How I cured doom-scrolling

first of all I promise this video isn't clickbait I'm going to get to the solution within the next 20 seconds but just so that we're all on the same page what is Doom scrolling the way I'm defining it is that it's when you indefinitely scroll through a site consuming content without any particular purpose The Cure simply stop scrolling you can't Doom scroll if you don't scroll in the first place for example here is what YouTube looks like on my phone we can see two to three videos on the homepage if I want to watch any or all of those then great I can go check them out if I don't like this selection or already seen these videos then too bad I can't scroll that's it that's the technique the rest of this video is Food For Thought around what brought about Doom scrolling why it's bad and how my technique has impacted me how did we get to Doom scrolling well I don't want to focus too much on history so I just want to cover a couple of events both of which happened in 2006 one is that infinite scrolling was invented so you no longer needed to click a next button in order to get new content you would just scroll down and it would load and two is that Facebook introduced the news feed which was one convenient location to see all of your friends updates now the concept of a Newsfeed may have existed before that but as you know Facebook is a mega site and it helped embed that Concept in our Collective Consciousness and now look around you on the internet it's practically expected that social media or news sites are going to employ both of these Concepts they'll have aggregation of all the content on their page this is Twitter for example this is Reddit this is Tik Tok and as you scroll down you'll see more content load and that formed The Crucible of Doom scrolling you needed lots of content in one place and you needed to load as you scroll down on the page so why did sites start employing these techniques to facilitate Doom scrolling how do they benefit and it's simple they're all vying for your precious attention if you were to run out of content or if it took too long to load you may lose interest and then you'd leave the site and at that point the site would have to recapture your attention which is harder than just keeping it in the first place it's why sites will send out emails or notifications to try to get you back but if you're just one little scroll away from something that's potentially interesting you'll stay on that site for longer it's essentially a fight between the designers of the site and your psychology so why is Doom scrolling bad well we're entering opinion territory here I think it's bad for many reasons for one it's training us to expect instant gratification if you want to seek out entertainment or information you just need to scroll a little bit farther and there's your dopamine hit often times in real life we don't have such quick reward Cycles so this steers our behaviors toward those that are more immediately fulfilling the second is that we have shorter attention spans as a result of Doom scrolling when you can flip from point to point if you find something that's boring or complex then you can just skip it and move on to the next thing if you apply that many times over days or months you'll shorten your attention span and the third is that it consumes an outsized amount of time I think we all need some amount of mindless entertainment but if you've ever Doom scrolled you've probably seen hours evaporate these three things combine to form something a little bit bigger than that though if you are expecting instant gratification and you don't have much of an intention span left and you're short on time you're probably not going to tackle a medium-term or long-term project and then by not tackling one you'll probably justify Doom scrolling a little bit more I don't think Doom scrolling is the end of society or the worst thing to happen to us but technology influences our daily lives and I've seen these impacts in myself and in others around me that brings us back to my system I originally said it was just don't scroll but that's not entirely true I came up with these three rules the first is no scrolling the infinite so you can still look through your email if you want to or if you're buying a product you're not forced to just click the top one or two results and as I just kind of hinted at there you can search for things and can subscribe to things all three of these have the quality of intentionality Doom scrolling is not intentional think of what happens before you start Doom scrolling you're probably not thinking oh man I can't wait to watch three hours worth of videos you're probably just bored and you're seeking out entertainment and before you know it you've consumed tens or hundreds of posts when you search for something you at least need a vague idea of what it is you're searching for so that you can type it into the search query and if you subscribe to somebody then it's an informed decision based on your past experience with them you must like their content and you want to see more of it so you subscribe to them wink wink that brings a level of mindfulness to what you're doing that I theorize will let you stop that thing that you're doing if you didn't like it let's talk about the impact of this system and I'll start with the positives for one it was easy to start I sort of had this automatic habit of just scrolling through an app even if I didn't really care and once I overcame that I wasn't really struggling with the fact that I was just looking at a static view of the app and I couldn't scroll down that might be hard for some people it didn't turn out to be too hard hard for me at least I did run out of content which was pretty much the entire point of this when you have an infinite list of things you can't run out but when you only look at the first few you can run out and that's what instills that mindfulness in you and as a result of running out of content I did have some positive replacement behaviors things I wanted to do or books I wanted to read that I would do when I figured I'm done with my phone now I can't look at anything else and then if you can only see one or two pieces of content your bar of what you'll look at starts to drop a little bit so I did end up experiencing new content because I was just super bored some days and would only watch those first one or two videos that showed up and then I did still get some news one nice coincidence about this is that most apps are going to try to show you the most interesting content at the top anyway so even though I could only see one or two news items those were essentially tailored to my taste and would be interesting to me it did feel a little weird at first this is not a positive but as long as I'm talking about this I was out of the loop on some things that I was previously completely up to date on and I would find out later maybe a week or a month later from a friend that hey something happened or a new game came out that I wanted to try and that did feel a little bit strange I think the good outweigh the bad or I wouldn't be making this video but there were certainly some negatives whenever you have any rules it's possible to abide by them but still bend the spirit of the rule which I found myself doing I could only look at one or two things in each app but I could open multiple apps and so when I wanted more content I found myself kind of bouncing back and forth between three or four different apps and then sometimes I was bored I looked through everything I could look through and I just thought I still just want to sit here and do nothing so let me search for something and I rationalized that by saying well at least I'm searching for something I was interested in and sometimes it was productive but sometimes it was just to fill the time and then while there were some productive replacement behaviors I had there were also some negative ones or unproductive ones I'm not going to comment on whether they were better or worse than Doom scrolling but it's not like it always resulted in me doing something productive with my time so the technique isn't perfect I can't say I'm some evolved human being after all of this but it was an easy enough experiment to conduct and if it helps even a little it's probably worthwhile to try out I can say that I did stop Doom scrolling after all this but it's not a silver bullet for curing depression or for getting you to start in that project you've always wanted to do I've read a decent amount about topics adjacent to this mental health productivity psychology and there's almost never a simple solution to complex behavioral problems some of us are doom scrolling because we lack the framework in our lives to do what we want to do and not scrolling is going to make your job less stressful your family more supportive or redrew obligation so I still urge you to try it out it did help me but I wanted to set expectations as always thank you very much for watching this video and please do consider subscribing

Channel: Adam Learns

Views: 793

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Id: PjxE2p_tWOw

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024