4 Steps to Defeat Doom Scrolling
Table of Contents
The Problem
Have you ever thought about spending too much time scrolling? About being a victim of what’s called Doom Scrolling?
I have. Often, when I was tired, my hand would almost automatically open Instagram and start scrolling without thinking — it was like watching images slide by while my brain shut down. Hours later I’d “wake up” drained of energy, with an intense feeling that I had just lost hours of my life. I absolutely had to do something, and my inner problem solver woke up.
But I still needed a way to keep chat functionality (which can be useful) and remove the rest. Often, when someone sent me a message on Instagram, to get to it I had to pass through the feed — which tried to pull me back into its infinite sea of nothing (and often succeeded). Sometimes I would close the app half an hour later without even reading the message.
(My) Solution
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The first thing I did was remove social media apps from my phone’s home screen: if they’re not easily accessible, it’s not easy to open them without thinking. I also added a daily usage timer of 15 minutes.
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I discovered Beeper, which lets you keep all your chats from different platforms in one place. Every time a message arrives, you don’t need to open the actual app to respond — you just reply via
Beeper. I disabled all Instagram notifications and kept only the ones from Beeper. -
I installed Reddit and subscribed to many subreddits that deal with topics I’m passionate about. This way, I started to truly care about the content I consume. Every time I open Reddit, I know the content will be quality and I might discover something useful that could make me a better developer.
Important: Shortly after I started using Reddit, I began to see more and more posts in my feed from recommended subreddits I wasn’t subscribed to. This really bothered me, because it defeated the whole purpose. (All the suggested posts were of no interest to me and cluttered my feed).
After some research I found out you can turn all suggestions off:
Settings -> Preferences -> Turn “Show recommendations in home feed” off
- In addition to Reddit, I started exploring another platform called Daily.dev. Daily.dev is a very interesting blogging platform for developers. Here you can find technical posts that cover a bit of everything from the software development world.
Conclusion
These steps were the result of experimentation to figure out what worked and what didn’t. The important thing was replacing Doom Scrolling with something constructive.
Since I adopted this system, I feel more productive, my scrolling time has gone down a lot, and when I do scroll, I’m not shutting off my brain — in fact, I find really interesting and stimulating content.
But more importantly, since I stopped doom scrolling, I’ve been much happier :)
This is my solution, but we’re not all the same — just like in software development, I recommend finding your own path by experimenting as much as possible, keeping what works, and discarding or adapting the rest.
It doesn’t matter how — what matters is finding a balance that makes you feel good.