While many people might be aware how bad it is for you to doomscroll, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to stop. Developing some habits that can train you to reduce the amount of time you spend mindlessly scrolling can put you in a good position to improve your mental health and turn to some more constructive habits.
One way to get started with this is to be more intentional and focused with what you use your phone for, allowing you to engage with what you enjoy while still cutting down your screentime.
App Timers
If you feel as though you need some external assistance with regulating how much time you spend on your phone, many smartphones have an in-built solution for you. In your settings, you can set a timer on any given app that will lock it for the rest of the day once a set amount of time has been hit. For example, if you set 30 minutes a day for an app, once you’ve used it for 30 minutes, it’ll lock until the next day.
At first, you might find yourself running into this limit quite regularly, but over time, once you become conscious of the fact that you’re operating with a smaller amount of time to what you’re used to, you might modify your behaviour to match these expectations.
Time Trades
There are also measures that you can put into place yourself. On the one hand, these can be more difficult to make effective due to the fact that they’re self-regulating – lapses in self-control can easily have you falling back into old habits, but on the other hand, knowing that you’ve had such a direct hand in this change of habit might make you feel more motivated to stick to it.
In some ways, this can function as a reward system – using your phone less as a matter of course and more because you feel as though you’ve earned a set amount of time with a given activity. The amount of time that you give to it might depend on what it is. For example, if you’re someone who enjoys playing slot machines online, then you might set somewhere around 20 minutes so that you can engage with this in a healthy way and give yourself enough room to step back once you’ve hit that limit.
Looking at Your Phone Less
If you want to cut out a lot of the time that you’re spending doomscrolling, you might think about just cutting back on your phone time altogether. This might sound obvious, and just as difficult as the initial task, but a blanket approach can help you to rely on it less. For example, when you’re eating breakfast in the morning, you don’t need to look at your phone, and you don’t need a second screen while you’re watching a film or a TV show. Cutting back on these habits rather than eliminating them out of your schedule entirely is still valid, but just trying this cold-turkey approach might help you to develop a new attitude.
