This content was created by Ashok Gupta. This content was uploaded by Ashok Gupta. This is a YouTube talk titled "Why Am I Doomscrolling? The Neuroscience" (posted 2026-07-30) featuring Ashok Gupta delivering a spoken monologue explaining why people get addicted to doomscrolling. Gupta outlines a neuroscience model: the amygdala detects threat and triggers cortisol/adrenaline, uncertainty drives hypervigilance and predictive‑coding updates, the ventral striatum releases dopamine in response to novel/intense/unpredictable news (reinforcing doomscrolling), and the overwhelmed prefrontal cortex plus signals from the anterior cingulate and insula perpetuate the cycle. The excerpt is an explanatory lecture-style piece in English rather than a multi‑speaker conversation.
Chapters
why do we get addicted to the news? Because I think this is central to reducing these triggers around world events. So the first thing is the threat. So the threat is a trigger, which is watching the news, over-consuming the news. And that's the part of our brain called the amygdala, which when it hears this news, and it's constantly detecting threats in our environment, it says, "Is my tribe safe? Am I safe?" And it reduces or releases cortisol and adrenaline into your system. All right, and as a result of that, the brain says, I'm receiving this information, there's uncertainty. Because there's uncertainty, I need more information. So the brain starts becoming hypervigilant and actually wants more information. And this comes back to our idea of predictive coding, that the brain says, well, the world was okay and now it seems unsafe, I need more information in order to update my predictive coding about the world around me. All right, so there's a hypervigilance on the news. Our third step, and this is where it gets very interesting, do we notice that sometimes we can be addicted to the drama, addicted to the emotional intensity? Well, this is where dopamine comes in. So there's a part of our brain called the ventral striatum. When there is a novel experience or an intense experience or an unpredictable experience, it starts releasing more dopamine. So our brain says, 'Hey, I'm going to reward you for this hypervigilance, for you doom-scrolling, and therefore I'm going to release more and more dopamine the more you keep doom-scrolling.' And because it's helping us deal with uncertainty, and in any way anything that's novel, intense, and unpredictable also stimulates dopamine. So that explains why we might feel, uh, this kind of, I suppose, an urge, an urge to, uh, to continue with the doomscrolling. Then that fourth step is where we then lose that control over our ability to stop the doomscrolling, where the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed with the emotion and can no longer fulfill its role of calming down these responses. And that's where you think, I know I should stop, but I can't, I can't, because your brain is getting hits of dopamine as a reward for being hypervigilant in your environment and also the novelty of it all. And as a result of that, that hypervigilance continues, and your anterior cingulate and your insula said, "Keep monitoring, don't stop," which then means you monitor more of that threat, and around and around you go in this vicious cycle of doomscrolling. So your brain in this environment is not your friend when it comes to the doomscrolling, and we have to recognize that this pattern is going on.
