With seemingly endless studies showing doomscrolling is bad for mental health, more people are rethinking their relationship with social media and digital content.
Enter “bloomscrolling,” the latest trend on social media, which encourages people to intentionally and actively seek out uplifting and inspiring content online. According to experts, it reflects a broader shift away from passively consuming negative news content.
Sreela Roy-Greene, a licensed therapist at online therapy platform BetterHelp, says the bloomscrolling trend isn’t about ignoring difficult realities or forcing yourself to feel positive, but rather making more conscious choices, so that internet consumption helps you feel informed and connected instead of overwhelmed or depleted.
“After years of being exposed to a constant stream of stressful or negative content, it makes sense that people are seeking out content that feels hopeful, comforting, or inspiring [that] can give us a momentary emotional reset and interrupt the cycle of stress that often comes with doomscrolling,” Roy-Greene tells Fast Company.
“In the same way we think about balance in what we consume as part of a healthy diet, it can be helpful to think about balance in our media diet, too,” Roy-Greene adds. “What we repeatedly expose ourselves to can shape our thoughts, emotions, and overall sense of well-being.”
Excessive consumption of distressing news and content has been linked not only to anxiety and depression, but also to physical health issues such as headaches, low appetite, difficulty sleeping, and higher blood pressure, according to Harvard experts.
Meanwhile, proponents say bloomscrolling can combat those unwanted side effects of online swiping through the conscious act of curating one’s digital space.
“People are starting to treat their feeds with more intention regarding what they let in and how it makes them feel,” Sydney Stanback, Pinterest’s global trends and insights lead, tells Fast Company, noting that the platform is seeing that play out beyond the scroll, too.
“In our latest Pinterest Men’s Trend Report 2026, searches for ‘offline hobbies’ were up 551% year over year,” Stanback says. Also up: the phrase “no phone ideas”—“which tells us this instinct to curate carries beyond the feed and into what people actually do.”
