Doomscrolling Now Has a Clinical Scale. Escaping It Depends on Where You Work.

Vogue Italia's midsummer complaint, that the doomscroll follows readers to the beach and boredom itself is at risk of extinction, treats this as a private failure of willpower. Two things add nuance: the habit now has a clinical measurement tool, and the one concrete policy meant to interrupt it works very differently depending on which European country signs your paycheck.

What the term actually covers

Doomscrolling is not a synonym for phone use on holiday. Coined in 2020 during the pandemic and entered into Italian usage by the Accademia della Crusca in 2021, the word describes a narrower behaviour: compulsively scrolling for bad news specifically, in a loop where anxiety drives further searching and further searching feeds the anxiety.

That definition is now attached to a validated instrument. In 2025, researchers from Università Niccolò Cusano in Rome, working with Mark Griffiths at Monash University, published a psychometric validation of an Italian-language Doomscrolling Scale in the journal Current Psychology. Tested on 300 Italian adults, both a 15-item and a 4-item version showed high internal reliability, and doomscrolling scores correlated with self-reported anxiety, depression, stress and social media addiction, and inversely with wellbeing and life satisfaction. The study is correlational: it shows the habit and the distress travel together, not that one causes the other.

The one lever that exists, and where it stops

The closest thing to an institutional countermeasure is not aimed at doomscrolling at all: it is the right to disconnect from work devices, and by 2024 eleven EU states, including Italy, had some version of it. The versions are not equivalent.

• France legislated first, in 2016: companies over 50 employees must negotiate a charter with defined off hours, backed by fines up to 3,750 euros and, in principle, prison for employers who ignore it.
• Portugal's 2021 law goes further, barring employers from contacting staff, or even monitoring their remote-work tools, outside scheduled hours.
• Spain's 2018 data protection law only obliges companies to have some disconnection policy, without setting its terms.
• Italy's right, under a 2017 law, applies solely to employees on individual smart-working agreements, carries no penalty for employers who skip it, and by the account of Italian labour lawyers suffers from a documented enforcement gap. A bill to extend a 12-hour disconnection window to all workers was filed in the Chamber of Deputies and remains pending.

So the premise that doomscrolling cannot be escaped holds least true for French or Portuguese employees, and most true for Italian ones, for reasons that are legal rather than characterological.

What boredom was doing before the phone filled it

The holiday boredom the wire item mourns has its own research record. A 2014 study by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire found that participants given a boring task before a creative one outperformed a control group, an effect the authors attributed to daydreaming filling the gap. A phone that fills every idle minute forecloses exactly that gap.

Sources: Current Psychology · Accademia della Crusca · Creativity Research Journal