New Delhi, March 3 -- In the weeks after a breakup, 32-year-old Shubhika Joshi, a Mumbai-based product manager found herself doing something familiar- scrolling. Not compulsively, or desperately, but just instinctively. Her five-year-old relationship had ended. The difficult conversations were over. But instead of relief, there was a low-grade agitation that seemed to demand distraction. "I wasn't sad exactly," she says. "I just didn't want to sit with myself."

Her response was not unusual. Clinicians say it reflects a growing psychological pattern: an inability to remain with the emotional aftermath once the immediate crisis has passed. The discomfort of ambiguity-What now? Who am I without this?-felt harder to tolerate than the relatio...