At two in the morning, when the only source of light is a phone screen and the only sound is a thumb moving upward repeatedly, there is a certain kind of silence in a living room. In clinics from Karachi to Karlsruhe, that stillness has recently been dubbed “doomscrolling.” Additionally, therapists say the habit has hardened into something more akin to a symptom than a quirk since the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran started in late February.
Finding the trigger is not difficult. After Iranian forces declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, Brent crude surged from about $71 per barrel to $77 in just two trading days. Later, it broke through $100. Approximately 25% of all seaborne oil produced worldwide passes through that small body of water. The phones began to buzz like they hadn’t since the early months of the pandemic, when the pipeline of headlines began: tankers attacked, crew members killed, a U.S. president floating with Navy escorts.
The pattern is being noticed by clinicians. Sleep issues come first, followed by a racing heart in the morning and an odd flatness after spending hours scrolling through Telegram channels and X threads that purport to track missile launches in real time. Although the patient was never in proximity to the incident, it resembles vicarious trauma. The bridge was the phone.
The underlying economics is what sets this moment apart from previous news-anxiety cycles. In addition to watching a war, people are also witnessing the real-time trembling of their own grocery bills. A friend of mine was informed by a retired teacher in Lahore that she now checks gas prices three times a day, just as her father used to check cricket scores. Speaking with people gives the impression that there is no longer any distinction between household budget and geopolitics.
The brain may not have been designed for this. Instead of refreshing a feed every ninety seconds for updates on a strait we will never see, we evolved to scan the horizon for threats. The concept that a conflict can occupy your nervous system without ever entering your physical surroundings is known as “ambient war exposure” and has become popular among behavioral health researchers. It captures something true, but whether or not that label sticks is another matter.
Anecdotally, a wave of patients returned to their therapists’ inboxes after Trump’s televised speech in early April, which failed to provide a timeline for resolution, causing oil prices to rise once more. The loop has an almost cruel quality: a speech triggers a price increase, the price increase triggers anxiety, the anxiety triggers more scrolling, and the scrolling triggers the subsequent speech. The screw gets tighter with each turn.
Some disagree that this reaches a clinical threshold. Opponents contend that worrying about a war impacting fuel prices is reasonable and that pathologizing it runs the risk of medicalizing common citizenship. They’re right. However, rational concern typically doesn’t keep someone up until four in the morning when they are learning the layout of Iranian missile silos by heart. Vigilance becomes harmful in and of itself after a certain point.
Whether the Strait reopens, whether spare capacity in Saudi Arabia and the UAE actually flows, and whether the war remains contained are all factors that no one in a therapist’s office can control. Until then, moving the phone to a different room is the most analogous and recommended intervention. It’s another matter entirely whether anyone will do it.