According to the 2022 Canadian Internet Use Survey, seniors aged 65 and older are the fastest-growing demographic group to adopt smartphones, up 11 percentage points in just two years (between 2018 and 2020.) While seniors use them much less than teenagers and working-age adults, almost two-thirds of all Canadians used their smartphones at least once an hour. The study suggests that the more often you check your device, the lower your level of satisfaction will be with relationships with friends and families.

Mike Drak, 70, is a former banker turned author, retirement lifestyle designer and self-described “retirement rebel.” He blames the makers of social media.  

“It's made to be addictive, right?” he says. “It's made to lure you in. It's made to have you spend hours scrolling through all this nonsense. And I'm starting to think it's so repetitive.”

Drak’s mission is to fight what he calls retirement shock, depression brought on by adjusting to not having to go to a job every day.

“It's estimated that one in three retirees are going to suffer from retirement, “Drak says. “My father did. And I had a good friend die from it — he ended up drinking himself to death.”

Obsessively scrolling news sites add to the misery, he says.

Drak preaches self-discipline, being positive and getting off the couch. He volunteers at his local food bank one day a week and speaks to any group that’ll listen. And though he’s currently 45 pounds overweight and classed as obese, he and his pals are planning to compete in this year’s Ottawa Iron Man competition.

“I know I'm going to be at the back of the pack because I'm not fast,” Drak says. “We're all going to be struggling, but we're all going to be laughing about it because we're saying this is crazy, but we're having fun doing it. It's like we used to play as kids.”

McMaster University sociologist Marisa Young says constant exposure to negative news can take a real toll on our mental well-being. It can create a sense of ongoing stress, almost like background noise or what we refer to as an “ambient stressor” that never really goes away.  Sociologists call this “stress proliferation,” where one type of stress spills over into other areas of life.  

“The goal isn’t to avoid the news altogether, but to be more intentional about how we engage with it,” Young says.  

Matthew Johnson is director of education for MediaSmarts, Canada’s bilingual centre for digital media literacy. In the past, it has focused its studies and outreach on youth, but increasingly it’s developing resources for seniors.

“The first thing I would say is that they're not alone,” Johnson notes, saying this is an issue all ages are now dealing with. “How do those different things make us feel? Do we feel in control of our media use?”

Johnson says doomscrolling, an understandable phenomenon for Canadians during Trump 2.0, starts off as a positive urge to be informed, but gets out of control.

“Most of us are not that in control of what's happening in the world, and learning more about that can feel like a way of feeling more in control,” Johnson says. “And we also know as well that one of the big things we get from media, particularly social media, are emotional effects.”

MediaSmarts studies show that a post that makes you angry will make you more likely to respond and spend time on it. Johnson adds that one of the most impactful factors in whether or not screen use has a positive or a negative impact on us is whether or not we feel in control of the experience.

That said, they don’t frame this behaviour as internet addiction because it’s not chemically addictive like nicotine. 

“If we frame it in terms of habits which influence us, we're powerfully influenced by habits,” Johnson says. “But habits are changeable.”

Johnson notes that not all web surfing is bad, that some screen activities, such as checking the weather can have positive effect. Your happiness acid test is whether you feel in control of your actions.

A good habit to get into is, before you start scrolling, ask yourself “why am I doing this?” Johnson says. That answer may be just to distract yourself, and that’s okay as long as you don’t get lost in a swirling eddy of links.

Another is to budget the time you allow yourself for a task such as checking the weather.

And finally, think about what you’re going to do after you look at your phone.

“We can't pretend it's a level playing field,” Johnson says. “These are designed to keep us using them, whether it is people or organizations who are trying to grab our attention. We are swimming upstream against these forces.”