powerless witnessing. Young people are repeatedly witnessing events that carry emotional weight without the ability to intervene. This has an impact. For instance, depression in adolescence has been linked to feeling powerless and overwhelmed (Ekbäck et al., 2024).

They see injustice without resolution. Crisis without closure. Suffering without being able to act.

As I listened more closely to the accounts of young people amid global crises, the loss of agency was tangible. A sense of "what's the point?" emerges from their lived experience.

From an ecopsychological perspective, what is being witnessed is not separate from the self. Roszak (1994, 2001) views humans as an integral part of a planet that is always changing and responding. This means that psychology cannot be fully understood apart from ecology. It reflects what Chalquist (2019) describes as "wounded places, wounded people," where distress is tied to the state of the world itself.

Over time, this shapes how the world is experienced: as an unstable, overwhelming environment that is beyond one's reach and difficult to make sense of. As one participant expressed, "we don't have the emotional capacity… we become numb."

A form of meaning-making

Humans are meaning-making beings (Frankl, 1959/2006; van der Spek et al., 2013). We try to organise experience, to make sense of what we see and feel. It is central to how individuals integrate difficult experiences and restore a sense of continuity (van der Kolk, 2014). Digital spaces have become one of the places where this happens. Through memes, short videos, and shared content, young people create and circulate meaning (Saperas & Carrasco-Campos, 2025). These are sometimes humorous, sometimes critical, and often collective.

Scrolling may be a new form of storytelling for young people. But these forms are fragmented. Content appears and disappears quickly. Consequently, emotions accumulate without always settling.

This tension, between connection and fragmentation, may be part of what makes scrolling feel both necessary and unsatisfying at the same time.

Rethinking the response

Quantitative studies, such as Pieh et al. (2025), have shown that reducing screen time leads to better mental state, better sleep and less stress. However, they do not explain why young people continue to scroll. The Power Threat Meaning Framework (Johnstone et al., 2018) offers a different way of making sense of scrolling.

Instead of asking, What is wrong with you?, it asks:

What has happened?
What threats are present?
What meanings are being made?

From this perspective, scrolling is not a symptom. It becomes a coping strategy. Such as avoidance, distraction, or emotional numbing. Scrolling appears as a layered response, shaped by emotional needs, relational dynamics, and wider social and ecological conditions.

If we stay with the first story, that frames scrolling as an individual problem, the response is clear: reduce it, control it, limit it.

But if we allow the second story to come into view, that is, understanding scrolling as a response to broader conditions, then the questions begin to change:

What are young people being exposed to, day after day? What emotions are they trying to regulate?

What meanings are they making from this? What is not being processed?

Where is their agency and where is it missing?

Two stories.

One locates the problem within the individual.

The other situates it within a wider world; one that is intense, uncertain, and often overwhelming. The behaviour looks the same. The meaning does not.

If young people are scrolling through crisis, perhaps the question is not why they are doing it. But which story we choose to tell about it and what that choice makes possible.

Implications

As practitioners, this shift matters. It moves us from correcting behaviour to understanding the context and scrolling as a function. It means recognising that the behaviour may be pointing towards something deeper such as unmet needs for connection, regulation, meaning, and agency.

It also invites for more integrated approaches to mental health, which recognise that wellbeing is shaped not only by individual and social factors, but also by ecological conditions. Interventions that incorporate nature-based experiences, community engagement, ecotherapy as part of psychological healing and wellbeing (Buzzell & Chalquist, 2009), and embodied practices, including bottom-up approaches to regulation of the autonomic nervous system (Porges, 2011), may offer alternative pathways for regulation and connection, complementing existing psychological approaches.

For parents, educators, policymakers, and society at large, the lens widens from seeing solutions as solely individual to collective. The question then becomes: What are young people holding and what spaces exist for them to process, share, or act on what they are witnessing?

It calls for more nuanced approaches to digital literacy and wellbeing that go beyond focusing only on risks. Education and prevention efforts may also recognise the emotional and meaning-making aspects of digital use. This may support young people not only in managing screen use, but also in raising awareness on the impact on their sense of self, agency, and future.

Reframing scrolling brings into view the broader conditions that give rise to it. And very importantly, it engages our collective responsibility and the paths of action it calls for. It does not make it harmless. It makes it meaningful.

The bigger question may be, "What type of environment are we shaping and how do we create one that young people do not need to escape from?"

One that does not require something like Scrollazax.

• Christella Monnier-Antoine holds a doctoral degree in Ecopsychology (US). Her practice explores the relationship between people, place and the wider conditions shaping human experience. Her work draws on trauma-informed, non-pathologising, integrative and humanistic approaches, and she works with organisations, NGOs and individuals through her private practice.

References

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