Opinion Addiction to scrolling is a public health issue. It’s high time we start treating it like one

From the moment we wake up, we chase small dopamine hits. A quick scroll. A short video. A harmless reel. A few minutes that turn into hours. These micro-pleasures feel productive or relaxing, yet achieve nothing. They are so habitual that we barely register them anymore.

Our digital consumption today is like eating street food from every stall in sight, none regulated, none inspected, none accountable. If we did this with food, the result would be obvious: Complete gut dysregulation. And yet we are doing exactly this with information. Endless videos of cats, carpet cleaning, shopping streams, we consume data indiscriminately. In my clinical practice, people come in complaining of headaches, poor concentration, memory lapses, and a persistent mental fog. When asked about screen time, the answer is almost always the same: “Just a couple of hours”, framed mostly as harmless relaxation after work.

Then we look at device analytics. Seven to eight hours a day online. Nearly 80 per cent of it on social media. What felt like 15 minutes of scrolling turns out to be two uninterrupted hours. A “short” YouTube break sometimes stretches into an entire evening. For many, social media is no longer entertainment alone. It has become their primary source of information, and in some cases, their worldview.

One patient told me they had taken to audiobooks to rest their eyes. Their screen time, however, did not reduce. While listening, their hands felt so restless that they had to scroll through apps or play video games simultaneously. When I asked how they followed the story, the response was unsettling. “I really want to concentrate. But then, what do you do with your hands?”

That question captures the crisis perfectly. Many of us no longer know what to do with our eyes or our hands if we are not being continuously entertained by online, largely nonsensical data. This is not a fringe problem. It is real, widespread.

The inadequacy of willpower

The solution we keep offering is willpower. Put the phone away. Be disciplined. Control yourself. This is inadequate and unfair. We are unlikely to ask a lifelong pack-a-day smoker to quit using willpower alone. We would reduce access, regulate advertising, offer rehabilitation, and provide medical and social support. Only then would the individual effort have a fighting chance.

Yet, with digital entertainment, we have done the opposite. We have flooded every waking moment with temptation and then blamed individuals, including children, for failing to resist it. This is why it is so unfair. You cannot distribute a powerful, addictive stimulus at scale and then instruct citizens to rely solely on restraint. Societies regulate drugs not because everyone lacks willpower, but because unregulated access causes harm. Constant online entertainment functions in a remarkably similar way.

Why regulation is no longer optional

This is no longer an individual problem. It is a systemic one, and it demands government-level intervention. How many productive man-hours are being lost? What is the growing burden on our healthcare system as attention disorders, anxiety, sleep disruption, and cognitive fatigue become chronic?

These are not abstract questions. Human resources are being drained. Healthcare systems will feel this pressure increasingly. And none of this can be solved by telling people simply to try harder. The hooks are everywhere. Money is involved, and no stakeholder will voluntarily give this up. That is why regulation needs to be stronger.

We must stop pretending that asking people to put their phones away is a solution. What is happening to the human brain today is neither random nor coincidental. If we continue to treat this as a matter of personal weakness rather than public health, we will pay for it with our attention, our productivity, and eventually, our collective well-being.

The writer is a health psychologist, author, and podcast host of Detangle by Kinjal