PhronesisDoomscrolling — the compulsive consumption of negative, threatening, or catastrophic news and content, driven by hypervigilance to threat rather than genuine information-seeking, producing anxiety escalation rather than threat resolution — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_DS in the landscape of calibrated attention. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated attention: the capacity to attend to real threats proportionally — gathering information that actually increases safety or enables meaningful action, then disengaging when more information would not increase either — without compulsive monitoring that amplifies anxiety without improving preparedness.
W_DS is rigorously distinguished from appropriate news consumption, legitimate staying-informed, and healthy concern about real threats. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: threat hypervigilance (doomscrolling is driven by hypervigilant threat-detection architecture — an attentional system biased toward negative information and calibrated to treat potential threat as requiring continuous monitoring; D(ξ) is generated by disengaging from the feed, not by the threats themselves), anxiety escalation without resolution (unlike functional threat-monitoring which terminates when adequate information is gathered, doomscrolling escalates anxiety without resolution — each piece of negative information reveals another potential threat without any point at which monitoring can stop because it has worked), and algorithmic amplification (digital news and social media algorithms are optimized to maximize engagement through anxiety and outrage, preferentially surfacing threatening content that captures attention, actively deepening the wrong attractor basin).
The Safety Paradox is central: doomscrolling reliably produces the threat and anxiety it is organized to resolve — the monitoring that should produce safety instead produces escalating anxiety, reduced actual preparedness, and progressive depletion of the psychological resources needed to respond to genuine threats. Nine formal propositions characterize the calibrated attention ground state, the threat-monitoring wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the safety paradox, developmental roots in trauma-based hypervigilance and social media architecture, and return paths through attentional retraining, ACT defusion from threat narratives, and news fasting as exposure and recovery.