How to stop Doomscrolling | Techcrunch

The world is sometimes bad, but it feels even worse if you can’t stop staring in the all-consuming abyss that is the 6-inch screen of a smartphone that follows you through space and time. It mocks her with its compact, light build, which is small enough to slip into her pocket and take somewhere – but his siren call is so strong that we cannot sleep on our bedside tables for some reason.

How we weather The horrors around usIt can consider that you would feel more calmer and more carefully and more balanced if you had not picked up your phone to do dozens of times a day for the Doomscroll. It plays with our brain In order to turn our day into the most extreme and figal tictoks to turn to X or Bluesky and see the headlines from Cruthing News.

Like every bad habit, the crooked is difficult to kick. But it is not hopeless – or at least I hope it is not. How can you stop Doomscrolling? It’s not that easy, but at least we have some ideas on how you can set up for success.

Understand that this is not your fault

First of all, they are not the problem. The problem is that our life is so deeply intertwined with technology companies that want to capture as much time as possible. When I use my Apple Watch to follow a training session, I see how text messages appear while trying to get my breath after I have led a steep hill. If I can listen to Spotify to listen to a certain album, I open the app and immediately look at recommendations for podcasts and audio books where I am not usually interested. If I download Snapchat exclusively for a group chat in which my friends send pictures of their pets, every pet picture is delivered with an advertisement, a foreign push notification or the AR marketing filter that I have not registered. No wonder our phones drive us crazy.

I do not think that Mark Zuckerberg is sitting in his hiding place – probably in his “meta -verse” – to get worse my life personally. But it is the inherent nature of the tech companies of consumers: our attention keeps them alive, and the more we take care of them, the happier their investors and the share prices are increasing and so on. Despite the knowledge of the functioning of these companies, it is still difficult to break our bad habits. I will still open my Instagram account to see what my friend sent me to regain my consciousness 10 minutes later after seeing dozens of roles.

Set up the screen time restrictions and take them seriously

In the first years after Apple introduced the screen time function on iPhones, I deliberately decided not to turn it on – I was afraid of what I could learn about myself. But this fear of itself told me that I have a problem. Knowledge is power, and if we know which apps absorb most of the time, we can contain how much time we spend for you.

Here you will find out how to set the screen time restrictions on certain apps on iOS:

• Open the settings app.
• Scroll down the screen time, which is marked with an hourglass.
• Here you can see your daily average screen time and reduce the guardrails for yourself on average.
• When using limit value, there are various ways to shorten your screen time: downtime and app borders.
  • Downtime Set a schedule if you can use certain apps. Perhaps you set downtime for the hours you usually sleep, or create a more customizable everyday plan. If you go too much on Instagram during class, this may be a time to set a limit.
    • Instead of selecting which apps should restrict during the downtime, find out which apps you want always allowWhich is also accessible in the limit use menu. For example, if you have friends and family abroad, you probably want to make sure that you can always access WhatsApp. Or if you are like me and sometimes need audio books to fall asleep, you may allow unlimited access to Libby.
  • App boundaries There you can determine how much time you want to spend for certain apps a day. You can define individual limit values for certain apps or put a category of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Tikok, X etc.) together and set a period for these apps.

The integrated tools for Apple’s screen times are effective, but a little easy to avoid. If you look at a great TIKTOK and suddenly get a pop-up that your time has expired, you can simply tap on a button to give yourself for another 15 minutes … and then do the same after another 15 minutes have passed.

Some people opt for third -party apps to motivate them to shorten their screen time, which can fix potential pitfalls of Apple’s existing functions.

Here are some apps that are supposed to restrict your screen time:

• ScreeningWith, available on iOS and Android, you can create popups that are displayed before opening certain apps. Before you open Instagram, for example, you may see a 10-second pop-up with the inscription “Is this important?” You can also get the app deeply before opening apps and it plays its success if you stay under time limits. My friend is currently working with a 144-day series that you refuse to sacrifice a quick jerk from Dopaminer Il-Tim-Tim-Tim-Tim-Timpamine.
• opalAvailable on iOS, Android and the web, focuses more precisely on increasing productivity at work or at school. The app is more adaptable when limiting the screen time than the integrated functions of Apple. You can not only concentrate on times, but also on how often you open an app (e.g. you may only want to open the Instagram app three times a day).
• RootAvailable on iOS, not only focuses on the time you spend on your phone, but also on the quality of this time. Some users in particular love the “Monk mode” of the app, which can be activated to make it impossible to avoid one of its app boundaries -even if they go as far as the app’s extinguishing. But if you really had your limits, you can unlock “cheat days”.

We have summarized some physical devices This can help you look too much at screens.

You have opened Tikok and your screen time boundaries have refused to access, but now you don’t know what to do. Maybe you are in line in the café and need a distraction. And in an ideal world we could simply be bored without burning spontaneously, but this is not an ideal world.

Here are some other things that you can do on your phone that do not include social media:

• Read a book. No, really. On apps like iBooks And IgniteYou can change your settings so that you scroll to read a book instead of turning the page on the page. They literally scroll, but instead they may learn something.
  • Don’t you want to buy books? You don’t have to! Libby Mix a connection to your library card so that you can access your phone from your phone via e-books and audio books.
  • Don’t you know what to read? I’m so sorry, but you may have to find out on Boktok.
• Play games. Sure, games can also be addicted, but at least they are not informed that the world has been imploded in a new, unexpected way. Each app copies any other app, but in the event of once a day in cross -border games, this is a good thing.
  • The New York Times Games With app you can play fast games such as worm, strands and the mini crossword puzzle, even if you are not a subscriber. But the games of the gray lady were so successful that other apps take the bait.
  • Listen to me. The Play on LinkedIn actually make really funny. Sure, you can be rocked by a contribution by your old, evil boss, but the risk is particularly worth the risk.