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My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

allthatjazz.me

21–30 of 330 posts

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#21
post #9
post #2

Recently my coworker asked me if I could recommend any physical alarm clocks. He said that phone alarm causes him to pick up the phone the first thing in the morning and he wants to break away from this habit. I guess at some point the society as a whole will start fighting back.

I use a Garmin watch for alarms. Frequent conversation: "oh you have a smartwatch" "no it's dumb in all the right ways, which is the point" Notably I have notifications but can't act on them, which prevents me from picking up the phone just to check notifications and then be drawn into doing actions. YMMV.

> I use a Garmin watch for alarms.

I've tried that, but found them to be too easy to sleep through unless my watch wrist is very close to my head (without a pillow between it and my ear). The sound isn't particularly loud and the vibration is similarly shallow. Useful for reminder alarms when I'm awake though.

My current success is using the Amazon branded wiretap for alarms. Interacting with the dumb cloth-eared irritation sometimes annoys me into being awake rather than hitting the virtual snooze yet again, and it doesn't have the doom-scroll potential of my phone.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#24
Moderation is a high form of discipline. Keep the apps, learn to limit usage. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Keep food in the house, learn not to pig out on the sweets. Works in other areas of life where removing access is not an option.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#25

Moderation is a high form of discipline. Keep the apps, learn to limit usage. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Keep food in the house, learn not to pig out on the sweets. Works in other areas of life where removing access is not an option.

So basically 'just be successful' it's easy: just learn everyday, do sports, eat well...

But hey thanks for your tip!

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#26
I've been trying to switch from scrolling to reading my Kindle.

I aggressively curate who I do follow; on Twitter, I mainly use lists. At this point, I'm mostly just interested in AI news. I'm also subscribed to an AI newsletter, but it isn't as tightly scoped as my set of feeds.

I guess I could apply AI to this problem. I'd like a tool a bit like Yahoo Pipes, with email and Twitter integrations, and LLM transformation boxes for summarizing and making decisions.

I should probably look at https://github.com/huginn/huginn

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#27
post #2

Recently my coworker asked me if I could recommend any physical alarm clocks. He said that phone alarm causes him to pick up the phone the first thing in the morning and he wants to break away from this habit. I guess at some point the society as a whole will start fighting back.

It comes with other benefits as well. Not even the cheapest alarm clock has ever failed me. Sure, it can run out of battery power but the low power icon shows up months before it runs out of juice. Phone alarms on the other hand? I had them not triggering at all, or the vibration motor in the phone being stuck (?) and thus not working temporarily, etc... Hence I also prefer physical alarm clocks without software that…

Not really relevant but I'm going to say it anyway. I hate devices that tell me about "low" battery long in advance of actually going flat, it simply trains me to ignore the notification and then it unceremoniously dies on me at a later time.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#28
I've done something similar recently..

I have always deleted apps off my phone but still suffered from access via web.

My solution for X is to logout. This is enough since un-authed has no content and the login screen is enough to stop me.

Then for Youtube/Reddit I blocked on personal and work laptops by adding to /etc/hosts file. If I still had access to un-authed Youtube/Reddit homepage I would still find a way to enjoy it. Also Unhook is too easy to disable for me.

Then for my iPhone I have added both Reddit and Youtube to restricted sites via the iOS settings.

Works well so far.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#29

Moderation is a high form of discipline. Keep the apps, learn to limit usage. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Keep food in the house, learn not to pig out on the sweets. Works in other areas of life where removing access is not an option.

Moderation is more difficult than abstinence because it means you are fighting an activated dopamine loop in real time.

I wonder: are there any good games where the game is literally to escape dopamine loops in various ways? That would actually be a novel and interesting game mechanic. You could make it a puzzle type game or even work it into a role playing or fighting game where sneaking you into some kind of addictive game loop is how the enemies get you.

Re: My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

#30
Does everyone really mean doom scrolling when they talk about these issues? For me personally, it's definitely about dopamine and not about negative emotions, yet everyone uses the phrase doom scrolling - am I the odd one out?

For example, if I'm feeling stressed/anxious, I'll scroll/browse/distract myself to avoid the negative feelings. I'm not seeking them like doom scrolling says.

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