How I stopped doomscrolling
Just thought I'd share since this has been a problem for me since graduating 2 years ago.
So I'll keep this short - but basically same as anyone else especially since having started working, it's become my default activity when I have downtime especially after a long day at work to just go on whatever form of reels/scrolling which can often consume hours of time in a row even eating in to my already limited sleep schedule.
I found myself always deleting and redownloading apps unable to find a long term solution. I can't go about just deleting my accounts as some suggest as I do have value in staying in touch with friends and family through the platforms.
Instead, I sat down one day and really thought about what I was doing. Personally, I spend a lot of time and effort working on my work and health - lifting, cardio, what I eat and drink, how I sleep and so on. So if I take so much care of my body, why do I spend so many hours at a time consuming absolute trash. Longer form content - movies, some TV shows, books especially, or even self reflection produce so much more satisfaction and actually in many ways help me grow as a person where as most of the content I consume on reels, etc I forget within a few minutes of having seen it. Somehow this clicked and now using reels seems like I'm disrespecting myself and allowing my attention/brain and my self potential to be sold to advertisers. Somehow since then instead of being drawn in I feel largely repulsed from reels and it's been 2 months almost entirely off.
Same, I had a doomscrolling problem too, and I fixed it with a simple life hack.
Basically, anytime I have an urge to watch reels, I do 20 jumping jacks, 10 pushups, snort a line of coke, and then finish it off with some mountain climbers. I've been doing this for 3 days now and am confident I no longer have a doomscrolling habit.
A line of coke, you are something else👌🏾😂😂
Good for you man
can you make this into short form video i can’t read all dat
need the subway surfers background?
yes pls and hand me my auto gooner 3000 while you’re at it
to play a devils advocate a bit: what's the point of growing as a person? at the end of the day, your mental and physical abilities will decline no matter how hard you try to improve them. they start declining already in your late 20s and keep declining until you die and disappear. what's the point of trying to impress someone (or even yourself in your case) by reading a book and spending like a week to learn one mediocre story when you can just watch a video and learn the same or better story?
at the end of the day, what are you doing this all for? the way I see it: we're living life to trigger dopamine and feel happy. some people try to convince themselves that reading books is somehow a superior way to get dopamine just because it's a more old and traditional way. but really it doesn't matter. you may as well watch tiktoks or play videogames. just do whatever releases your dopamine and don't try to impress anybody, including yourself.
I hear you, but this is fundamentally flawed to me. By “improving” I am seeing real world benefits to my life, including the conversations I can hold, the interactions I have with others including women, my ability to enjoy things in the real world (food, nature, etc).
I’ve been more confident and less anxious as well because of the wiring in my brain is less dependent on constant hits of dopamine always (I think anyways).
I believe there is virtue in this and I am learning values and building strengths I can pass on to my future kids and family. I feel like using TikTok to get nonstop dopamine hits was making me weak.
Also I’m not reading nonsense stories, instead philosophy and more timeless fictions. Imagine the world we’d live in if everyone before us lived by the TikTok dopamine maximization lifestyle
why does it matter to you? why do you need to impress someone with your conversation? does your life really depend on someone else's opinion of you? you can fake it at work to keep getting paychecks and you can fake it with girls if you want hookups (if you have a gf, you don't need to fake it), but other than that people's opinions don't matter.
the best you can enjoy things is when you're under influence (weed, alco, etc.), which is not healthy.
you can't force anyone to be who you want them to be. your kids will choose their own behavior, values, goals.
probably, but why does it matter. you don't have to hunt and fight to survive in modern world. you can be weak and happy. or you can constantly make yourself struggle in order to improve yourself, and you'll just spend life struggling and unhappy.
what kind of philosophy are you reading? philosophy sounds deep until you start reading it. once you start reading it, you realize that 80-90% of the book is just word masturbation and someone trying to come up with new complicated terms to describe something simple. you can just watch videos on youtube that describe works of different philosophers.
and fiction is fiction, even if it's timeless. I read all the classic books as a kid, and I'd say that books are no different from movies, and it's silly that some people pat themselves on the back for reading books. it's an old form of entertainment. yes, there's wisdom in good books, but there's also wisdom in good movies. and once again, every classic book has good ecranisations, so you may as well watch a movie for 2h instead of spending 2 weeks to learn the same story.
Keep doing what you're doing, don't listen to the nihilists. I think very similarly to you.
I will never understand why, but 75% of all zoomers carry themselves as if we are all going to die tomorrow. Life is not short, life is the longest thing you will ever experience. Every hour you don't spend asleep you can probaly improve any aspect of your life. Improving yourself is not a NPV-0 action; read long books and have long-term goals.
I agree with you, and I'd say you need to work and sacrifice pleasure and focus on improving yourself through your teenage years and in your 20s. but once you're in a place where you're not worried about your future finances (I'd say in your 30s and later), you should focus on pleasure rather than improving yourself.
Tiktok gives you big dopamine spikes, but the crash afterwards is worse. Longer and more challenging activities (reading, exercising, learning) release dopamine more steadily so people find them more "satisfying."
I think reading, exercising, and learning are only satisfying if you made yourself believe that these activities are important. so when you engage in them, you imagine yourself getting smarter, more attractive, more successful, and it makes you satisfied. the process of reading or working out by itself is not satisfying (more like dissatisfying tbh).
there are even bodybuilders who are harming themselves by using steroids but they just made themselves believe that it's a good thing because it helps them grow, which they convinced themselves is very important. and it's also a source of motivation for many guys (including me back in the day) to watch these bodybuilders lift heavy and look huge.
once you get older and wiser, you realize that none of this matters. your muscles will disappear, your brain will weaken, you'll forget 90%+ of what you've learned. but what actually matters is feeling happy. and happiness doesn't really depend on your physical or mental abilities. there are plenty of happy fat and stupid people and plenty of unhappy fit and smart people.
this is not how we got to where we are as a species. i expect more from this forum.
well, our species will disappear sooner or later. this forum has different people with different ideas.
Think it depends what you get satisfaction out of. For me, most activities range from immediate dopamine (candy, reels), medium (working out, knocking out a task, golf/tennis), and then drawn out (cooking a healthy protein rich meal, understanding a piece of classic literature over a few weeks, etc). The “drawn out” activities tend to be rewarding over a longer time period and the satisfaction becomes more deeply ingrained, it stays with you as long as you keep these hobbies up. For example: you eat well and work out for a few weeks, so you look and feel better and it improves all your interactions subtly. Or you read a few books, some classics — you meet a friend of a friend who also likes some lit and you hit it off and learn a new POV to apply to interpreting art, and in turn framing the experience of your own life.
Absolutely 100% the short term dopamine buttons are awesome. But if you only do those you neglect a wealth of different and potent satisfaction.
you feel even better when you're under influence.
but yeah, looking good brings benefits. however, if you're already in a position of financial stability and partnered up, then you don't really need anything from society, so you don't have to stay in great shape for it.
you can meet friends through much more fun activities, like playing videogames online or drinking at bars.
can also watch movies with your partner and discuss them to learn new POVs.
to each their own tho.
Find God. Read Ecclesiastes
God doesn't exist in religious sense. It's just a Santa Claus for adults who need someone to follow, because they can't be happy by themselves.
Gen Z is strong in this one
I'm a millennial
Getting dopamine through TikTok is like getting calories with Milky Way bars. Reading good literature or watching good movies is like getting calories with a steak and vegetables. The value of fiction isn't about "learning a story," it's about developing a better understanding of yourself and the world and developing greater empathy.
sure, except dopamine, unlike nutrition, is not essential for survival.
well, what exactly is "developing a better understanding of yourself and the world and developing greater empathy"? you develop it through learning the thoughts of a writer that he wrapped inside a story. does it really matter if you learn the story by reading it for 2 weeks or watching it in a movie for 2 hours? imo, the medium doesn't matter for the above mentioned purpose.
I think a lot of people underestimate how much of a trap the short-form content loop is. It's engineered to hit you with dopamine over and over, so of course it's hard to stop. I had the same experience of realizing that I could spend two hours watching reels and not remember a single thing I saw.
Compare that to finishing a good book or watching a thought-provoking movie, I actually carry something away from it. Like you said, the key is noticing the difference between consuming for growth and consuming just to kill time. That shift makes quitting feel less like "deprivation" and more like leveling up
For example, I watched the Godfather trilogy and obsessed over it for about a month, and walked away with genuine lessons that I could apply to my real life and since then have you become more interested in schools of philosophy that inspired the movie. On TikTok, I would just get twerking
leave your phone at home, and give important people your work phone number. Its what I'm doing currently.
Where is tldr?
just get busy and you'll stop doomscrolling
clean, cook, go out for a walk, go date, go in a shop and read, etc.
A good middle ground i have found is using the web browser form of Instagram and deleting everything else. you can still keep up with those you care about around you through stories and post but it is so hard to use you will barely stay on it and get pissed off after awhile. it is also impossible to doom scroll on the web browser version of Instagram
Genius lowkey
These apps are designed to obsess you, influence you (by continually showing you more of what you've been watching), and market to you. They become totally addictive to all of us, and they also rewire your brain so that it's harder to focus, to focus on one thing at a time, and to be really able to deeply read and analyze what you're reading. It kills long-term concentration. There is zero upside other than the temporary calming effect (which is then supplanted by the stress of having totally wasted hours of your life). I honestly think screens and quick-play video like Reels is causing anxiety and depression because there is some chemical/mechanical effect on our brains. It is fantastic that you stopped and found other outlets.
I think one of the most important goals for all younger people (and all people) is to return to common, age-old human interaction - meet ups, phone calls, eye contact, chatting with people on line or in a store. I think we have gotten too far from real connection with one another out of convenience, efficiency and what became "normal." I honestly think that this more natural human interaction improves mental and emotional function and is healthier psychologically, because when you hear someone's tone of voice, or see facial expressions, there are cues that we need, and connection.
To relax after stressful days of work maybe go back to a hobby or activity you used to do "mindlessly for hours without realizing the time passed", like playing an instrument, cooking, creating art, writing. I know you can't do this at work, but your brain is searching for something to soothe it from the high mental state and pressure of work. I'm sure you'll find something to replace it that is beneficial to you!
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