Psychology
How to stop doomscrolling, and what to do instead
Short answer
Change two things before the moment comes: what starts the scroll (the cue) and what you do instead (the swap). Then use your phone's own settings to put a few seconds of friction in the way, and keep a 7-day log to see which swaps held.
Your phone already keeps a record of the habit. On an iPhone, Settings > Screen Time > Daily Average shows your time by app, with counts of Pickups and Notifications further down the same screen; on Android, Settings > Digital Wellbeing shows Screen time, Times opened and Notifications received. Open yours before you read on.
The plan has three parts. First, find the moments that start a scroll. Second, decide ahead of time what you’ll do in each of those moments, and third, use the phone’s own settings to put a few seconds between you and the feed. A 7-day log at the end shows whether it worked for you, which is the only test that counts here.
What doomscrolling means
Doomscrolling is reading an endless feed, often of bad news, for longer than you meant to. Two parts of that definition do most of the work. The feed has no last page, so stopping is always your call, and the session often didn’t start as a decision at all: you picked up the phone to check the weather, and the feed was one tap away. The steps below work the same for any feed, news or not, so they also cover the wider question of how to stop scrolling when you never decided to start.
Most US adults already use at least one big feed. In Pew Research Center’s 2025 survey, 84% of US adults said they use YouTube and 37% use TikTok, and about half visit YouTube every day.
Dictionaries spent the end of 2025 naming what’s in those feeds. Oxford’s Word of the Year was “rage bait”: online content made to provoke anger or outrage, usually to drive traffic or engagement. Oxford says use of the term tripled in 12 months. Merriam-Webster picked “slop,” for low-quality digital content usually mass-produced with AI, as reported by the Associated Press. Neither word describes the person reading; both describe what gets posted. A feed stocked with content made to provoke a reaction, or made cheaply in bulk, won’t run out, and that’s why resolving to scroll less, on its own, is a weak plan.
The lesson below, from the app’s Business category, covers the economics behind it.
The Attention Economy
Herbert Simon observed that information abundance creates attention scarcity. Every business on the internet competes not for money first, but for attention. Attention, once captured, can be monetised (advertising) or converted to purchase intent. This is why TikTok's algorithm is so valuable, it captures attention with superhuman efficiency. The cost: human time and cognitive bandwidth.
Source Simon, H.A. (1971). Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.
Quick quiz
Every app on your phone, whether it sells products or just shows content, competes for the same scarce resource. What is it?
Change the cue and the swap
A habit like this runs on a cue: a buzz, a pause in a queue, the moment you lie down. When the cue fires, the reach for the feed often comes before any decision, so resisting in the moment puts all the effort at the worst point. Two things are easier to change in advance. You can remove or move the cue. And you can decide what your hands do when a cue you can’t remove still fires.
Find your cues
For two days, change nothing. Each time you notice you’ve been in a feed longer than you meant, write one line: the time, where you were, and what you’d just finished or were waiting for. After two days, circle the moments that repeat, and start with the three that came up most.
Your settings fill in what you missed. Pickups on an iPhone and Times opened on Android count how often you reached for the phone, and the notification count shows how often the phone reached for you first.
Pick a swap for each cue
A good swap is available where the cue happens and lasts about as long as the gap (40 seconds in a queue, 20 minutes in bed). It also has a clear end, which the feed doesn’t. Some cues are better removed than swapped, as the first row shows.
| Cue | Swap | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| A news or social app sends a notification | Turn off that app’s notifications, or move it into a scheduled summary | Removes the cue |
| Waiting: a queue, the kettle, an ad break | One Scroll lesson and its quiz question, about 40 seconds | Same phone, but the session ends |
| Getting into bed | A paper book on the pillow, the phone on a charger across the room | Puts the feed out of reach |
| Finishing a task at work | Write the next task on paper, then refill your water | Gives the break a job and an end |
| Unlocking the phone for one thing, such as the weather | Use a widget or the Lock Screen for it | You never see the home screen where the feed apps are |
Scroll is the app this site belongs to, so weigh that row with that in mind. It’s in the table because a lesson ends. Each one is a single idea that takes 32 to 50 seconds to read (median 44), followed by one question. The free plan stops after 5 lessons a day, which is about 3.7 minutes of reading (5 lessons at about 44 seconds each). Scroll also has streaks and XP, and any streak is designed to bring you back tomorrow, so watch whether it turns into a cue of its own.
Phone settings that add friction
Friction here means a few seconds or one extra tap between the cue and the feed. There’s some evidence it changes what people do. In a 2023 study in PNAS, David Grüning and colleagues followed 280 people who had just installed one sec, an app that shows a pause, a short message and an option to back out when you try to open an app you’ve picked. Over six weeks, 36% of attempts to open those apps ended with the person backing out, and by the sixth week people opened the apps 57% less often. A follow-up online experiment with 500 people found that the option to back out had the strongest effect and the waiting time also helped, while the message asking people to reflect was not effective. The field study had no control group, so it can’t separate the app’s effect from people wanting to cut down when they installed it, and one of the authors created the app.
You don’t need a separate app to add friction. The names in the table come from Apple’s iPhone User Guide for iOS 27 and Google’s Digital Wellbeing help page, both read on October 17, 2026. On iOS 26 and earlier, the nearest settings are called App Limits and Downtime. Android phone makers can label things differently, and Google’s page says the steps may vary by device.
| What you want | iPhone (iOS 27) | Android (Digital Wellbeing) |
|---|---|---|
| See your numbers | Settings > Screen Time > Daily Average; Pickups and Notifications are further down | Settings > Digital Wellbeing; tap the chart for Screen time, Times opened and Notifications received |
| Cap time in feed apps | Settings > Screen Time > Time Allowances; add a category such as Social Media under Manage Categories, then set its time | Settings > Digital Wellbeing > App timers, then Set timer next to the app |
| Block feed apps at set hours | Settings > Screen Time > Screen Time Schedule; turn on Schedule, then Add Schedule | Settings > Digital Wellbeing > Focus mode > Set a schedule |
| Fewer buzzes | Settings > Notifications > Scheduled Summary, or turn off Allow Notifications for one app | Apps paused by Focus mode send no notifications while it’s on |
| A duller screen | Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, then Grayscale | Bedtime mode’s screen options include Grayscale, at bedtime only |
| A night routine | Sleep Focus: open Control Center, tap Focus, then Sleep | Settings > Digital Wellbeing > Bedtime mode > Bedtime routine |
Both systems let you get past a limit. On an iPhone, apps in Always Allowed ignore your schedule and allowances. On Android, when an app timer runs out the app closes and its icon dims until midnight, but you can delete the timer and carry on. So a limit adds a step and stops nothing for good. If you want a bigger step, Android has an App limits PIN (Settings > Digital Wellbeing > App limits > App limits PIN), and an iPhone can use a Screen Time passcode. Some people ask someone they live with to set it.
Notifications are the cue you can remove most completely. The lesson below, from the Tech & Internet category, explains how one reaches your phone in the first place.
How Push Notifications Reach Your Phone
Apps do not constantly check for new messages; that would drain your battery in hours. Instead, your phone keeps a single quiet connection open to Apple or Google, and those companies act as a relay. When an app's server has news, it tells Apple or Google, who slip the message down the existing channel to your phone. One pipe, many apps, almost no extra battery.
Source Apple. (2009). Apple Push Notification Service Overview.
This is also why push notifications can be silenced by the operating system, regardless of the app. The pipe runs through the OS vendor, who reserves the right to throttle, batch, or hold notifications based on focus modes, battery state, and your usage patterns.
Quick quiz
How do apps deliver push notifications without draining the battery?
At night and before bed
The bed is the hardest cue to remove, because you go there every night and the phone usually comes too. In a Pew survey of US teens taken in September and October 2024, 45% said social media hurts their sleep. That’s a self-report. It tells you how teenagers see it, and nobody measured their sleep.
If you want to stop doomscrolling at night, these settings cover the last hour of the day:
- A schedule that starts an hour before you plan to sleep: Screen Time Schedule on an iPhone, Bedtime routine on Android (on a schedule, or while the phone charges during hours you set).
- Grayscale for that hour. On Android it’s one of Bedtime mode’s screen options; on an iPhone it’s under Color Filters in Accessibility.
- Sleep Focus on an iPhone, which can filter out notifications and calls before and during bedtime.
Then give the reading you do in bed an end. A paper book has one at every chapter. If you’d rather stay on the phone, pick something that stops on its own: Scroll’s free plan runs out after 5 lessons. Charging the phone out of arm’s reach removes the cue altogether, at the cost of needing a separate alarm clock.
What to do in the two minutes you’d scroll
Many cues come with a gap of a minute or two: a queue, a kettle, a loading bar, the walk from one meeting to the next. Pick two or three of these and write them on a note where the cue happens (the charger is a good spot).
- Read one Scroll lesson and answer its question. It takes about 40 seconds.
- Read two pages of a book you keep where you usually scroll.
- Write tomorrow’s first task on paper, with the time you’ll start it.
- Send one person a message about one specific thing.
- Refill your water and drink it standing up.
- Open Settings > Notifications and turn off one app whose alerts you never act on.
- Listen to one song all the way through and do nothing else.
- Tidy one surface within arm’s reach.
- Stretch your calves against a wall, one leg at a time.
- Write down the thing you picked up the phone to do, then do it.
A 7-day log you can copy
Copy this into a notes app or onto paper. Day 1 is a baseline: change nothing, and fill in the numbers the next morning from your settings (on an iPhone, swipe back to see the previous day).
| Day | Screen time | Pickups or times opened | Cue you noticed most | Swap you used | Did it hold? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (baseline) | None | ||||
| 2 | |||||
| 3 | |||||
| 4 | |||||
| 5 | |||||
| 6 | |||||
| 7 |
“Did it hold?” gets one word: yes, partly or no. Say Amara’s baseline is 2 hours 40 minutes of screen time and day 7 shows 2 hours 15 minutes, a drop of 25 minutes a day. Over a year that’s about 152 hours (25 × 365 = 9,125 minutes).
Seven days won’t make a swap automatic. In Lally and colleagues’ 2010 study, the time it took a new daily behavior to feel close to automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days, and missing a single day did not derail the process. The study ran for 84 days, so the longest figures are projections. Use the log to choose what to do next: keep the swaps that held, pick a different swap for the cues where it didn’t, and add one new cue a week.
If you’d like an app for the swap, there’s a guide to apps people use in place of the feed. For a longer plan, the 14-day reset adds one small change a day, and the attention span guide covers what’s been measured about focus.
Drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed on October 17, 2026. Phone setting names were read on Apple's and Google's support pages that day.