(CNN) -
Are you mindlessly scrolling on your phone after a long day at work, sifting through miles of negative posts?
This is what is known as "Doomscrolling."
In what seems like minutes, hours have passed.
Consuming lots of negative news has become a popular word over the past year to describe the habit of mindlessly flipping through negative news.
People lose track of time while scrolling on their phones, said Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
Hall has spent more than 10 years studying the use of technology in conjunction with relationships and is the director of the Relationships and Technology Laboratory at the University of Kansas.
The lab focuses on how people incorporate digital technology into their daily communication.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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CNN: How is it that people get carried away by "doomscrolling" or the massive consumption of negative news?
Jeffrey Hall:
There are actually three parts that are worth paying attention to.
One has to do with the way social media companies design their product and user experience.
Another has to do with the user interface with that algorithm and the way it is designed.
And the third has to do with the way we are attentive to negative information.
The express goal of social media companies is to collect more information about our viewing habits to engage our attention for longer periods of time.
This is so that they can monetize that behavior for the purpose of selling it to advertisers.
The algorithms are designed to maximize the amount of time that people pay attention to the application and evolve based on user engagement.
What you click on, what your eyes spend more time on, what you reinforce in your scrolling, it tells the algorithm what you want to see more of.
It becomes a funnel in which you see less and less information that you are not interacting with.
The third part has to do with your own attention processes.
People tend to have what is called a negativity bias when it comes to information.
From an evolutionary perspective, it is related to the idea that we needed to be more alert to threats.
If things aren't particularly surprising, we can live in a very low energy state, but as soon as we see something that is potentially threatening or worrying, it catches our attention.
Algorithms are picking up on what we're engaging in and our attentive processes tend to focus on the most negative information.
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CNN: What are some of the ways that people can prevent fatal breakthrough?
Hall:
A long time ago a researcher told me something that I thought was really smart.
She said, "I'm constantly training my algorithm."
When I see things that I want to see, I click and like, and when I see things that I don't like, I don't click them.
You can reject what you want to see by directing the algorithm to the things you prefer to see.
You can also take active steps to recognize if there are people in your social network who seem to be fueling your sense of pessimism.
You may want to consider unsubscribing or silencing them.
People are very reluctant to stop being friends or to stop following a person altogether.
However, there are ways not to consume that content.
We are often very upset by the content we see, but we do nothing to change what we see.
The third thing you can do is what I like to think of is a more extractive than immersive way of using social media.
An extractive way of using social media means you go in, look at the content that's there, then log out and drop it.
Immersive use of social media means you are always active and available.
If you have it on your mobile device, it is usually a way to invite the immersion because it is always there and will constantly give you notifications.
An extractive way to do this is to mute notifications and log out of their accounts when you're not using them.
CNN: How can people have a more positive relationship with social media?
Hall: Researchers have become very attentive to the reality that the more one-on-one relationship-building interactions someone has, the stronger their use of social media.
What I mean by that is that the behaviors that tend to relate personally and responsibly to the people you care about tend to be the behaviors on social media that lead to the greatest sense of well-being in the moment.
You can really divert your use of social media from things that tend to be divorced from personal content and towards relationship building activities.
Research suggests that it's not just what you post; what is valuable to you is how other people respond. Let's say I'm posting something about how personally I'm having a difficult time. All the people who sustain me in my relationships can do so through positive affirmations and support, ways of showing sympathy in response to what I post. That's more work, but it's important work. That's the work we can do to show people that we care about them.