The events of 2020; COVID-19, murder hornets, racial riots, have a lot of people doing a lot of 'doomscrolling.'
Doomscrolling is when you can't stop yourself from looking at your phone to get the news. Psychologist Wendy Rice explains why we do this to ourselves.
"Our fight or flight response gets going. Our adrenaline gets going. Our survival instincts kick in, and we are scanning for danger," Rice said.
Social media platform won't do anything to stop it. You're addicted, and they are your supplier.
"The ease of picking up your phone and checking to see if anything else has happened since you last look. It can be every 30 seconds; we get that urge, and get that dopamine rush. So we look," Rice explained.
We've been doing a lot of looking. Twitter says they had 24% more traffic in the first quarter of this year than they did in the first quarter of 2019.