What your doomscrolling results mean (and what they don't)

What does my yearly total actually tell me?

It tells you the size of a trade-off. Every hour spent on a feed is an hour not spent on something else: sleep, people, study, exercise, rest or simply other media. One hour a day, every day, is about 365 hours a year, or roughly 15.2 full days. Seeing it as a yearly figure makes that trade-off visible in a way “just an hour” never does.

What the number does not tell you is whether that time was well spent. An hour learning a recipe, laughing with friends in a group chat or following a cricket match is different from an hour of tense refreshing during a crisis. The calculator can’t see the difference; you can.

Is my number high compared with other people?

We don’t show an “average Indian user” line on the calculator, on purpose. Published figures for time spent on social media vary a lot depending on who was surveyed, how time was measured (self-reported, app-logged or panel-tracked), which apps were counted and when. We were not able to verify a recent India-specific figure from a primary source that we would be comfortable putting next to your result, so we don’t.

A more useful comparison is with yourself: your result last month, your weekday versus weekend use, or the target you set. That comparison is apples to apples, and it’s the one you can act on.

Does more scrolling time mean more harm?

Not in a simple, straight line. A widely cited analysis of three large datasets covering more than 350,000 adolescents found that the association between digital technology use and wellbeing was negative but small, explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in wellbeing (Orben & Przybylski (2019)). The American Psychological Association’s advisory states that social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people and that effects depend on the person and on what they see and do (American Psychological Association (2023)).

At the same time, some patterns deserve attention. A 2025 meta-analysis of 71 studies found heavier short-form video use was associated with poorer attention and inhibitory control (Nguyen et al. (2025)), and a systematic review found screen time associated with shorter or later sleep in most of the studies it examined (Hale & Guan (2015)). These are associations, not proof that scrolling caused the problem, but they point to where to look.

Which parts of my result matter most?

Timing is often more important than total. Thirty minutes at lunch and thirty minutes in bed at 1 a.m. look the same to the calculator, but the second can cut into sleep. If much of your scrolling happens late, that is usually the first thing worth changing.

What does “years of waking time” mean?

The projection converts your total hours into the number of years you would be awake for that long. If you sleep 8 hours, you are awake 16 hours a day, or 5,844 hours a year (16 × 365.25). A result of “1.5 years of waking time” means that, across your chosen horizon, scrolling adds up to a year and a half of being awake. It is the same total as the “full days” figure, just measured against the time you actually have.

How should I feel about my number?

However you like, but guilt is rarely useful. Feeds are designed to be hard to put down, so large totals are common and not a personal failing. If you’d like the number to be lower, an experiment found that students who limited three apps to 10 minutes each per day for three weeks reported less loneliness and depression than those who didn’t (Hunt et al. (2018)). That was a small, specific group, but it suggests modest, deliberate limits are worth trying. Our tips to cut scrolling time show how to turn a scenario from the calculator into a plan, and our sister site explains the psychology of why feeds are so hard to leave (our sister guide, Doomscrolling Explained).

Want to double-check how a number was produced? Every step is on how the calculator works, or go back to the calculator and try a different scenario.