How to Stop Doom Scrolling | Tips to break your social media addiction

 

You know the feeling you’re on social media and you keep scrolling and scrolling your feed sometimes you’re actually entertained other times you’re just doing it out of habit searching for something to entertain you for another brief moment you have no idea how much time has passed by and you’re starting to feel sluggish you’re in a daze and somehow you can’t stop scrolling when you do stop you check the time and one two or even three hours have gone by and you’re like what the heck have I been doing this entire time social media is designed to keep us engaged it’s designed to make us stay on the app for as long as possible by giving us quick dopamine hits we’ve become addicts to the immediate gratification that social media provides post after post our brain is exposed to so much information and a skewed view of reality via this tiny little screen it’s amazing the damage that social media can do to our minds and mental health like breeding insecurities and comparison or shortening our attention spans and making it harder for us to focus on deep work if you found yourself spending way too much time on social media this video is for you I’ll be sharing six tips to help you kick your social media habits and stop Doom scrolling once and for all

How To Stop your doom scrolling habit ?

1. The first tip I have for you is to swap out your habit so you first want to become aware of when you find yourself scrolling on social media for me I tend to do a lot of scrolling in the morning like that’s a bad habit just waking up taking my phone and you just start scrolling social media kind of to help you wake up sometimes I also find myself scrolling when I’m taking a break from work so that I just like open a social media app like hey I wonder what’s there and then you just end up scrolling for like way too long so notice when you’re doing this and then start to swap out the habit for something just as fun just as energizing if not more than what you were searching for so for example with the waking up example like the scrolling is a way for me to kind of like wake up so if you are in the same boat do something else that also helps you wake up without social media so a way that I really enjoy doing is starting to play good music right when I wake up and letting the music kind of energize your body it just like starts your day on such better Vibes there are so many different wake up and morning playlists that you can find on Spotify I made my own personal wake-up playlist a few years ago because I really love like listening to big band jazz like it just makes me feel so like big and fun and it makes the day feel really Grand if you also find yourself scrolling while you’re taking a break you can also turn to music instead or you can do things like take a dance break go for a walk find a way to give yourself what you were originally looking for which was some sort of break some way to like energize yourself kind of like switch into a new frame of thinking and you can do that without social media you can do that in so many other ways so let’s start sharing ideas comment down below with what you plan to swap out your habit of scrolling for so instead of reaching for your phone or social media what else are you gonna do instead

2. The next tip out of sight out of mind so basically put your phone away so if you find yourself reaching for your phone spending hours scrolling on social media one thing you can do is just put your phone away put it in a drawer in a different room especially if you need to get work done so this is really helpful if you need to study or work or just focus literally put your phone on silent and place it hidden somewhere out of sight out of mind if you have the habit of scrolling your phone in the morning another thing you can try is to put in your phone in another room when you are sleeping so that when you wake up your phone is not there you don’t immediately reach for it and subconsciously just open your apps and start scrolling even I don’t do this but I have heard that it’s life-changing for some people and if you’re thinking about like oh what do I use for an alarm just use a traditional alarm or if you have something like those like smart speakers you can tell it to set an alarm at a certain time for you so that you don’t need your phone to wake you this tip also applies if you are out so if you’re like out at a restaurant with your friends or family like try not to have your phone on the table just put your phone away that will help you become more present I think a lot of times people leave their phone in View and they end up like scrolling and checking it when they feel bored just because they need something to do so practice just being present in the real world you know don’t look at your phone look at your environment pay attention to the sounds what’s happening like just be in real life for a moment

3. The next tip is to set app limits so this is something that is a feature on phones now where you can set limits for how long you allow yourself to spend on an app so I set an hour maximum per day that I’m allowed to browse Instagram and Tick Tock Twitter just any social media even though it’s really easy to like cancel this limit when you want to browse longer I feel that the notification is really helpful like it helps you become aware like oh I’ve reached my limit of one hour for today and then it’s up to me to decide whether I want to like stick to my goal or not and it’s okay either way but at the very least It helps me become aware of how long I’m on an app another thing that I do on the iPhone there’s something called downtime where you can set like certain times where everything kind of like shuts off my browser shuts off my social media apps shut off you can choose which apps you want to keep on and which apps you want to like limit so I turn everything off at 11 PM because my personal goal is to get off my phone get off social media and don’t look at anything from 11 pm and onwards because I want to start winding down and you know getting ready for bed I don’t want to be all wired and have all this new information in my brain before I sleep because social media apps are designed to keep us on the app for as long as possible we need to put in these like limits to like break us out of that system because it’s not as easy as willpower you know so you need to have things that like wake you up out of the zone so that you can go back to living your life in the present

4. The next tip I have for you is to delete apps that aren’t serving you so if being on an app is making you feel worse about yourself if you find that it’s really destructive to yourself and your well-being delete it it’s not worth it the whole point is our tools are supposed to enhance our lives and make our lives better so if it’s not making your life any better get rid of it see how it feels to live life without the app it might be hard because all your friends are on it you want to know what’s going on but just try it out go on a social media detox I can assure you that after you get over that hump it will feel good and you’ll notice how much more present you can be with the people in your life because you don’t have this distraction happening I have a few friends that completely got off social media and they’re just happily living their lives all they do is keep in touch with their friends through texting and calling and seeing people in person kind of like the old days right because social media is a big part of my job I can’t completely delete the app which is why I have to put those time limits and and stuff but even for me there was a time where I for example deleted Twitter for like six months because it was just so bad for my mental health to keep seeing like news after news and just like so much information for my brain I just started feeling really frazzled it became a very bad habit to like scroll that at night so deleting that and instead using that time that I would have spent scrolling on something healthier like exercising at home that really shifted my life in the past like year.

5. The next tip I have for you is to go deeper and pinpoint the real issue why you spend time scrolling so this gets more reflective instead of just like blocking things on the surface like all the tips before this goes deep you want to reflect on why you find yourself scrolling why you reach for the phone own so I find that most of the times it’s because we want to avoid something most of the time we are you know distracting ourselves on purpose because we’re running away from something whether you’re running away from your responsibilities whether you’re just running away from your problems in life social media is a way for us to numb ourselves to escape into another world to focus on something outside of ourselves so that we can forget about our responsibilities and our problems this is where Shadow work comes in because you want to take a look at your Shadow what are you running away from what do you not like about yourself or your life and just see what’s really happening what is the real issue here for example one of the reasons that I realized I spent time scrolling so much was because I was procrastinating I was running away from doing things that were hard scrolling social media is so easy it’s so comfortable there’s very little effort I realized that I was turning to social media when I was running away from some something that was challenging in my life so I had to work through that limiting belief that I was afraid of facing my challenges and doing hard things and but I basically had to ingrain this new belief in me that I am capable of doing anything that is hard or challenging I can do hard things that belief has been so Monumental in me being like okay I know I’m running away from what’s hard let me like turn it off and let me just face with hard because I know I can do it obviously it’s still hard right but it gives you a little more courage to be aware and to like learn to face your fears learn to face what’s scary so reflect on why you turn to social media and why you end up scrolling for so long

6. The last thing I’ll share with you today to break out of your doom scrolling habits is to cultivate more mindfulness and practice being presents ultimately this is the biggest skill you can have for just becoming powerful in your life the more awareness you can have in your life the more Mindful and the more present you can be in your everyday life the more power you have to like direct your life and fine-tune it in any direction you want because we tend to go off track when we aren’t being that conscious when we’re just kind of on autopilot and we’re distracted and we’re not paying attention to what’s really happening but if you can practice being more Mindful and present then you’ll have that power to like Snap yourself out of it if you’re in that autopilot mode and this is especially helpful for like things like Doom scrolling on social media so you build this mindfulness and this conscious awareness by doing things like meditating another way is to practice two tuning into your five senses just at any point of the day what do I see what do I hear what am I feeling or as you’re eating like what am I tasting what am I like smelling you know our five senses are our gateway to experience the physical world so kind of tapping into and truly feeling each of those five senses is a way to be present in the now in this place that we are living so yeah the more you can hone that and practice that Consciousness you’ll be able to snap back so much faster and be like wait a minute like this scrolling is not productive I’m not even having fun right now and I think I should be doing something else like I know I should be doing something else that’s gonna serve me better than scrolling so building that mindset is it’s a practice like it’s not willpower it’s the practice of being The Observer of your life that the best way I think I can put it alright.

I hope you enjoyed my tips today let me know if you have more tips on how to stop this Doom scrolling habit once and for all please let’s help each other share with each other like remember that social media is not evil it is a tool because there’s pros and cons there’s all these positives that came with this technology there’s also negatives but we want to embrace the positive and then try to protect ourselves from the negative you being in control of your attention and how you spend your time because social media is not the boss it can’t tell you what to do you are the boss you can tell yourself how you want to spend your time where you want to put your attention so definitely build that conscious Habit to spend your time the way you want to spend it before I sign off I want to let you know that You can read my more Insightful Articles Here –

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