A month of less scrolling taught me more than I expected
My New Year’s resolution every year for the past few years has been the same: spend less time on my phone.
Doom scrolling is one of my worst habits. I get so caught up in it that I don’t even realize how much time has passed until the regret hits and I’m left wondering why I just spent an hour doing absolutely nothing. As a busy college student, my phone is the first thing I reach for when I need a distraction or want to unwind. But when I started noticing myself grabbing it mid-conversation or in the middle of class, I knew it was finally time to make this resolution stick.
For the entire month of March, I committed to spending less time on social media and my phone in general, with the goal of being more present and finding better ways to decompress. Here’s what I noticed.
The first week was hard. I’d been so used to lying in bed and opening TikTok before falling asleep that it felt automatic. The problem is TikTok doesn’t exactly make it easy to keep track of time, so I set app time limits as a starting point. Having that reminder pop up helped break the autopilot habit, and gradually, spending less time on my phone started to feel natural rather than forced.
Instead of scrolling before bed, I started reading, even if it was just a few pages. I used to tell myself that reading after a long day of studying would make me more exhausted, but honestly, it did, in the best way. It was calming in a way that staring at a bright screen never was. And it made me realize I couldn’t keep using “no time” as an excuse. If there’s time to scroll, there’s time to read.
Something else I didn’t expect was how much more intentional I became with my phone overall. Instead of mindlessly opening apps, I was actually using it with purpose, to text people, check the news and put it down. That shift alone got rid of so much of the wasted-time guilt I used to feel constantly.
I also noticed that boredom started looking different. Instead of filling every spare moment between classes with my phone, I’d use that time to do something small but useful, like tidying my space or running an errand. It sounds small, but it made those in-between moments feel like they counted for something.
The thing I least expected was the FOMO going away. I’ve never been someone who stresses about missing out on plans, but I realized I was getting FOMO from things I wasn’t even planning to attend. Seeing influencers post about the same concert or event on repeat had a way of making me feel like I was missing something. Once I stepped back from social media, that feeling pretty much disappeared on its own.
This is still a work in progress, but I’m proud of how much my screen time has gone down.
As college students, we already spend the entire day behind a screen for readings, assignments and exams, so it’s worth being intentional about how we unwind. Especially now that the weather in Wisconsin is finally turning around, there are a lot of better things to do than scroll.