Stop Doomscrolling: Use These Apps You Already Own

“Hi, are you engaging in doomscrolling? Our bodies were not equipped to handle prolonged anxiety and stress like this.”

In the tumultuous year of 2021, a helpful little bot emerged on Twitter known as the Doomscrolling Reminder Bot. This bot was designed to provide mindfulness reminders just after the term “doomscrolling” was declared the word of the year for 2020. It quickly became a sort of anxiety index, gaining a significant increase in followers during the chaotic takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. This bot’s reminders served as essential nudges to help users regain a sense of calm amidst the chaos of social media.

Although the Bot ceased its posting activities in 2023 due to many of its less chaotic creators departing, its follower count has remarkably remained above 100,000 Twitter users. This indicates a strong ongoing interest in cultivating mindfulness and reducing doomscrolling, even without the bot’s active reminders.

In today’s digital landscape, you don’t need a bot to recognize when you’re doomscrolling. If you’re active on social media, chances are you’re already caught in a cycle of endless scrolling. With a constant stream of disturbing news and troubling images, platforms like Google News and Apple News can also lead to doomscrolling. Just seeing multiple images of the world’s wealthiest individuals engaging in questionable behavior can trigger this compulsive behavior, making it hard to look away.

By 2025, even a brief visit to Facebook—where Mark Zuckerberg has made attempts to decrease the algorithmic prominence of news stories—can devolve into hours of distressing observations as personal narratives play out among your family and friends. You may find yourself wishing for more constructive ways to spend your time—especially if you aspire to contribute positively to society. You’re correct in thinking this. According to psychotherapist Tess Brigham, the primary reason we engage in doomscrolling is that it provides a sense of control in an otherwise chaotic world.

However, after a certain threshold, you’re no longer staying informed; instead, you’re inundating your mind with troubling images and anxieties that can disrupt your peace and leave you feeling exhausted the next day. A world in turmoil needs us to be at our best; it doesn’t require us to obsess over negativity or the potential escalation of issues.

Take Control: Break Free from Doomscrolling

If gentle nudges from a mindfulness bot aren’t enough to stop you from consuming distressing content, how can you successfully break this habit?

Ending doomscrolling is challenging, akin to breaking any compulsive behavior fueled by our smartphones—essentially a habit. For instance, I decided to quit Twitter on election night and made a conscious effort to limit my news intake through the end of 2024. However, for days afterward, it was a struggle; I often found my finger hovering over that dreaded X icon in my iPhone’s “Communication” folder, which I had accessed so frequently.

One piece of popular online advice suggested using a service like Freedom or Apple’s Screen Time to restrict access to social media apps. Freedom has garnered over 3 million subscribers who pay up to $8 monthly to limit their accessibility to certain platforms across multiple devices, while also raising awareness about the dangers of doomscrolling.

If you’re among those users, kudos to you! Personally, being told I can’t access something—even if it’s by my own choice—often makes me desire it even more. For years, I’ve utilized Screen Time to curb my access to Threes, a game I frequently play during stressful moments, limiting myself to just 15 minutes a day.

Usually, when I receive that 15-minute warning, I take it as a prompt for mindfulness and proceed with whatever task I had been avoiding. However, there are times when a rebellious voice appears in my head, akin to a defiant teenager.

“Forget you, self, you don’t control me,” it declares, promptly hitting the snooze button to grant me another 15 minutes of escape from reality.

Various tips and strategies exist for diminishing the allure of your smartphone, such as switching your screen to monochrome. However, I found that I didn’t need to go to such extremes. I also didn’t feel the necessity to delete Twitter entirely from my phone, a drastic measure that would likely lead to a panicky reinstallation the following day.

Ultimately, I discovered that the reason I was able to resist the urge to check Twitter again was that I implemented a straightforward yet effective recommendation from our 2020 anti-doomscrolling article: reorganizing my apps. By placing the X app and the equally captivating Threads at the back of my Communication folder, several pages in, I was better off than if I had deleted them completely. Over time, I simply forgot they were there.

The principle of “out of sight, out of mind” may be undervalued in the digital age. Nutrition experts suggest keeping healthy snacks like nuts and fruits readily available on the kitchen counter while hiding chips and cookies at the back of the cupboard—not entirely prohibited, just out of immediate reach. Why not apply a similar strategy to your smartphone home screen?

Enhance Your Life with Mindful Apps

Simply hiding the X app wasn’t enough; any behavior change requires a notable shift in mindset. As research indicates, it’s much easier to cultivate new habits that can effectively disrupt old ones.

First and foremost, I had to stop convincing myself that it was essential for a journalist—whose interests span a wide array of topics—to constantly be present on social media. I owe this realization to a November article by Laura Hazard Owen, the editor of Nieman Lab, who drew a clear line in the sand: moving forward, she stated, “I’ll read news, not other people’s reactions to news.”

However, I wanted to take this experiment even further. Could I remain adequately informed without opening news apps or visiting aggregators? The answer was a resounding yes, as email newsletters are still very much alive. While you should definitely subscribe to all of ours, I also sought recommendations from friends and discovered some fantastic, straightforward news recaps from sources like The Conversation.

In the past, when I was consuming news incessantly, I found email newsletters rather annoying, almost akin to spam. Now, I appreciate them as a valuable means to contextualize news—important but seldom more critical than the pressing matters in my inbox.

Regarding habit disruption, it’s clear that not all apps on your phone provide equal educational value. For instance, if I had redirected all the hours spent scrolling through Twitter and Facebook in 2024 into an app like Duolingo, I could have easily acquired a new language.

Ultimately, I opted for a simpler yet more rewarding approach. Since my doomscrolling habit was essentially a reading habit, whenever I felt the urge to read news, I chose to read books on my phone instead (in dark mode, of course). Apps like Kindle, Books, Libby, Hoopla, and the book streaming service Everand (previously known as Scribd) became prominent fixtures on my phone’s home screen.

Initially, it felt a bit strange for my brain to adjust, as I was accustomed to reading e-books on devices like the Kindle or iPad. However, once I embraced the idea, the benefits of reading books on my phone became evident. You can dive into a chapter anywhere—whether waiting for a friend at a restaurant or standing in line at the DMV.

The less reactive your reading time is, the more you can transition into what is known as Type 2 thinking: a slower, more logical thought process that leads to improved decision-making. In a world filled with chaos that demands our best cognitive efforts, a Doomscrolling Bot won’t save us—but dedicating time to deep reading just might.