You know the moment.
You pick up your phone to check one thing,
And then 20 minutes later,
You're still scrolling through news that makes you anxious,
Posts that make you feel behind,
Videos you won't even remember tomorrow.
And some part of you is going,
Why can't I just stop?
Here's the reassuring part.
There's nothing wrong with you.
Your brain's doing exactly what it evolved to do.
And the apps in your hand were engineered deliberately to take advantage of that.
Let me explain because once you see how this works,
You start to get the power back.
Let's start with how your brain learns.
It's beautifully simple,
Trigger,
Behavior,
Reward.
You feel a little bored or stressed,
That's the trigger.
You pick up your phone and scroll,
That's the behavior.
You get a hit of something new,
Something interesting,
That's the reward.
Do that enough times and your brain learns.
Bored?
Check your phone.
You never sat down and decided to build that habit.
Your brain built it for you automatically because at some point it delivered.
Ready for this?
The companies behind these apps took their playbooks straight from the casinos.
That pull down to refresh gesture?
That's a slot machine.
The little delay before your feed loads.
That's often on a variable timer,
Engineered so your brain is left guessing.
So you get a surge of dopamine in anticipation.
At one point,
They even held back your likes and released them in a batch so you'd keep checking.
It's called intermittent reinforcement.
You never know when the next reward is coming,
And they run this at a scale of millions of people at once.
This isn't an accident.
It's a business model.
And it works because of how dopamine works,
Which brings me to the internet myth number one.
Dopamine is not a happiness molecule.
It's a motivation molecule.
It doesn't make you feel good.
It makes you feel the itch to get more.
It's what got our ancestors up and out of the cave to go find food.
So that pull to keep scrolling,
That's not happiness.
That's anticipation,
An urge engineered to keep you reaching.
So how do you actually stop?
Not with willpower.
From a neuroscience perspective,
Willpower is pretty much a myth.
There isn't even a brain network for it.
And you've probably already noticed this yourself.
Deleting the app,
Setting timers,
White knuckling it,
None of these things last.
I see this with my students at Brown University.
A bunch of them want to ditch social media altogether,
And all the forcing in the world doesn't work for them.
What works is something different.
And it's free,
Something that we all have.
What is it?
It's awareness.
So the next time you reach for your phone,
Try this.
First,
Just notice the pull and ask why.
Why did I pick up my phone?
Often you'll find it's something like,
Well,
I'm stressed and I could use a break.
Great,
That's not a problem.
But next,
Pay attention as you scroll and pay attention to what it actually feels like in your body.
Here's the key question to ask.
Get curious and ask,
What am I actually getting from this?
Be honest.
Most people find,
Well,
I numbed out for a minute,
But the stress is still there.
It didn't fix anything.
When you see that clearly,
When you really feel it in your body,
Your brain starts to update.
The behavior becomes less rewarding.
I call this becoming disenchanted.
It's the same thing I saw in my smoking studies years ago.
When someone actually paid attention while they smoked,
They realized the cigarettes tasted terrible,
And that made it far easier to quit.
You're not forcing yourself to stop.
You're just seeing the thing as it really is.
And here's how I even use this myself.
For me,
It's kitten videos and surfing videos.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But as I watch,
I pay attention to one thing.
How much is enough?
Pretty fast,
A couple of videos in,
I noticed the enjoyment plateau right before it would tip over the cliff into overindulgence.
That's my signal.
I'm done.
I can put down my phone and maybe even stand up and stretch instead.
Again,
Nothing wrong with surfing or kitten videos,
But that curious awareness helps me see when I'm reaching to watch kittens playing or someone ride a wave as a distraction so I can stop it before it becomes mindless and I've wasted 15 minutes.
That awareness also helps us take care of ourselves.
For example,
In my Going Beyond Anxiety app,
I teach people to explore what they actually need so they can meet that need instead of feeding their wants.
Yes,
It's very different to scratch that urgey itch of wanting to distract ourselves and get sucked into scrolling for minutes or even hours.
When we wake up from the mindless scrolling,
We can ask ourselves,
What do I need right now?
Then we can meet that need instead of feeding that want.
So that's the brain-based approach to doomscrolling.
You don't need more willpower.
Instead,
You can learn to get curious.
Notice why you reach for the phone.
Notice what you actually get from it.
And notice when enough is enough.
Then check in with yourself and see what you need so you can meet that need.
And each time you do,
Your brain learns a little more about what's truly rewarding.
That's how the doom scrolling habit starts to unwind and the self-care habit gets rolling.
