Endless Scrolling Through Social Media Can Literally Make You Sick

When a dark ashy cloud born from wildfires settled over the Seattle metropolitan area, Jack Riewe was among the millions of people suddenly trapped indoors. It was September 2020, and without access to the outdoors during a pandemic, it became even more difficult for the 27-year-old writer to see other people. He could only fill his days switching between working remotely on his computer, watching TV, or scrolling through endless fire updates on his phone.

“I was forced to stay inside in my hot apartment without any escape except the craziness happening on Twitter,” he says.

For a week he scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, until he felt “weighed down, dizzy, [and] nauseous.” At the time, he attributed these symptoms to the air quality, or even wondered if he had contracted the coronavirus. The cause was something more insidious: the physical toll of living almost entirely in a virtual world.

The pandemic has forced most of us online at incomparable rates. It’s where we’ve worked, taken classes, attended parties, and gotten lost in 2020’s voracious news cycles. But our bodies were not designed to primarily exist in virtual space like this, and as our collective digital time creeps upward, something called cybersickness seems to be leaking into the general population.

Characterized by dizziness and nausea, cybersickness has mostly been studied in the context of aggressively submersive niche technologies, such as virtual reality headsets. In 2011, 30 to 80 percent of virtual reality users were likely to experience cybersickness, though improved headset hardware brought the range down to 25 to 60 percent by 2016.

Now, it seems the scrolling movement in a Netflix queue or a social media newsfeed also has the power to cause cybersickness when used under exceptional circumstances: all day, every day.

“Any kind of perceived motion is going to cause cybersickness,” says Kay Stanney, CEO and founder of Design Interactive, a small company researching human systems integration. “Virtual reality or augmented reality cybersickness is just a kind of a cousin to other forms of sickness related to perceived motion, and scrolling would be another form.”

What’s old is new again

Cybersickness is really just the latest neologism to describe the ongoing tussle between the human body and a world we continuously transform with technology. Cybersickness is space sickness is car sickness is sea sickness.

Reports of illness brought on by mismatched perception go back as far as 800 B.C., when the ancient Greeks wrote about a “plague at sea.” Despite their important role in trade, war, and migration, ships could be so intolerable for some passengers that nausea wasn’t merely a symptom of seasickness but the only word for it. The English word “nausea” actually comes from the Greek word for ship: naus.