No matter your age, you’ve probably been affected by something called “doomscrolling.” Instead of investing in your hobbies, cleaning your space, or doing your work, you’ll pick up your phone, open up TikTok or Instagram, and start the infinite scroll.
Scrolling on social media used to be fun! At least for me, I could scroll my Instagram Reels for, at most, 10 minutes and get a quick laugh, but then it became something more. I found myself doing nothing but scrolling. I knew that doomscrolling had become a full-blown addiction, and I had to do something about that.
Stopping doomscrolling wasn’t easy for me; it took about 1.5 years in total, but I found strategies that worked. I can officially say that I am doomscroll-free and can have apps, like Instagram, on my phone without the call of the scroll getting to me. Here are the strategies that worked for me, with a few that didn’t, to avoid.
Worked: Deleting the app entirely.
As the most drastic of the strategies I’ll share, I understand that not everyone would want to use this one. For a lot of us, social media apps are how we keep up with our friends, and we might not have any other contact methods with them.
To make this a possibility for me, I had to request phone numbers from those who I’d miss talking to. Don’t worry about sounding “cringe” or “uncool”; everyone wants to stop the constant scroll. Deleting the apps entirely works by completely getting rid of the source and forcing a reset of your routines. It may be hard at first, and you may want to fall back into old habits, but not having the apps accessible helps deter those impulses.
Didn’t Work: App timers.
Most phones have settings that help you reduce your screen time, one of those being App Timer. It seems like a very easy way to stop scrolling, since your phone will literally just kick you off the app when you’ve reached your 30 minutes (or whatever you set it to).
The problem I found with this strategy is that a lot of phones don’t have a way to lock the timer or turn off the “snooze” option. I had a pretty intense addiction to doomscrolling, so this small barrier to my quick dopamine didn’t help me at all.
Worked: Reviewing every single bit of content you consume.
This strategy is an odd one, so bear with me. Most of us have a Letterboxd or Goodreads account to review the long-form content we consume, but what if we did that for all media? The problem with doomscrolling is how easy it is to scroll to the next video, so making the process intentional and physically difficult will slow you down.
I found that writing with pen and paper would hurt my hand and slow me down even more. Answer questions about the TikTok or Reel you’re watching, like, “Did this content make you happy, sad, or angry?” or “What was the most interesting part of this content?”
Didn’t Work: Any purchasable “anti-phone” item.
While scrolling, either through an ad or an influencer (which is probably also an ad), I ran into a lot of recommendations for items that would magically stop me from doomscrolling. Those phone lock boxes, “dumb” phones or flip phones, and paid apps that promise you that they will lock your apps without a snooze, just to give a few examples.
I was seriously thinking about buying a “dumb” phone before I realized just how connected we have to be on the daily. For most people, they have an authenticator app for their work or school, or they might rely on ride-sharing apps to get around their city.
Researching “dumb” phones also made me realize how many good things that aren’t doomscrolling my regular phone allows me to do. Listening to music and podcasts on Spotify or watching my favorite shows on streaming while waiting for class to start are some of my favorite things to do. Because of those cons, these “miracle devices” would end up in my closet or a drawer.
Worked: Leaving my room without a phone.
When there was time when I wasn’t required to be connected — say, going on a hike, going to the store, or going to a class I can take notes on pen and paper for — I would leave my phone behind. Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, people weren’t expected to be always contactable and would only tell their friends and family what happened as a concluding call at the end of the day.
Most of my doomscrolling happened walking to class, waiting in lines, or sitting in transportation, so getting rid of that entirely made me stop yearning for it.
Being on your phone, and even scrolling, isn’t a bad thing. We live in a digital society now, and that’s amazing in so many ways, but it can get very out of hand. These are strategies that did and didn’t work for me, but there are so many others out there that you can use in combination. If you’re anything like me, it might take a while, but you got this!
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