Do you feel constantly overstimulated? Do you find yourself wanting to regulate your emotions by scrolling, but only find stress? Some of your online habits that you use in an attempt to unwind are most likely causing you more anxiety, and clouding your brain. Here are a few tips to regulate your emotions, ease anxiety, and get your brain back.
First, let’s define what brainrot is. In the BBC News article “Losing Your Mind Looking At Memes?: The Dictionary Has A Word For That”, Yasmin Rufo defines brainrot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging”. Obviously, our phones and the apps on them are designed to be addicting, so it’s almost impossible to cut them out of our lives. But we can definitely change the media we consume and the amount of scrolling that we do. We can also change the way our brain is now trained to take in information.
“Doom-scrolling causes our mind to scan for danger all the time, with women being especially susceptible”, states Maureen Salamon at Harvard Women’s Health Watch. A good way to practice mindfulness and calm your brain and body down from the overload that screens can bring is by body scanning. Body scanning is a meditation technique usually done lying or sitting down, in which you relax your body and focus on how it feels, from your toes to your head. It’s effective for feeling where your anxiety is in your body, and dissecting why you might be feeling it.
I’ve found that replacing long scrolling sessions with actual long form media like movies, tv show episodes, podcasts, and video essays, are still stimulating while lengthening my attention span. When you scroll, you normally only enjoy a small portion of the short form content you watch, and most if not all of it is unmemorable. Watching longer media, while still a bit unproductive, helps you actually enjoy and take in what you’re watching. If you want to take that a step further, journaling about the media you watch is a great way to be present with yourself and having a physical proof of your thoughts and feelings about what you’re watching.
And lastly, in my opinion, the best remedy to brainrot is reading. I enjoy having a fun book, a ‘learning’ book, and a casual comfort book that I’d want to reread. These options kind of mimic scrolling for me, in the way that there’s many separate options and vastly different storylines to look into.
Essentially, it’s definitely hard to cut down on scrolling, but incorporating mindfulness about what you watch and your online habits greatly benefit you and your brain.