What’s the secret here?
When I find myself doomscrolling during the day I’ll sometimes throw the phone to the side and pull out a pen and paper and try to write what’s on my mind instead. It helps bring focus and clarity to what is more important in that moment. A lot of the time that translates to clear productive action.
That being said I’m throwing my phone aside after this posting - thanks for the reminder!
Become comfortable with being alone, with yourself and your own thoughts and not doing something.
Some people call it meditation. I just call it starring into the void.
Related, but different: Embrace boredom.
We tend to see boredom as something negative, and avoid it by constantly entertaining and distracting ourselves, e.g. topic of this post.
We do have goals and things we’d actually like to do (more often), but those tend to be harder, less accessible or less instantly rewarding.
So these things which are valuable for our lives get pushed away by digital replacements, which were designed to capture our attention.
The solution, therefore, is to more actively abstain from these distractions, to not fall for their false promises. What then?
You sit around and do nothing. Immediately, your mind starts coming up with ideas what else you could do. How not to be bored.
Suddenly, these other things which are valuable become appealing again. Pick up a book or your guitar, call a friend or go for a walk.
Saw this while unproductively scrolling…
Change of venue and removal of the scrolling device. I have a home office; I’ll move to the kitchen out the living room and take my laptop. I close my browser and, if I have to look something up, I’ll use only my Firefox instance which, on my machine, is the clean/no cookie/no extension/incognito-zero-history browser. Not having my bookmarks makes it easier to remain focused.
If I’m not in the office and am scrolling on my phone, I’ll put it in the other room, turn it over, or pull up the stopwatch (or timer) as a reminder that it’s tracking productive time, not there for scrolling. The timer helps in the office, too. I often get impatient waiting for web pages to load or files to download - I’ll use the timer as a focus point. Am I doing nothing but looking at a stupid timer for 12 seconds between page loads? Yes. But I’m also not filling the time with distraction and allowing myself to get pulled back into a scroll-of-doom.
Am I doing nothing but looking at a stupid timer for 12 seconds between page loads? Yes.
That sounds like an easy but effective life hack! I can lose my focus in just a few seconds when waiting for some process to finish. But what I do in the meantime often takes much longer.
Also the other advices seem really good and on point. Restrict your distractions, or simply put the device somewhere less accessible.
set a purpose or a time constraint and respect it. Be conscious and thoughtful if you want to extend it
