Definition: The mentally corrosive habit of endlessly consuming negative news, social media outrage, and online disaster content as your primary mental nutrition, mistaking the temporary numbness for relaxation or ‘staying informed’. It’s like feeding your brain a steady IV drip of emotional junk food.
While it feels passive and harmless in the moment, this diet slowly fries your dopamine receptors and amplifies anxiety. Long-term, it rewires your outlook to expect catastrophe, making real-world interactions feel bland and leaving you cognitively malnourished – the mental equivalent of living off energy drinks and existential dread.
Example: After work, Ben spent hours passively absorbing news alerts and social media fury, mistaking the grim numbness for relaxation, not realizing it was pure emotional junk food.
Years of late-night disaster video doomscrolling rewired Sarah’s brain; real-life interactions now felt bland and underwhelming compared to the constant online drip of outrage.