How to cut down on mindless scrolling and fight brain rot

The “Brain Rot” Problem

We have all been there: spending incessant time on our phones, doom-scrolling our lives away. It is not uncommon for us to feel very unmotivated and unfocused after doing this. We think of cognitive decline and emptiness.

I am not a scientist or a psychologist, so we are not going to concern ourselves with the spikes in dopamine the social media apps are designed to cause, how they are designed to keep us occupied, or how everything on our phones seems to crave our attention—and it wants it right now.

We do not need any of that technical and psychological background as we do not need to know what is going on on a brain chemistry level to know that at least the effects are not good. And the effects, let’s face it, will accumulate over our lifetimes and by the time we are in retirement, we will most likely feel as if we have scrolled and wasted our lives away.

So, what to do about it?

Why? Boredom

You do not have to be a neuroscientist to understand the cause: we do this because we are bored. And our phones allow us to exchange that boredom for the dopamine hit. It is because they are convenient. We are bored – we take the phone.

At the risk of sounding like an old man and provoking the “OK boomer” comments, I am starting to believe that the phones are offering a “too easy way out” of boredom.

Remember, before phones people used to do many different things to fight boredom. And while there’s the risk of rotting away in front of a television screen, I do feel like the TV is not as addictive, as most of the time it does require a higher attention span than mindlessly scrolling through TikTok or Instagram reels.

So, I do believe that TV is not as addictive and doesn’t provide such a dopamine hit, so if we are spending our time watching TV, we are more likely to get up and go for a walk, for example, than if we are watching TikTok or Instagram constantly.

But we are talking about this because we wish to improve, not because we wish to replace one mindless, brain-rot activity with another.

Boredom might not be all bad.

Before we get to my recommendations on how to try to reduce the time we spend on our phones, I just want to throw something out there – boredom might not be all bad.

We might not always wish to decide that we have to constantly fight boredom – instead, we might sometimes wish to harness it, to see how it feels, to just sit and listen to what our higher self wishes to tell us. Some gentle jazz can’t hurt, though.

We might even consider keeping a notebook or an e-ink device nearby, as a brief flash of a great idea might come our way and we might wish to preserve it without having to use the phone to do so. Remember how some of our best solutions come to us in the shower? That is probably because there are not that many distractions in the world around us. So, when a moment of boredom comes to us, sometimes, when the feeling comes, we might consider running with it and just relaxing for a few minutes.

If we are feeling particularly “zen”, we might even wish to consider scheduling boredom, maybe even having pen and paper nearby to be ready to record whatever thoughts come to us.

In other words, to fight brain rot, we might consider putting our thoughts to paper instead, maybe in one of these two ways:

1. Writing a Diary

A diary is when we put our thoughts, feelings and experiences to paper or an e-ink device. Note that we should not use our phones or tablets for this purpose as by their very definition, these are devices which prioritize distractions – and we do not want that.

Having a diary is very easy – we simply write our thoughts, feelings and actions of the day – instead of trying to suppress them, we express them.

2. Having a Journal or multiple Journals

While a diary, at least in the definition I prefer, means recording our thoughts, feelings, events and actions, a journal for me means having a place to write about regarding specific topics – for example, one might maintain a journal of their philosophy thoughts, or regarding bird-watching, or one might maintain a food journal, or a travel journal.

Differences between a journal and a diary, at least for me are, that a journal does not necessarily have a time component to it and that emotions are often not included, but rather just the facts or thoughts.

But I am not the journal police and these are simply my definitions. The point is, that we should seriously consider having some sort of a written record of our thoughts and feelings as this will help us to stop scrolling our lives away.

Tips to reduce mindless scrolling

If the above sounds too newage-y for your taste – trust me, it is not – but if you’re looking for a more “action-based” approach to reducing scrolling, read on.

Reduce your access to the phone and social media.

Sure, not having social media accounts at all might be the most effective, but let’s be honest – that is probably not happening. And maybe we should not even consider this idea, as often Facebook and other, newer social media might be our only realistic way to try to keep up with our friends and family members’ lives – especially if they live far away. So, if that option is eliminated, what else is there?

This might sound a bit too naive, but we might simply try to keep our phones away from us, especially during focus hours, before going to sleep and after we wake up.

That is because often right after we turn our alarms off, we reach for the IG feed, which often leads us to start our day with doom-scrolling – and naturally, we then feel bad.

In contrast, however, if we play with our phones right before bed, this influences our sleep and makes us more tired in the morning.

So, it follows that we might maybe consider not keeping our phone in the bedroom, but letting it charge overnight in the living room. We might consider using Alexa to set our alarm or maybe even try switching to a “light alarm” to wake up, like this SmartSleep Sleep and Wake-Up Light, for example.

Use a laptop, a physical notebook or an e-ink tablet

While our phones and tablets are amazing devices that enable us to take notes, work, listen to music and what have you, unfortunately, they are also hosts to a bunch of stuff that attempts to steal our focus.

So, we might consider using a device that has less potential for distractions to do what we plan to do – we might consider using a laptop instead of a phone or a tablet – because on a laptop social experience is often less captivating, if practically non-existent. After all, there won’t be such enticing notifications as there would be on a tablet. You might be annoyed because of all the update notifications, though. 🙂

For taking notes, or reading, we might consider grabbing a paper notebook, a real book or an e-ink tablet.

For best results, we should keep our phones out of reach while using these other devices.

Try some healthy living.

Some might say “Well, that’s ambitious, jumping from doom-scrolling to taking a walk”, but hear me out, it’s not THAT crazy.

Yes, sometimes we are doom-scrolling our lives away in the wee hours of the night when taking a walk is not a realistic alternative, but, as mentioned above, sometimes we grab our phones immediately after we finish work.

In these instances, it might be not as difficult to take a walk as you might think. We are hopefully already dressed, we are longing for a break from the screen – it’s a good idea to simply put our shoes on and go out for a while – even 15 min should be enough to get us into a better mood and make us less likely to engage in typical brain rot activities immediately after.

Not to mention that we should be trying to live a somewhat healthy and active life anyway, so it seems that there are multiple good arguments to try and do this.

Good luck!