Doomscrolling, Scrupulosity, and Sacred Trust

Doomscrolling, Conspiracies, and Scrupulosity: Why “I Have to Know” Fuels Anxiety

The host describes repeated client concerns about social media feeds filled with conspiracy, hidden-symbol, and “spiritual danger” videos that feel like a duty to watch to protect family and faith, and argues this is anxiety-driven threat monitoring rather than prudence. She explains the attention economy: platforms monetize watch time, track behavior, and recommend emotionally high-arousal content, with fear and fascination logged as “interest,” creating escalating loops and intermittent rewards like slot machines; ads then sell remedies to the unease. She defines scrupulosity as OCD focused on religious/moral fears and outlines its engines—intolerance of uncertainty, inflated responsibility, thought-action fusion, and reassurance seeking—calling the feed “premium fuel.” Using Aquinas (curiositas vs. studiositas), the Catechism on unhealthy curiosity, Paul’s “wise as to what is good,” and Ignatius’s peace test, she offers four steps: name the loop, stop researching, retrain the feed, and follow the Church’s protocol (renunciation, sacraments, prayer), emphasizing trust and tolerating uncertainty. She mentions a course and a free “Summer Scroll Reset” PDF.

00:00 Conspiracy Feed Spiral
02:47 Why You Cant Just Stop
03:28 Your Feed Is A Mirror
04:33 Attention Economy Explained
07:51 Fear Wins The Algorithm
11:01 Slot Machine Certainty
14:49 Why Scrupulosity Hooks In
17:10 Threat Monitoring Trap
20:38 Aquinas And Curiosity
26:15 Four Steps To Break It
30:05 Objections And Clarity
31:12 Review And Sendoff

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I have had the same conversation in my office maybe six or more times this summer. Different clients, but the same story. Amber, my feed is full of conspiracy videos, hidden symbols, spiritual danger stuff, and conspiracies in the church, conspiracies in the government, and I feel like I have to watch it to protect my family, or some version of that. So I thought it was time that we all take a closer look at how doom scrolling may be fueling your anxiety, scrupulosity, and OCD. You just sit down because you want to watch World Cup highlights or Summer Olympic highlights. That's really all you wanted. But three videos later, the feed says maybe the opening ceremony was a Masonic ritual. And there's a part two. Watch before it gets taken down. You may not have even wanted to watch it, but something whispers that a serious Catholic has to know. That whisper, it can feel like faith and prudence, but it's not. Stay with me, and I'll prove to you it's anxiety. So since I've had this exact same conversation, it has to be something that other people are too. And so when I see patterns, I like to talk about it because it could be helpful to many of you. If you have anxiety or scrupulosity, I'm gonna make a good guess that in your algorithm, there are many conspiracy breakdowns, videos of hidden symbolism, content about spiritual danger, and that it's happening all summer long. Underneath every version of this sort of algorithm or content is this belief that I have to know this stuff so that I can protect myself and my family, so I can be in the know. So there won't be danger out there that I don't know about and sneaks up on me. And that instinct is good because it comes from love of your family and your faith. You want to guard people and the things that are important to you. And there's nothing wrong with that. The love is real, it's the strategy that's broken, and you may be starting to feel a little broken by it too. Here's why you can't just use your phone less or be on social media less. For most people, doom scrolling is about news, but for you, it may feel dressed up as or seriousness about your faith. It can look like devotion from the outside or being in the know or taking things seriously, but underneath there's a lot of fear and anxiety. So my promise to you is this that by the end of this episode, you will understand why I have to know is a phrase that's actually lying to you, and more importantly, what to do instead. Let me give you a reframe that may help. Many people think that the feed is an editor deciding what's important. So if something keeps appearing, then it must matter. It must be important for you. But the reality is your social media feed is like a mirror. It reflects your attention back to you, and it's nothing more. So to see why that matters for scrupulosity and anxiety in particular, you have to see how the whole machine actually works. And that's where I want to start. Your feed is not telling you something about the world, it's telling you something about you. I want to spend some real time here on purpose because this is where fear can start losing its grip. Let's talk about the machine first and then how it plugs into anxiety and scrupulosity. When you see the wiring, then the trick doesn't work as well, although we still have to be careful. Why is YouTube free? Why is Instagram free? Why is Facebook or any other social media free? Because you were never the customer. The advertisers are the customers. The product on this shelf is actually your attention and it's measured in minutes and clicks. Researchers who study this call it the attention economy. The feed is not a library, it's not a news service, it's a harvesting tool. The app was not built to inform you, it was built to keep you. Follow the money with me for 30 seconds because it really helps to explain everything that happens downstream. You open the app and the platform now holds something scarce, your attention. Behind the screen, advertisers bid in real-time auctions for the ad slots in your feed. The platform gets paid per view and per click. So a revenue is a function of one variable, how long you stay. And every design decision, every recommendation serves that one number. Every extra minute you scroll is inventory. You're not browsing a feed, you're stocking a shelf. While you're watching the feed, the feed is watching you back and it takes better notes than you do. It logs behavior, not your stated interest. Every pause, every replay, every video you finish at 1 a.m. What time of night your thumb slows down. Thousands of little signs build a working model of what moves you. This is what's important. The same profile that predicts which video holds you predicts which ads you land on to. And it knows what moves you better than you do. This is the most important slide in this whole section. The system has no category for true or false. It doesn't have categories for peace or panic. It has watch time, pauses, replays, and clicks. So when you hover on that symbolism video or conspiracy video with your stomach in a knot, the machine only logs one thing: interest. Your fear and your fascination and your anger produce identical data. You were terrified, but the machine or the algorithm writes down, she liked it. Give her more. It keeps her here. That's the whole tragedy of this whole thing. Want to know how much you're watching is actually your choice? YouTube itself said roughly 70% of what people watch comes from recommendations, not search, not subscriptions. So a full feed of conspiracy content is not a picture of what's out there. It's a picture of what the machine or the algorithm predicts about you. You think you're choosing videos, but mostly the videos are choosing you. So which content wins the auction for your attention? Here's where we have some good research. Marketing researchers studied what makes content spread. High arousal emotion always wins. Anger, anxiety, awe, but basely anger and anxiety. Calm content, nuanced content, true content often sit still. It's just not as interesting. Here's an important nuance though. The fear on purpose. It prefers whatever works. It's just that fear works, anger works. Being the remnant, the few people in the know works, which is why these conspiracy content videos are appealing. We want to be the only ones in the know. We want to be the ones who know the secret thing that other people don't. We want to be the ones who know where the danger is so we can protect ourselves and our family from it. But before you feel weak for falling for all of this, let me tell you why it works on literally everyone. Our brains have a negativity bias. Your brain's job is not to keep you happy, it's to keep you alive. Human brains hold on to threat information faster than good news. And that asymmetry has kept our ancestors alive. It's wiring, not weakness. It is far more dangerous to confuse a bush for a tiger than a tiger for a bush. Researchers tested this on 105,000 real headlines and found that negative words reliably increase clicks. So be gentle with yourself. Your normally wired human brain is facing an intelligent algorithm that has found the ancient lover. It doesn't mean your brain is weak. It's doing exactly what it's built to do. It's just that this machine or algorithm has industrialized the bait. No, let's put those two together. And conspiracy content widely described stops being mysterious. It's novelty, it's threatening, and it never resolves. The perfect attention cocktail for the negativity-biased brain. Engagement-ranked feeds consistently surface more emotionally charged content than chronological ones. A Berkeley team tracked eight million YouTube recommendations for over 15 months and documented a loop. Watch one, get offered more, and the offers escalate. It doesn't spread because it's true or important or real. Videos or ideas spread on social media because they hold attention. Those are very different things. But then the more that you see something coming from multiple people in multiple areas, the more your brain starts to believe maybe this is true. There's one more layer here, though, and it's one that is used in casinos. The slot machine creators figured it out first. Your feed runs on an intermittent variable reward. This is the same reinforcement schedule as a slot machine. Its unpredictable payoffs produce the most persistent and addictive behavior. This is decades-old behavioral psychology. If you give a mouse a lever and every time he hits the lever once, he gets food, or every time he hits the lever three times, he gets food, he'll do the thing, but not as long. But if sometimes he hits the lever two times and gets food, sometimes seven and gets food, sometimes a hundred and gets food, sometimes one and gets food, where the time between the reinforcement changes, this is intermittent reinforcement schedule and it is the most addictive. It's what slot machines use, but it's also what is baked into the algorithm. But for a viewer who struggles with scrupulosity or anxiety, the jackpot is certainty. The video that finally tells you everything you need to know so you can relax, or gives you the secret to the puzzle, or the danger that no one else is seeing, but now you do, that certainty is your jackpot. Here's where emotion and money start shaking hands. The feed will stir you up and then places ads inside the agitation because stirred up viewers keep watching and keep clicking. Notice what runs next to the fear content. Go ahead, pull out your Instagram and just start scrolling. And for each of the videos or each of the ads, write what you're supposed to feel. Just start making a list. You'll start to see some patterns. Supplements, security systems, survival gear, products that promise to resolve the exact unease that the content just created. Be measured on camera. I'm now I am not claiming a coordinated scheme. I'm just describing an incentive structure that has begun to work and in some ways has created itself. Fear creates a felt need, and a felt need is the easiest thing in the world to sell to. First, they rent your fear and then they sell you the remedy. It's the same transaction in different directions, though. Now, I do want to be careful not to trade one conspiracy thing for another. I'm not suggesting that there is a villain in the control room targeting Catholics with masionic or conspiracy content. It's much more simple than that. And honestly, a little bit more sobering. The machine or the algorithm is optimizing for revenue that has discovered the fear that holds your attention so that your fear gets fed. That is my clinical understanding of the research. And I stand behind that. It's not that someone hates you or someone's trying to hurt you. You're just profitable. And sometimes that's even worse. Now, let me give you the whole first section in a picture that I hope that you will remember at 11 p.m. tonight. The algorithm is like a vending machine that restocks whatever you flinched at first. If you paused on one strange video last June, then it's been restocking you that row ever since. Here's the translation: that is the algorithm. Now, why is this algorithm or machine so particularly dangerous for scrupulosity and anxiety? Messianic World Cup didn't find you because there's something real being revealed. It found you because you flinched, and then the algorithm took notes. Now, this is the part that can really land at home for people who struggle with scrupulosity and anxiety. Here's a quick definition for newcomers. Scrupulosity is an obsessive-compulsive pattern where the feared content is religious or moral rather than something we're more familiar with, like germs or health. It's different than being devout. It's different from a tender conscience. Scrupulosity runs on a very specific engine, and the feed is premium fuel for that. Clinicians have mapped this algorithm or engine. And I want you to see all four of the cylinders. Number one, intolerance for uncertainty. I can't rest until I'm sure. Number two, inflated responsibility. If something bad happens and I could prevent it, then that's on me. Number three, thought, action, fusion. Thinking it feels nearly as bad as doing it. And number four, reassurance seeking, checking, asking, researching, repeating. Hold these four in your mind because now let's look back at the machine or the algorithm that we just described. See where we're going here? This is the collision course that's at the center of this episode. Scrupulosity and anxiety at its core is about struggling with uncertainty. And the feed is an infinite uncertainty machine that keeps promising resolution. One more video from now. The condition, the anxiety, the scrupulosity demands certainty. And the machine, the algorithms, sells almost certainty, but forever. It never ends. And you pay in hours and in your peace. But you never get certainty or a surety because almost sure is actually the product that keeps you coming back. Now, under all of this scrolling, there's a fear underneath all of this scrolling. I have to know every dangerous situation so I can defend against it. This is threat monitoring. It is a safety behavior. Watching the ninth symbolism or conspiracy video, the same mechanism as checking the stove 14 times to make sure that it's off. The content is spiritual. The mechanism is anxiety. Anxiety alone. It's not discernment with a phone, it's checking. That's wearing the costume of discernment. But here's the truly cruelest part. One of the best replicated findings in anxiety research is this safety behaviors work for about a minute, but long term, they maintain the fear. This is because while you're monitoring for threat, your brain never runs the experiment that proves that the threat didn't come. And the checking actually blocks this learning of safety, this experience of safety that the threat didn't actually happen. The watching feels protective, but functionally, it preserves your attention to the platform. It keeps the fear fed and alive. Every video you watch to feel safe teaches your brain one lesson. We survived because we watched. Or we avoided this danger because we watched. And so you have to keep watching. The safety that this scrolling promises does not actually exist for three reasons. Number one, you can't verify any of it. You're building defenses against reports that you often can't confirm. Number two, knowing is not the same thing as controlling. Even if a symbol claim were true or a conspiracy were true. What does video nine let you actually do about it that you couldn't with video one? Number three, this is the one that has the real impact, though. You already possess the only fact that vigilance requires, that evil does exist. The church told you that at your baptism. The details are not important for us to know. Every possible expression in detail are not important for us to know. They just add anxiety, not safety. You can still respond. You can still respond after video one in the exact same way as after video 900, with all of the things that we already know: prayer, sacraments, staying in a state of grace. Everything we just walked through, Catholic tradition has planned for. Not the phones, of course, but the heart underneath them. Psychology describes the mechanism, but our church has understood this wound, this anxiety, this longing for certainty for centuries. Aquinas did not have a smartphone, but he does describe your feed, anyways. The desire to know is good. Aquinas says so. And then he shows you how this good thing can curl back on itself. The disordered version he calls curiositas, knowledge that pulls you from your actual duties, knowledge that pulls you from your actual duties, claims beyond your ability to evaluate so you fall into error and preoccupation with harmful things. That's from the Summa. Walk the three marks against the feed with me. The rosary you didn't pray because you had to watch part two. The symbol claims or the conspiracy claims that you have no reac no way to actually test or know, knowledge that serves, and the steady diet of darkness. The remedy is not ignorance. I'm not suggesting that we just don't think about that. It's it's what Aquinas calls studiositus, ordered study, knowledge that serves your actual life. He's describing the recommended feed all the way back in the 13th century. The church has seen this move before, and she has wisdom waiting. The catechism gets thirdly specific about the need to know. Order to feel safe. In paragraph 2115, it talks about divinization, the old temptation to secure the future by knowing it, putting oneself confidently into the hands of providence and giving up all unhealthy curiosity. The church looked at this impulse and has understood it in some ways a problem of trust or of the ability to tolerate uncertainty and uncertainty in life, but confidence in God's providence, it's not an information problem. So the catechism really under so surprisingly, the catechism totally gets our doom scrolling. Unhealthy curiosity. And its prescription is a type of trust that learns to tolerate the uncertainty of life. Paul actually writes a sentence that helps us with this whole question, and most of us haven't sat with it in this way before. Wise as to what is good and guileless to what is evil. Notice the asymmetry. Deep expertise in the good, but deliberate non-expertise in the dark or evil. So something I tell my clients is this: you're not assigned to the intelligence desk. You are assigned to the goodness desk. An expert in the good, become an expert in the good. Stay a beginner in evil. That's the assignment for all of us in one verse. Now the objection that your anxiety might already be forming, because this is not my first rodeo. Doesn't Peter say to be watchful? He does. Your adversary, the devil, prowls like a roaring lion. But he finishes with verse 9. Resist him, firm in your faith. This says to us that vigilance is a posture, not a surveillance program, not a surveillance program that keeps us logged into the algorithm. Saint Ignatius also gives us a test. So I would invite you to run this test, honestly, in this context. In his Rules for Discernment, the enemy signatures agitation, obsessive turmoil, and loss of peace. So ask yourself, does this content claim to expose the enemy? So, this content that claims to expose the enemy's tactics, what does watching it produce inside of you? Peace or agitation, turmoil, and a loss of peace? The videos about the enemy's work are doing the enemy's work more reliably, and they're doing it with more reliability than whatever they claim to expose. Watch how the two threads of this channel meet in one place. Psychology says safety behavior, threat monitoring, it maintains the fear that it promises to relieve. And tradition says that curiosity, disordered trust, a heart trying to secure itself instead of resting in promise. But tradition calls it curiosity, a disordered trust, a heart trying to stay secure itself instead of resting in providence by learning to tolerate the uncertainty of everyday life. It really is the same type of wound. That's not me saying that people who have anxiety or scrupulosity simply don't trust God enough. That's not true, that's not fair. It's that they can't access trust in God because of the difficulty tolerating uncertainty, which is presented through their anxiety. Your brain and your soul are telling that they are both asking you to stop gripping and to start trusting by learning how to tolerate uncertainty. Okay, that is the diagnosis, so to speak. Let's fix your feed and your evenings. I have four steps. You can do them all today. Name it, drop the research, retrain the feed, and run the church's protocol. You can't argue with the slot machine, but you can stand up from your seat and move away. Here's how. Number one, name the loop out loud. Step one costs you nothing and changes a whole lot downstream. The next time your thumb hovers and it feels like a duty to pull and refresh, say the truthing out loud. This is threat monitoring. This is not discernment. We aren't arguing with the fear here. We're just refusing to believe its disguise. Your brain may need to hear this over and over, and that's okay. Anxiety can keep talking. It just doesn't get to keep talking unchallenged. Number two, the no research rule. Step two is the hard one. One sentence, then nothing else. Evil exists. I don't need to know the details. God holds the parts I can't see. Then, and I know exactly what I need to do to stay spiritually safe. Then no clicking, no checking, no one more video, no asking Reddit, no Googling again, no talking to someone to confirm that you're safe. Your anxiety might spike. You have to expect this. But remember that that spike is the loop dying or getting weaker. It's not proof that danger is rising. This is what dropping a compulsion feels like. It's very uncomfortable. But what it means is that we're saying something different about what the anxiety means. The anxiety doesn't mean danger, it means uncomfortableness. But the anxiety will quiet when you stop feeding it, not after it gets just one more video. And riding the wave is how we start weakening these loops. Step three, retrain the machine. Here's the flip side, though, that should really encourage you. The machine that learns your fear can actually learn peace. Remember that it reads behavior. So behave on purpose. Tap not interested or don't recommend that channel on the fear bait. Don't do any hate watching that tells the machine. The machine can't tell anger from love. It's only the minutes that count. Feed it with good deliberately. Watch, like save what you want more of. Give it a couple of weeks. And then also Philippians 4.8. Turns out to be an algorithmic strategy. Whatever is true, honorable, just think on these things. So St. Paul actually wrote a content strategy of sort 2,000 years earlier. Feed the machine the good and it will learn. And here's step four: run the church's actual protocol. This is what the church has been saying that we need to do to combat evil for 2,000 years. Renew your baptismal promises. The words that are set over you, I renounce Satan, all his works, and all of his empty promises. Use the sacraments, Eucharist, regular confession, the St. Michael prayer, if it helps. Then point out this list to your brain. Nowhere does the church ask you to gather intelligence about evil. There are no saints that became saints or canonized because of their expose research. It was because of how they lived their lives and how they loved the Lord. The protocol is trust by learning to tolerate uncertainty, sacraments, and resistance, not more information. Now, there may be two objections out there. So let's talk about them. They're good questions. Isn't this vigilant? Isn't vigilance a virtue? Yes. Prudence watches, but anxiety surveils. There's a difference. The test is in the fruit. Does this bring me peace and readiness or agitation and compulsion and a loss of peace? And then the other objection is but isn't some of this real? Sure. Some evil is absolutely real. And that reality is fully covered by the fact that you are baptized, that you regularly interface with the sacraments. The question is not whether evil is real. The question is whether the 14th video changes your defenses. And it doesn't. And for many of these topics, as we mentioned before, we really don't have a way to know if this particular thing that is evil is real. It's enough to know that evil is real and to do what the church has told us. Okay, let's review, put it in your pocket so you're ready to go. Remember that the feed is a business, your attention is the product, and your emotional wiring is how it gets harvested. I have to know every danger is threat monitoring. It's not prudence. We cannot verify, cannot control, and do not need it. Aquinas, the catechism, and Paul all point us to one same direction. Gain expertise in the good, trust for the rest, and be think on what is good, resist what is evil. If we can name this loop and how it works, stop the research, retrain the feed, and run the church's protocol, you are good to go. There's four moves, and you can do all of them tonight, right now, right here. None of them requires watching anything else. So this is what I want to leave you with. Some July evening this month, you're in the kitchen, phone in hand, full feed of what they don't want you to see, what they're trying to cover up, the conspiracy they're glad you don't know about. You can put that down. You can put it down, not because we have to be certain that it's fake or real, but because safety doesn't come from knowing whether it is. The father doesn't ask you to out-research the enemy. He asks for our trust. That's not naivety. It is a strategy which requires us being able to tolerate uncertainty, which requires us to manage our anxiety. Now, if you want to learn more about that, just know that we have an online course called Freedom from Scrupulosity and Intrusive Thoughts, a Catholic Educational Approach. I put everything that I know about scrupulosity into this course. And there's hours of videos and several hundred-page workbook that so many people have found helpful. I'll put a link if you want to go further. I also have a free summer scroll reset PDF linked below. So take care of yourself this week. And remember, there's always room for you and your doom scrolling, but also your piece on the Catholic Couch. I'll see you next time.