Doomscrolling, Attention, and the Case for a Daily Poem: What the Research Shows

1. The Feed We Didn't Choose

"Doomscrolling" entered common usage during 2020, coined to describe the compulsive consumption of a continuous stream of negative news and social content, but the underlying behavior is older than the word. Infinite-scroll interfaces, autoplay, and push notifications were deliberately engineered over the previous decade to remove the natural stopping cues — the end of a page, the bottom of a newspaper column — that once told a reader when to put something down. According to DataReportal's Digital 2025 Global Overview Report, the typical internet user now spends roughly two hours and twenty-one minutes on social platforms every day, a figure that has held roughly steady, at historically high levels, for several years running (DataReportal, 2025). None of that time is inherently harmful; the concern raised by researchers is not social media use in general, but a specific pattern within it — repetitive, low-intention consumption of distressing material that continues well past the point of any informational benefit.

For poets and writers in particular, this pattern competes directly with the conditions that creative and reflective thought actually require: unstructured attention, a settled physiological baseline, and time. What follows is a review of what the research says happens on each side of that competition — first to attention and mood under habitual doomscrolling, then to both under a bounded daily practice of expressive and, specifically, poetic writing.

2. What the Research Says Doomscrolling Does

2.1 Variable reward and a shrinking window of attention

Feed-based platforms typically present content in an unpredictable order and reward interaction — a like, a reply, a new post — on a variable schedule, the same reinforcement structure long known in behavioral psychology to be unusually resistant to extinction. A small but suggestive neuroimaging study helps illustrate the physiological stakes: Westbrook and colleagues used positron emission tomography to measure striatal dopamine synthesis capacity in twenty-two healthy young adults whose smartphone use had been passively logged for a median of thirty-two days, and found that a higher proportion of social-app interaction, specifically, was associated with lower dopamine synthesis capacity in the posterior putamen (Westbrook et al., 2021). The sample was small and the design correlational, so the finding should be read as suggestive rather than conclusive, but it sits within a broader pattern of research proposing that habitually reward-seeking behavior driven by unpredictable digital feedback is associated with altered reward-system function rather than a stable neutral baseline.

Separately, longitudinal field research from Gloria Mark's group at the University of California, Irvine, has tracked how long people sustain attention on a single screen before switching away. Her team's original 2004 study of office workers found an average unbroken focus period of roughly two and a half minutes; by the early 2020s, tracking described in her subsequent research and her 2023 book Attention Span put that figure at well under a minute (Mark, UC Irvine, 2023). Mark's own interpretation is not that people have become incapable of attention, but that environments engineered for constant interruption have retrained the expectation of it — a distinction that matters, because it implies the pattern is reversible under different conditions.

2.2 Mind-wandering, rumination, and mood

Scrolling is, cognitively speaking, a low-intention activity: attention is technically "on" the screen while the mind is frequently elsewhere. In one of the more widely cited studies in the science of subjective wellbeing, Killingsworth and Gilbert used an experience-sampling smartphone app to contact several thousand adults at random moments throughout their day and ask what they were doing and whether their mind was wandering. They found that people reported a wandering mind in nearly forty-seven percent of sampled moments, and that mind-wandering — regardless of the activity it occurred during — predicted lower momentary happiness, with the effect present even when the wandering thoughts were neutral in content (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). Doomscrolling compounds this baseline tendency in a specific direction: rather than simply drifting, attention is pulled toward content engineered to be alarming or emotionally activating, which a growing set of studies has connected directly to measurable changes in mood and distress.

"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

Killingsworth & Gilbert, Science, 2010

3. The Mental Health Evidence Specific to Doomscrolling

Satici and colleagues developed and validated the first dedicated psychometric instrument for the behavior, the Doomscrolling Scale, and used it to show that higher scores were associated with greater psychological distress and lower life satisfaction and psychological "harmony" across the samples they studied (Satici et al., 2022). That kind of cross-sectional association leaves open the possibility that distress causes doomscrolling as much as the reverse, which is a fair objection — but it is addressed, at least partially, by daily-diary research that tracks the same people over time. Price and colleagues collected 1,117 daily observations from participants during the COVID-19 pandemic and modeled the relationship between each day's media consumption and that day's mental health symptoms; greater social media consumption on a given day was associated with higher depressive and post-traumatic stress symptoms, and the association was stronger among participants with histories of childhood maltreatment (Price et al., 2022). A design of this kind, in which the predictor is measured before the outcome within the same person across many days, cannot fully rule out reverse causation, but it substantially strengthens the case beyond what a single cross-sectional survey can show.

4. The Counter-Literature: What Happens When People Write Instead of Scroll

Long before "doomscrolling" existed as a concept, psychologists were studying the opposite behavior: brief, structured, private writing about one's own emotional experience. The foundational study is nearly forty years old. Pennebaker and Beall asked college students to write for fifteen minutes on four consecutive days, either about a traumatic experience and their deepest feelings about it, or about a superficial, emotionally neutral topic. Students in the emotional-disclosure condition later showed significantly fewer visits to the student health center in the following months than those in the control condition, despite reporting more negative mood immediately after each individual writing session (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). That short-term discomfort paired with longer-term benefit has been a recurring pattern in the decades of research the study inspired.

The clearest summary of that subsequent research is Frattaroli's meta-analysis of 146 randomized controlled trials of expressive and experimental disclosure, spanning both healthy and clinical populations, which found a statistically significant overall benefit across physical health, psychological wellbeing, physiological functioning, and general functioning outcomes (Frattaroli, 2006). The effect sizes reported across this literature are generally modest rather than dramatic — this is not a claim that fifteen minutes of writing cures illness — but the consistency of a small positive effect across 146 independently conducted trials is itself a notable finding, and one of the more replicated results in the psychology of everyday behavior.

5. Why Poetry Specifically

Poetry is a distinct case within expressive writing, and a smaller, more recent literature has begun to study it on its own terms rather than as a subtype of general disclosure. Neuroimaging work is part of that case. Zeman and colleagues used fMRI to compare brain activity while literary experts read poetry versus prose, and found that poetry — particularly poetry the reader already knew well — engaged regions associated with the brain's default-mode network, including areas linked to autobiographical memory and self-referential thought, more strongly than emotionally neutral prose (Zeman et al., 2013). Separately, Wassiliwizky and colleagues combined psychophysiological measurement with neuroimaging to study the "chills" — the measurable gooseflesh response — that recited poetry can produce, and found that the response recruits subcortical reward circuitry similar to that engaged by musical chills (Wassiliwizky et al., 2017). Together, these findings suggest that engaging with poetry is not simply "reading text more slowly," but recruits memory and reward systems in ways that plainer prose does not reliably do.

The clinical and quality-of-life literature has grown alongside the neuroscience. The most comprehensive synthesis to date, a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in Psychiatry Research, pooled results across fifteen studies of poetry-based interventions and reported significant reductions in post-traumatic stress, depressive, and anxiety symptoms, along with significant reductions in perceived stress; effects on resilience were inconclusive and pooled effects on pain were not statistically significant (Kassab, Jayatunge, & Bou Khalil, 2025). The authors were candid that, while promising, the existing trials remain few in number and methodologically limited — a caveat worth taking seriously and returned to below. Outside the clinical setting, a 2023 survey of 400 registered users of a pandemic-era poetry-sharing platform, conducted by researchers at the University of Plymouth and Nottingham Trent University and funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, found that fifty-one percent of respondents said reading or writing poetry had helped them cope with loneliness or isolation, and fifty percent said it had helped with feelings of anxiety or depression (Caleshu, Waterman, et al., 2023).

Fifteen studies, pooled: significant reductions in PTSD, depressive, and anxiety symptoms, and in perceived stress, from poetry-based interventions — with the authors cautioning that available trials remain few and methodologically limited.

Kassab, Jayatunge, & Bou Khalil, Psychiatry Research, 2025

6. Dose, Not Duration: Why Once a Day Is a Feature

None of the expressive-writing literature above asked participants to write for hours, and none asked them to write continuously. Pennebaker's original protocol was fifteen minutes, once a day, for four consecutive days. That detail is easy to skim past, but it points to a design principle separate from the content-specific research: how a behavior is paced may matter as much as what the behavior is. The clearest evidence on pacing comes from outside the writing literature entirely. Lally and colleagues asked ninety-six volunteers to choose one simple behavior and repeat it daily, in the same context, for twelve weeks, then tracked how "automatic" the behavior became over time. Automaticity built gradually and continued to increase across the full study period for most participants, with the number of days required to approach an individual plateau varying widely — from eighteen to two hundred fifty-four days across participants — but the consistent finding was that repetition frequency, not the size or intensity of any single instance, was what drove the behavior toward habit (Lally et al., 2010).

Read alongside the doomscrolling and expressive-writing literatures, this suggests a specific, testable design hypothesis rather than a proven causal chain: the harms associated with doomscrolling are tied to a pattern of frequent, low-intention, open-ended engagement, while the benefits documented for expressive writing and poetry come from brief, bounded, intentional sessions repeated over time. A single daily creative prompt — a poem, a prompt, a few minutes of deliberate writing — sits structurally closer to the second pattern than the first. It is worth stating plainly that this specific bridge between the habit-formation literature and the writing literature has not itself been directly tested in a single study; it is a reasoned synthesis of two separate, well-supported bodies of research rather than a finding on its own.

7. How VerseLab's Design Reflects This Evidence

VerseLab was built around a simple structural choice: a bounded daily anchor rather than an unbounded feed. Every day, the app surfaces one daily quiz and a set of smart writing prompts designed to be engaged with in a few focused minutes, in the spirit of the brief, bounded sessions used throughout the expressive-writing research above — see how the app's Create tools work. Where doomscrolling research points to harm from passive, low-intention, indefinitely-scrollable consumption, VerseLab's feed is deliberately capped rather than optimized purely for time-on-app: friend-authored work is prioritized, but a guaranteed floor of non-friend voices and a capped "trending" signal keep the feed from narrowing into either an echo chamber or an infinite-scroll trap, and per-author and per-content-type limits keep any single slot from dominating a session.

The social and community research also shaped specific features rather than staying abstract. The finding that reading and writing poetry with others helped roughly half of surveyed participants cope with loneliness and isolation (Caleshu, Waterman, et al., 2023) is reflected in VerseLab's Clubs, group slams, and voting-based challenges — structured, purposeful social writing rather than passive browsing — and in VerseLab Campus, which extends the same structure to classrooms and learning communities. None of this constitutes a clinical claim about VerseLab specifically; no controlled trial has evaluated the app itself, and the paragraph above is a description of design intent informed by the general literature reviewed here, not a result. The honest version of the claim is narrower and, we think, still meaningful: the product decisions were made in direct response to a specific, citable body of research, rather than in spite of it.

One bounded prompt a day, not an infinite feed. VerseLab is free to download and free to use.

8. Limitations of the Current Evidence

A research-honest summary has to hold two things at once. First, the association between habitual doomscrolling and psychological distress is now supported by more than cross-sectional survey data; daily-diary and validated-scale research converges on a consistent negative pattern (Satici et al., 2022; Price et al., 2022). Second, causality in this literature is still incompletely settled — people experiencing more distress may also be more inclined to doomscroll, and most designs to date cannot fully separate the two directions of influence, even where lagged daily measurement makes a purely reverse-causal story less likely.

The poetry-specific literature carries its own, differently shaped caveat. The expressive-writing evidence base behind it is large and old, with Frattaroli's 146-trial meta-analysis among the most replicated findings in the field (Frattaroli, 2006), but the poetry-specific clinical literature is newer and thinner. The authors of the most comprehensive available synthesis were explicit that, despite significant pooled results for PTSD, depression, anxiety, and stress, the underlying trials remain "few" and "methodologically limited," and that effects on resilience and pain did not reach significance (Kassab, Jayatunge, & Bou Khalil, 2025). Readers should treat poetry as a promising, evidence-informed practice with real documented associations to wellbeing — not as a settled clinical treatment with the same evidentiary weight as, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy. And, as noted above, no study has evaluated VerseLab as a product; the design rationale here is an application of general research, not a direct finding about the app.

9. Conclusion

The research on doomscrolling and the research on expressive and poetic writing were developed largely independently, by different fields, using different methods, decades apart. Read together, they describe two versions of the same basic act — attending to language on a screen — that diverge sharply in structure and, the evidence suggests, in consequence. One version is open-ended, reactive, and engineered against natural stopping points; the literature associates it with measurable increases in distress. The other is brief, intentional, and bounded; the literature associates it, more modestly but consistently, with the opposite. Building a poetry app around the second pattern rather than the first is, on the evidence reviewed here, a defensible design choice — and one VerseLab intends to keep testing against the research as it develops, rather than treating as settled.

For a closer look at what that bounded daily act does specifically for creative thinking and mood, see our companion piece on how poetry sparks creativity and why one small creative act a day builds positivity.

References

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