My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

Second this.

I ended up building a nice charging station right near the entrance. It has storage for keys, wallet, and other things to grab when heading out. It has an abundance of wired and wireless chargers for all devices.

Then I got a dumb (but nice) alarm clock for the bedroom.

Then I noticed that a common reason to pick up the phone is to check the calendar. I ended up hanging a monitor on the wall, displaying the family month/agenda calendars. It’s read only, but it prevents a lot of device checking.

Cannot recommend enough restructuring physical reality to not have device on your person at home. It also helps the kids to put theirs away and learn good habits.

I am currently working on a phone designed to reclaim the digital toolbox nature of the smartphone- access to maps, messages email etc, but with an e-paper display. There are some (albeit not so interface friendly) e readers with SIM cards, but I think there is great power in just having a screen that doesn't vibe with the oversaturated video and image based distractions we are so used to lugging around with us all the time.

One of the most interesting things about a hardware based restriction is that it entirely avoids the game of turning on and off apps or deinstalling them. Even if you want to respond to a message in your DMs in Instagram, it will work, but the temptation to pull up the Reels or For you page just isn't there when it's all black and white and choppy.

Mind you we are super early stages but the idea feels promising and by my own testing I have really found it to be a much more pleasant phone experience.

I'll post some links here if people are interested.

>Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

You see, I've actually had some success with using Blocksite on my phone and blackholing things on my laptop by editing /etc/hosts. Of course if you have the access to put these filters in-place then you'll have the access to remove them, but the time it takes to fire up the blocker on my phone and disable it or to pop open a shell and type "mv /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak" is time enough for me to go "Am I actually accessing this because I care about some particular piece of content or am I just trying to plop myself into the dopameme stream?" It's not about 100% physically preventing myself from accessing these sites. It's about interrupting the flow. I used to have a problem where I'd be doomscrolling FB or TikTok in particular, realize that I haven't had any actual fun in about half an hour, close the app and exit the loop for a second, start looking for something else to do and then compulsively open the app again and start doomscrolling. Getting rid of the apps and having the web version default to being unavailable has made it so that I can still do the social part of social media with real people who send me content that I actually like and want, but I can't do the completely antisocial part of social media where robots send me content designed to piss me off and frighten me so that I interact with them and their masters get money.

I think there's one common element between our two approaches though: intentionality. Whether it's opening up a second app and disabling it, or walking into the other room to physically pick your phone up, there's an intervening step that allows us the space in which to go "Do I actually want this?"

> It really makes me want a 1980s-style cellphone with no screen and big physical buttons.

If you're using an iPhone, you can use Assistive Access to disable a lot of stuff, making it functionally simiilar to a flip phone:

https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...

There's probably an Android equivalent, but I can't speak to that.

A smart watch means you can still take calls with the phone hidden away or turned off. It's my preferred compromise.

I agree with this. No computer or screens in the bedroom, read a paper book; no phone - "but my alarm!" you cry - buy a sony dream machine at the goodwill for < $10. Go for a short trip outside the house without your phone, walk a few blocks, drive somewhere without your phone or GPS, buy a paper map - whatever; it's scary and so liberating! You will feel amazing self-sufficiency.

> Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

OneSec [1] is the only one that worked for me. It's quick enough that I'm not tempted to disable it, yet annoying enough that makes me think twice if I really want to open app X for the third time today.

Also it's just a polite nudge, rather than a full block, or condescending messages saying "you've hit your time limit for today" (that make you feel bad and make you want to immediately disable the thing in the first place).

Wish parental controls were designed with the same principles.

[1] https://one-sec.app/

I hear you about amygdala-bait. Back when reddit had third party clients, I used RIF and it let you block subreddits from showing up in /r/all, and so I blocked hundreds of subreddits. Anything that seemed focused on ragebait got blocked.

Made reddit's /r/all mostly about interesting new things or funny memes.

When reddit banned third party clients, I logged out and have never logged back in. I don't really miss it, even if it means I spend more time here or on fark. That was my last major social media site account, and I don't miss it at all.

> People on reddit write fake stories that push as many buttons as possible; an obviously wrong/evil antagonist, the ridiculous situations that only get more and more extreme to try to attract notice, the righteous moral superiority over the antagonist and their minions, etc etc.

I essentially blocked every subreddit and specifically only open accounts now. I completely agree with you.

One of the best advices I heard is: don't let the algorithm recommend stuff for you.

Never click on the recommend for you page. Or doom scroll.

Any time on these sites, you should know what you are looking for. Never get on there just to browse.

> I've found that having no social media apps on my phone has helped.

This. The phone without social media basically becomes a practical tool for basic communications, maps, taking photos, and news.

In other words: boring, and much less likely to be picked up.

I'm really hopeful for e-ink or low-fidelity devices to help ween us off media addiction. Hopefully Nothing pursues something in that space since it aligns with their mission. Would love to switch most of my work screens to e-ink and only have 'normal' screens for explicit recreation time.

"amygdala-bait" is such a good, concise way of expressing the phaenomenon. I too try to stay away from infinite scrolling. I installed an extension to block youtube shorts, for example, as they offer no value to me.

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.

> I wonder if there's a "minimum viable connectivity threshold" in modern life - you literally cannot function below a certain baseline of digital access.

Homeless people can't get access to govt. services if they don't have phone or callbacks in case they next in line to receive benefits. The following guy documents such problems that seem so obvious in retrospect.

https://www.youtube.com/@InvisiblePeople/videos

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.

For me it describes the feeling I have AFTERWARDS. It’s like eating a lot of sweets. They taste great while you’re at it. You feel awful afterwards.

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.

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.

I personally use it to mean "there is bad news in the world and I'm obsessively watching it hoping for some glimmer of good news." If I use too much social media I just say literally that, too much social media.

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"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

It initially referred to spending too much time scrolling through negative content, e.g. bad news, politics. But the term has at this point completed a transformation to meaning any excessive time-wasting scrolling.

No matter how much we wish we could stop, we are doomed to scroll.

It’s one of the lesser levels in Dante’s Inferno. We are in hell.

I finally broke wasting hours on YouTube shorts (and youtube in general) by turning off the watch history on my account [1]. It completely removes all videos from the "homepage" (including shorts from the sidebar). There are still shorts in the subscriptions page, but I think this is an acceptable tradeoff. YouTube for me now has just become who I'm subscribed to, which is a much more pleasant experience - there's an "end" where I'm finally caught up and can move on to doing something else. This is also for my entire account, so it's not something I can just disable from my browser bar or that won't work on mobile. I don't need to remember to set it up on a new device either.

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en&co=GEN...

That counts as doom scrolling to me.

If while I'm watching short form content like Reels or YT shorts etc, I realize that if you asked me what I watched 2 scrolls ago and I couldn't tell you- I'm doom scrolling.

This is the case almost every time I open instagram.

I had the same issue at one point. I'm not ready to delete some of my social media accounts as they do bring me real value, so I ended up blocking all shorts/reels/etc. on the services I use.

For YouTube there is Unhook [1], which allows you to block shorts. For all other sites I just use custom uBO rules. Both options also work on your phone if you use a browser that can install WebExtensions (Firefox on Android for example).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

I was a heavy tiktok user for the last couple years, before uninstalling the app a couple months ago. It was a lot of fun, truly, but I felt the habit (and its side effects) going in a direction I didn’t like.

I still have IG and FB on my phone, and find myself impulsively reaching for those scrollable short videos whenever I have a spare minute. That format of “content” is just very addicting. I really wish I could go back 20 years to when smartphones were a thing, but there was a lot less to “do” on them. I don’t think I’ll be able to break the habit without a major reset, personally.

> when I ditch FB, which I'm going to do as soon as

As someone who has deactivated and reactivated my Facebook account several times over the years — just do it! Maybe it will motivate you to finish that other project if you have something you really want to share. But the whole “I’ll start that diet after the holidays” thing doesn’t pan out in my experience :(

> which I'm going to do as soon as I get my new personal website/blog set up

I understand why you want a replacement for updating friends and family, but that's a really effortful barrier you're placing in front of deleting Facebook. For this reason you will find it way harder. And it's already harder than you think.

Take any and all barriers away from ditching FB. They are your mind tricking you into staying.

I used the SocialFocus extension to remove those kinds of features from sites when I was still weaning off the sites.

Removing the official apps was an essential first step. Then I progressed to using mobile web sparingly with SocialFocus to trim the experience.

That's called doom scrolling.

I blocked anything to do with Shorts because of how addictive they are.

I love the onesec extension and I've often thought society would be better off if this were the way Apple and Google implemented their app timer functionality on iOS and Android. If you could just mark certain apps as addictive and be given a simple few-second prompt before displaying each of them, it'd stop or soften a lot of the addictive loops, I think. I use onesec app on Android solely to do this to YouTube, but the fact that it isn't native introduces some weird bugs, especially when opening YouTube links from other apps (which I live with anyway, but alas).

I think any app that tries to minimize your usage needs to have mays to moderately allow that usage. Black and white thinking, particularly at the beginning, seems likely to fail.

Almost every night I want to learn some stuff I've been trying to study, and I read unrelated stuff online instead. It's REALLY hard to battle this. The double-edged sword of "the world is at your fingertips"... how can I settle on just one thing? >_<

> You want to let yourself think about things that you enjoy and motivate you INTRINSICALLY, not someone else because then you just keep needed to rely on their enthusiasm.

Legitimate question for debate: how does this differ for social media vs other media? Apart from social media being more addictive, all media is pushing someone else's thoughts on you, in some way. I can imagine old folks would've made similar arguments against TV and books.

(I ask this but still 100% agree social media sucks)

Physical barrier could simply be getting a timed K-safe lock box an sticking your smartphone inside it for a configured amount of time

"The wanting to not doom-scroll should be intrinsic"

For me, it is, but I would still automatically open Reddit or Twitter when compiling code, and then get stuck in a loop of looking at interesting and/or annoying stuff.

The solution was easy, though, I just put all of these sites, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. into my hosts file and pointed them to localhost. It took about a week for this automatic behavior to stop. Instead, I have a language learning app, so now I go through some flashcards while my code compiles.

Or open news.ycombinator.com. Maybe the next addition to my hosts file.

This is just short-term vs long-term gratification and competing desires. That's not intrinsic, except insofar as newly formed habits are compulsive.

Choice and opportunity-cost is all "self-limiting", the only difference is perspective. It's better to have an additive-mindset, i.e. replace a habit with another that provides value rather than merely focusing on restricting something. This works for everything, including diet. In the words of Allan Carr, if you view your actions as sacrifice, you won't succeed.

I think the secret is:

a) Make your feeds more worthy and less attention grabbing by blocking anything that isn't one of your specific interests.

b) If you make good use of your time, you'll find doing stuff more interesting than scrolling.

I've written about this too: https://thisisjam.es/reflecting/on-information-diets/

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”.

I like your solutions.

I do think having your phone in another room helps tremendously. I fight every morning to not take my phone into the bathroom for my morning ritual and waste 15-20 minutes of dooms scrolling.

Damn that's spot on. Thank you for sharing! Glad to know I'm not the only one struggling with this at a mature age.

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?

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.

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.

I got this for Christmas and quite like it: https://de.braun-clocks.com/collections/digital-clocks/produ...

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.

I use a physical alarm clock, but what distracts me is I have to pick up my phone multiple times a day for stupid MFA prompts. It's so easy to have a quick check of an app.

Siri home-pod mini “Hey Siri- set alarm for…” or “Hey Siri- what is the time”. Added benefit of now glowing LED in your bedroom and you can play relaxing sleep sounds if needed.