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My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

allthatjazz.me

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Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#191

Post by user432678 »

sriacha wrote: post #173

I wonder if we can have a continuum of "doom scrolling". For instance digital crack (tiktok ) X/facebook hackernews wikipedia "soft" novels poetry james joyce legal texts At some point any information stream can become susceptible to self-reinforcing doom scrolling. Reading novels is probably better than tiktok but could easily become unhealthy. I mostly weaned myself off of traditional social media but find it very…

Chuckled on “legal texts”, imagined a person so desperate and not getting any endorphins from “usual stuff” anymore, so only proprietary and very expensive CAD software’s EULA reading makes them “high”.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#192

Post by nicbou »

In my experience, working on the triggers had the biggest impact. Yes deleting the apps helps a lot, but so did removing the things that made me reach for my phone in the first place: notifications and badges. My phone is in do not disturb mode 90% of the time. In any case, I only allow notifications from WhatsApp and my bank. There are no feeds anywhere; not even the weather. I aggressively disable anything that calls for my attention. I add distance between me and the apps I check mindlessly, like Gmail. All that's left is Hacker News, and Reddit with no subreddits on my front page. Removing the default feed from these websites helped a lot.

Basically, picking up my phone is not rewarding anymore. I'm many steps removed from anything fun. It's enough to not think about it.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#193

Post by nicbou »

mindcrime wrote: post #154

Ugh. I don't necessarily do "doom" scrolling, but lately I have gotten drawn into wasting time on these various stupid "shorts" or "reels" or whatever, mostly on FB. It's weird too... for ages I was vehement about never, ever clicking on any of that crap on FB or Youtube (and I barely use Instagram at all and don't even have TikTok). But one day, somehow, I got suckered in by a thumbnail of a cute dog or something, a…

I blocked anything to do with Shorts because of how addictive they are.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#194

Post by smugma »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #179
brushfoot wrote: post #123

Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions. What works for me is removing the antecedent completely by charging my phone in another room at night. Now the battle is easier: Decide once a day to put it there, and track how many days you succeed. For me that's a lot easier than having it in my pocket, where the Internet is always a couple la…

You can use lockmeout.online to ultimately lock yourself out of your phone for a given timespan (i.e. 4 hours). No cheating, no way to "disable" your own restriction once you set it active. Works by changing your unlock PIN to a random 16 digit combination and will withhold it for you during your preset time lock.

I think you meant to use e.g. (for example) rather than i.e. (in other words)

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#195

Post by mindcrime »

afro88 wrote: post #175
mindcrime wrote: post #154

Ugh. I don't necessarily do "doom" scrolling, but lately I have gotten drawn into wasting time on these various stupid "shorts" or "reels" or whatever, mostly on FB. It's weird too... for ages I was vehement about never, ever clicking on any of that crap on FB or Youtube (and I barely use Instagram at all and don't even have TikTok). But one day, somehow, I got suckered in by a thumbnail of a cute dog or something, a…

> which I'm going to do as soon as I get my new personal website/blog set up I understand why you want a replacement for updating friends and family, but that's a really effortful barrier you're placing in front of deleting Facebook. For this reason you will find it way harder. And it's already harder than you think. Take any and all barriers away from ditching FB. They are your mind tricking you into staying.

Fair point. But it's not a pipe dream. I've already registered the domain name, stood up the VPC for the new site, configured DNS, installed Apache httpd, and configured the base VirtualHost. So progress is happening. All that's left is installing a blog engine (probably Roller), creating the landing page content for the static part, and create a cert using let's encrypt.

But again, your point is valid. Probably I need to set a "drop dead" date and tell myself "if this new site isn't up by Jan 31 (or whatever), then I'm killing FB anyway".

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#196

Post by a1o »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #133
a1o wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adjective used to describe someone who dresses in fashion associated with college preparatory (“prep”) school that gives the impression of old money I thought it was about stocking life supplies in the basement though.

Isn't that the old, pre gen alpha definition?

I thought so, but apparently no

> We all know what the word preppy means, right? It’s the word we use to describe those rich kids that look down on anyone whose shoes cost less than a car. It’s the perfect word to describe the pompousness and snootiness of the crustiest of the upper crust.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#197

Post by RebeccaTheDev »

I blocked a lot of social media sites on my home network to help ease my addiction some. Especially Reddit. I found the mornings I was on Reddit before getting out of bed my mood suffered. I still need to have them available to communicate with some people and for research. But now, in order to use those sites, I either need to leave the house or disconnect from the wifi.

Functionally, this seems to have helped a lot and usually the only time I end up on social media is when I am killing time waiting while out or when I really really want to look at something specific, and only on my mobile device. It seems that making it slightly more inconvenient worked on me without me having to give them up entirely.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#198

Post by HPsquared »

brushfoot wrote: post #123

Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions. What works for me is removing the antecedent completely by charging my phone in another room at night. Now the battle is easier: Decide once a day to put it there, and track how many days you succeed. For me that's a lot easier than having it in my pocket, where the Internet is always a couple la…

A smart watch means you can still take calls with the phone hidden away or turned off. It's my preferred compromise.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#199

Post by plssrs_be »

It's not exactly Doom Scrolling, but something I do on my work laptop while at work: I seem to have adopted some kind of tic nerveux during my work as developer that manifests when I get sidetracked for just a couple of seconds. I automatically will start to open my non-work browser/mail or other non-work apps and get completely distracted again. Other in-browser blockers have never seemed to work, but since a couple of days the Focus feature has been released for Raycast on Mac. I find that the system wide animations and the 3 second button delay to pause the session actually work really well. Hope this helps someone.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#200

Post by yurimo »

iPhone has this nice accessibility feature where you can greyscale the screen, this along with putting the phone away in a distance that I would have to get up and walk to it made a huge difference in frequency of usage.
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