I'm a psychologist—doomscrolling has a devastating impact

Well this is awkward, should I keep doomscrolling past this article?

I'm choking on the fucking irony!!! 🤣🤣🤣

My life is not so great, financially or socially.

Sometimes things go wrong and I get very close to being homeless. I get scared, and suddenly it’s easy to know how to spend my days.

The crisis creates a clarity of path. And when I experience myself fighting against that impending catastrophe, I find parts of myself that are strong and noble and relatively free of mental health problems.

I’m actually really functional in a crisis.

I think this is a major problem we face as a civilization: the lure of life-altering disaster as a way to give ourselves direction.

I think for me the path out of this cycle of failure is, for me, to find something to work on passionately when I’m okay. But I really struggle with this. I over-intellectualize, and I look at like twenty different options for how I can help and they all seem good and they all seem scary and I end up choosing nothing, other than survival, and then because I didn’t find that mission to set myself on, my subconscious manifests another disaster so that I can feel myself come awake.

As individuals and as a group, I believe we either find a mission worth growing and striving for, or via self-sabotage, we downgrade our lives to a survival struggle because at least it’s a mission.

surely the cbt I'm thinking of must be wrong...