My Struggle with Doom Scrolling
76 comments
·January 22, 2025jy14898
uludag
I definitely associate negative emotions with my doomscrolling behavior. Angst is the best word I can find to describe the feeling. For me it usually focuses around some major news cycle (war, politics, catastrophes, etc.).
ChrisRR
I don't think you necessarily have to be searching for bad news to be doom scrolling. The problem is with most of these services (this website included) is that even if you're trying to read limited topics, you'll still get bombarded with bad news
Take currently for example, every corner of the internet is saturated with US politics, even for those of us outside of the US. I just want to read about interesting technology.
koliber
I understand the "doom" in doom scrolling differently.
You're right that in general it's about getting those random dopamine hits when something nice appears in the news feed.
However, after some time, you got a lot of the nice stuff and no exciting stuff appears anymore. At that point, you're still scrolling, hoping for a dopamine hit. It does not come because you are satiated, desensitized and the algorithm no longer has good stuff to offer you.
I get it here on Hacker News. After coming too often and scrolling too much, I already clicked on all the good links. All that is left is either not interesting, or stuff I've looked at before. I still scroll, doomed to find nothing. And yet I scroll.
dqv
No. I think it's one of those situations where the word has changed meaning for certain groups of people, like a game of telephone, because dopamine scrolling and doom scrolling are semantically close. It's kind of like how gen alpha has a different view of what "preppy" means than what previous generations would have thought.
yeahsure
AFAIK - "Doomscrolling can also be defined as the excessive consumption of short-form videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without stopping"
yuppiepuppie
Yeah, unless not stated in this article, this is not doom scrolling. This seems more like an addiction issue, which is great that it’s being addressed. But it wouldn’t fit the definition of doom scrolling, which is an obsessive compulsion for searching of negative news.
bigfudge
That's not what I thought doom scrolling meant. I thought it specifically referred to the existential doom of endless scrolling for a dopamine hit.
iNic
I wonder if there's a "minimum viable connectivity threshold" in modern life - you literally cannot function below a certain baseline of digital access. You could model the failure of "delete everything" strategies as hitting against this hard constraint: banking, authentication, and basic services simply assume browser availability.
Maybe the key insight here is the pivot from prohibition to differential friction. By architecturing high activation energy for distractions (black UI, location blocks) while maintaining low friction for utilities, you've essentially created a "price spread" between productive and unproductive uses of the same capability.
I suspect we're seeing an inevitable arms race: platforms driving activation energy toward zero (think TikTok's frictionless feed) versus commitment devices manufacturing artificial friction. Perhaps the sustainable equilibrium isn't digital abstinence but rather carefully engineered friction differentials that respect our inescapable need for connectivity.
ramses0
There was a great UX principle around alternative mechanisms or backups. You can't have two rolls of toilet paper easily accessible in a public bathroom because people will naturally use them up at a similar rate.
You need to make ONE OF THEM more inconvenient to use, so that overall your bathroom experience remains useful and convenient. (You'll see this often with a sliding door between two installed rolls of paper, usually with a visible window showing the amount remaining)
Introducing "artificial" inconvenience can be a very powerful usability improvement.
renegade-otter
The struggle is real. I wrote about this a while back: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...
What you are doing is "self-limiting" which is not very effective. The devil on your shoulder will always fight this - "don't tell me what to do!"
The wanting to not doom-scroll should be intrinsic. I know that right now, for obvious reasons, it's easier said than done.
bryancoxwell
I’ve actually found using screentime limits on my phone for specific apps (which is essentially self limiting) to be very effective. Once time is up, there’s only a single button click stopping me from continuing doomscrolling, but that’s just enough friction that I’m able to say “oh right I don’t need to be doing this”.
shubhamjain
None of those ways are sustainable. Not only because there are good reasons to use those apps, but also because there are times when forcing yourself to work isn't going to work. I mean, if I am sick, tired, and just not feeling like working, I would go out of my way to beat the system I installed.
What has worked for me is: one-sec extension [1]. The extension asks you take a deep breath and confirms if I still want to open the app. What I have realized is I don't want to completely do away with time-sink websites, I only want to moderate my behavior of pressing Cmd-T and opening reddit/youtube/twitter in the middle of work. I have increased the length of the pause to 30 second and I am actively forcing myself to actually take the deep breath. Such a pause is enough to knock enough sense into me and return back to work. I think such kind of gentle nudging is better than being overly harsh on yourself.
[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-sec-website-blo...
dailykoder
I am so f-in glad I deleted facebook like 10 years ago and never hoped onto anything else. I only hate that I visit HN every few minutes, when I get bored at cagie.
But apart from that, just don't use social media. It's really as simple as it sounds. The only hard thing is to find something to fill the free'd up time with.
jaapz
The other hard thing is finding out that you now find out personal relationships are hard work. Quality relationships were always hard work, but with social media it was way easier to keep shallow relationships. With social media gone, you find out you need to put in way more effort to keep those valuable relationships going (and find out the hard way which relationships weren't valuable at all).
duxup
My thing about doom scrolling is that if I’m scrolling for very long it likely means I’m not running into much worthwhile content…
At that point I’m just annoyed and I quit.
I wonder, are people doom scrolling for a long time seeing a lot of content they LIKE?
benterix
Recently my coworker asked me if I could recommend any physical alarm clocks. He said that phone alarm causes him to pick up the phone the first thing in the morning and he wants to break away from this habit. I guess at some point the society as a whole will start fighting back.
criddell
My wife and I recently watched the HBO Dune miniseries (it’s great!) and I was thinking how bizarre it would be if people in that universe were spending their days passive scrolling the screen on their pocket computers.
Wall-E depicted a future like that, but I can’t really think of any other books or movies that imagine that kind of future for humanity. Surely this is a phase we are going through, right?
barrkel
Fahrenheit 451 has the wife mindlessly listening to airpods all day, even while having conversations (requiring skill in lipreading to avoid interruption). The airpods are described as Seashells or ear thimbles, small radios with speakers that sit in the ear canal.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
"Super Sad True Love Story" has that and some other interesting insights into potential evolution of existing media landscape, where watching full Narnia movie makes you movie buff and reading books makes you an icky old man. Book is fairly sad as the title suggests, but mostly due to world it portrays. Some of the trends were captures pretty well; some likely won't age that well.
lloeki
I use a Garmin watch for alarms.
Frequent conversation:
"oh you have a smartwatch"
"no it's dumb in all the right ways, which is the point"
Notably I have notifications but can't act on them, which prevents me from picking up the phone just to check notifications and then be drawn into doing actions. YMMV.
ablation
Agreed. My Garmin fenix is one of the most useful things I own. It's just 'smart' enough in the ways I need it to be (mostly for exercise/health), and 'dumb' enough not to bother me with useless dopamine nudges from apps from my phone. It's a delightful piece of technology that improves my life in subtle ways rather than detracts from it or saps it.
dspillett
> I use a Garmin watch for alarms.
I've tried that, but found them to be too easy to sleep through unless my watch wrist is very close to my head (without a pillow between it and my ear). The sound isn't particularly loud and the vibration is similarly shallow. Useful for reminder alarms when I'm awake though.
My current success is using the Amazon branded wiretap for alarms. Interacting with the dumb cloth-eared irritation sometimes annoys me into being awake rather than hitting the virtual snooze yet again, and it doesn't have the doom-scroll potential of my phone.
arccy
if you can't act on them, don't you have to pick up your phone anyway? if it was a bit smarter you can quickly act on it, but using a smartwatch is so uncomfortable you wouldn't want to use it for anything unnecessary.
TonyTrapp
It comes with other benefits as well. Not even the cheapest alarm clock has ever failed me. Sure, it can run out of battery power but the low power icon shows up months before it runs out of juice. Phone alarms on the other hand? I had them not triggering at all, or the vibration motor in the phone being stuck (?) and thus not working temporarily, etc... Hence I also prefer physical alarm clocks without software that have one job and one job only.
lloeki
I've had strange time issues lately with iOS and macOS.
Initially I thought it was a TZ issue because of automatic location but the offset ended up being inconsistent with any TZ. Looks like a mix of RTC and NTP issue, the latter hiding the former when it works but revealing it when it fails.
Luckily I don't use alarms on my phone.
jon-wood
Not really relevant but I'm going to say it anyway. I hate devices that tell me about "low" battery long in advance of actually going flat, it simply trains me to ignore the notification and then it unceremoniously dies on me at a later time.
TonyTrapp
In this particular case it's my use of NiMH batteries, which have a different discharge slope than normal Alkaline batteries. So it's not really a "feature" of the device but rather a limitation of the type of batteries used. With my alarm clock the signs when to charge the batteries are very obvious (the LCD starts fading away so it becomes hard to read, but the device is still functioning perfectly for some more weeks even then - it just doesn't much power at all).
weberer
Its a difficult problem to estimate remaining battery life with alkaline batteries. Devices can only use the voltage reading to make estimates.
corford
I got this for Christmas and quite like it: https://de.braun-clocks.com/collections/digital-clocks/produ...
im3w1l
Yes we are trying to fight back, but sadly I'm starting to think it will only be the next generations, the ones not even born yet that will fully internalize the lessons of our mistakes.
beardyw
If you are on Android you might not want to delete Google Play Store. It provides services which many apps depend on. I have made use of a couple of old 8Gb Android phones and I found that was about the minimum.
If you factory reset and just allow enough time for Play Store to update, I found if you are quick you can switch off auto update on all the other apps (which are installed as stubs only) and end up with enough storage to be useful, yet one which can run other apps successfully.
dash2
I had reasonable success deleting Safari from my iPhone. I still need to hit weblinks sometimes, but iOS does a reasonable job at providing a basic web browser for those (no URL bar so I can't then waste time on it).
Of apps, I am currently using ScreenZen, which links into ScreenTime to provide a warning message and delay before I browse a customisable list of websites/apps. (HN is on it...) It seems to work better than OneSec, though it isn't perfect.
[update] Another thing I find useful is to regularly measure my screen time, and have a manageable goal for how long I spend. That's more productive than hoping to go "off-grid" forever.
_tk_
I am struggling with this myself at the moment, but I find that just doing something else entirely - away from my phone or laptop - is way more effective than deleting apps. Activities like buying groceries, cooking, going for a walk etc all create a sensation when I'm done with them, that I enjoy a lot more than what I feel after an hour of scrolling.
boomskats
A little over a year ago I gave away my flagship samsung phablet and bought one of their flip phones, in an attempt to change my habits by consciously making myself doubtful/anxious about the longevity of the flip phone's infamous hinge. The idea was that the little front screen would do everything that a semi-dumb phone replacement could (notifications, camera, calls, timers, calculator, calendar), but I'd also have a 'real smartphone' whenever I needed one - it's just that with this one, using it came at a cost. Every time I'd go to use the big screen I'd remember there was an anxious moment that stood in the way, and the paranoia would make me just anxious enough to question whether I really needed to do what I was about to do.
It's been about 15 months, and I haven't really had to compromise or sacrifice anything: I haven't uninstalled any social media apps, my banking apps are all still there, I have contactless payments on hand, etc.. However, I can say with absolute certainty that my habits have changed _drastically_. Interestingly, I'm not even hesitant to use the phone when I need to, I use it all the time - but when I use it I now use it intentionally, and very briefly; gone are the days of catching myself somehow scrolling through instagram just because 5 minutes ago I opened a whatsapp notification from my mum. It's like night and day, and what's more I feel like I barely had to try.
This is obviously sample of one anecdata, but I'm genuinely surprised at how successful it's been. A real 'life hack'.
(And no I don't have any samsung coupon codes nor do I particularly care for them as a company. Worth mentioning though - the hinge on the zf5 is still really solid 15 months in)
DanielleMolloy
Deleting apps doesn't work for me because there are topics I actually want to follow on places like X (e.g. ML / AI news). As soon as I reinstall, it will easily suck you in again with some distracting emotionalised / partisan current event.
There is an app called ScreenZen that was immediately effective in breaking my habit. It made me use social media much more consciously.
My go-to "social media" page has been GoodReads for a while, and I don't see a problem with it – not only because it is rewarding reading books, but because it doesn't have dark distraction patterns and is much more like the mid 2000s internet. Half my family is doing the reading challenges now.
Does everyone really mean doom scrolling when they talk about these issues? For me personally, it's definitely about dopamine and not about negative emotions, yet everyone uses the phrase doom scrolling - am I the odd one out?
For example, if I'm feeling stressed/anxious, I'll scroll/browse/distract myself to avoid the negative feelings. I'm not seeking them like doom scrolling says.