It’s very annoying, it must have happened to you. That is, while you are downscrolling, you almost don’t notice it (it’s annoying for the other person if he thinks he’s having a conversation with you). Scroll (Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, Youtube, little changes), you see a video, another, another, without anything left, and yet you can’t stop.
Seeing someone else do it in front of you, while you’re not shaking, is even worse. When they tell you “look here, look at this”, and hand you the screen as if it were a gift, then you understand how ridiculous we have become. Not to mention when they find a video that arouses the slightest curiosity in them and they have to share it with you, as if you don’t have enough nonsense to scroll through on your own. So you have DMs full of people who send you the reel that “impressed” them, and you also have to reply to them, because sooner or later they will ask you “didn’t you see the video?”. In the end you don’t just shake your own, you also shake those of others, in a sort of collective shaking of balls.
Doom-scrolling was recently detected, it is that of “one more video and then I sleep” and has evolved into sleep-scrolling, the terminal phase: scrolling the screen while you are already collapsing, or worse, reopening your eyes in the dark to see if there is something new. It’s not a metaphor, it’s a clinically observed behavior: a study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry (University of Bergen, March 2025, 45 thousand students analyzed) showed that every hour of screen time in bed reduces sleep by 24 minutes and increases the risk of chronic insomnia by 59 percent. It is just one study, not yet confirmed by others, but interesting and consistent with those of the Sleep Foundation and King’s College London, which already in 2023 had documented a 31 percent increase in sleep disorders linked to the use of smartphones after 11pm.
Meanwhile, the day has become a long appendage of the night. According to DataReportal’s Global Digital Report 2025, we spend an average of 6 hours and 37 minutes online every day, of which 2 hours and 35 on social media alone. Users between 18 and 34 years old exceed 3 hours. A time dedicated not so much to informing or communicating, but instead to scrolling aimlessly, in an infinite loop that the American Psychological Association defines as “passive compulsive technology”: an automatic gesture, such as scratching or smoking, with a deeper impact on the dopaminergic system.
By the way, I saw a video on YouTube where they give a cell phone to a chimpanzee, and the chimpanzee, like our closest cousin, also shakes. Scrolls through the feed, stops, looks, observes again, goes back. The interesting part is that he only stops when he sees other chimpanzees or things that really interest him. We don’t. We watch everything, even what doesn’t interest us in the slightest. The chimpanzee shakes out of curiosity, the man out of boredom. It’s the difference between an instinct and an addiction.
It’s called doom-scrolling because even when you do it “to distract yourself”, you end up feeling worse. The Pew Research Center (2025) confirms this: 73% of users who read news through algorithmic feeds say they feel “anxiety, irritation or a sense of helplessness” after a few minutes of use. Sleep-scrolling makes things worse: The National Institutes of Health noted that blue light and cognitive stimulation delay melatonin secretion by up to 90 minutes, altering the circadian rhythm even in those who sleep “enough hours.”
Which goes hand in hand with down-scrolling, the daytime version of the same obsession, when we scroll in line, in the bathroom, at the table, in the elevator, even in front of the television or with a book in hand that we won’t read. Ofcom, the British communications authority, has estimated that we check our smartphones on average 214 times a day, practically once every 7 minutes of waking life. Not to do something, to make sure something is there. It is the new form of emptiness: updating yourself so as not to feel excluded, even if the only exclusion is from yourself. In short, doom-scrolling depresses you, sleep-scrolling puts you to sleep, down-scrolling erases you, because while everything flows, you don’t.
In the end we fall asleep with our thumb still on the screen, the same opposable thumb that has allowed us to grasp things, manipulate them, build tools, wheels, bows, telescopes, ships, computers, microscopes, cities, entire civilizations.
The thumb with which we played instruments, engraved stones, wrote books, caressed, cared for, killed, invented, explored the sky and built satellites to watch us from space. After millions of years of evolution, we use it to shake bullshit.