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Doomscrolling Is Draining Your Team and Most Bosses Won't Say It Out Loud

ended 05. June 2026

Bad news doesn't just upset people. It makes them worse at their jobs.

That's the warning from Chris Roebuck, former global head of leadership at UBS, speaking to HR Grapevine. He says the constant stream of grim headlines wears people down in the same way frontline workers absorb other people's trauma. Concentration drops. People stop collaborating. Decisions get worse.

The research backs him up. The American Psychological Association has warned about "headline stress disorder" for years. A study in Communications Psychology found that staff exposed to distressing material at work can develop genuine stress symptoms. And 2024 research found people who doomscroll during the working day are less engaged and dwell on things more. Over a third of adults say scrolling through the news before bed wrecks their sleep.

People are already protecting themselves. The Reuters Institute found 40% of people across 48 countries now actively avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017. The top reason? It ruins their mood.

Roebuck says leaders stay quiet because they worry "the news is affecting my team" sounds soft. He didn't stay quiet after 9/11. He got his HSBC team in a room to talk about it, and people thanked him for years.

We want your views:

  • Is "the news is hurting productivity" a real insight, or a handy excuse for weak management?
  • Should employers have any say in what staff watch and scroll in their own time, or is that none of their business?
  • Roebuck compares news overload to frontline trauma. Fair comparison or an insult to people who have actually served?
  • 40% of people now avoid the news. Are the ones who switch off better employees?
  • What has actually worked where you are? Talking about it openly, or just cracking on?

2 responses from the Newspage community

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Kate UnderwoodVerified
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
Bad news fatigue is real, and naming it isn't soft management. Ignoring it is. In a small business, you spot it fast: someone doomscrolls through lunch and spends the afternoon staring at their screen. So what's the answer? Not policing what staff watch at home, that's none of an employer's business. And not another wellbeing webinar either. It's a manager brave enough to say "it's grim out there, how's everyone doing?" and then actually shut up and listen. The frontline trauma comparison is clumsy; reading headlines isn't serving on one, but the point underneath holds: a constant drip of bad news wears people down. And the 40% switching off aren't slacking, they're protecting their batteries. Smart employers help them do it. Five minutes of honesty beats a week of pretending it's business as usual.
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Colette MasonVerified
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Recent US court cases have exposed the predatory level of exploitative behavioural science that went into the endless scroll and the micro dopamine hits from phones, yet the net result is still turning a phone into the "rectangle of sadness", which is quite spectacular.

But the scroll is the visible layer. Add in tens of thousands of grey zone privacy violations from SDK permissions bundled into free apps "for legitimate business reasons" and it's not just minds that get warped.

It's the whole of society, with governments powerless or complicit in letting big tech do what it likes to minds, motivation and attention.

Roebuck is right that leaders should have the conversation. But that conversation means a workplace picking up the repair bill for damage that was commercially engineered at scale, by companies no regulator has yet made pay for the cost.

Why should HR and wider society be expected to fix what Silicon Valley broke on purpose purely to get eyes on irrelevant adverts.