Scrolling UX and Avoidance!

I recently started removing apps whose primary user experience is “scrolling” from my phone.

This started when I noticed that I was doing that whenever I felt anxious or overwhelmed. In other words, it was my escapism and avoidance mechanism.

🤔 What behavior do I want to replace that with?
Treating anxiety as data, understanding the root cause, and designing my environment to reduce the impact of anxiety.

📜 “Doomscrolling” is the habit of continuously and compulsively scrolling through negative or distressing news, social media posts, or online content, often (but not necessarily) related to tragic events, disasters, or crises.

It can result in unwanted negative emotions:

⚠️ Anxiety: sheer volume of content we get exposed to can create fomo, anxiety about threats or performance, and even despair 
⚠️ Anger: the fact that we get off more radical information and events could leave traces of anger and irritation even when we just consume the titles of the content 
⚠️ Social Comparison: feeling inadequate in comparison to others needs no comments

_Importantly though_, when the trigger of the behavior comes from a negative emotion to begin with, not only do we miss the opportunity of dealing with that emotion, but we might subconsciously seek information that validates that negative emotion to feed our confirmation bias!

If I want to reframe what was happening to me it would be the following:

1️⃣ Some stressor, say work or life anxiety, becomes too large to handle
2️⃣ I pick up my phone and start scrolling -> the dopamine hit from the "unexpected turns", specifically designed to maintain my attention, provides a reward for that behavior
3️⃣ I emotionally numb myself by saturating my ability to “feel” through lots of content (let’s be honest, just the click baity titles of them) 
4️⃣ I start feeling guilty but I justify that I’m keeping myself informed and the fake sense of control over what I’m doing reinforces my confirmation bias
5️⃣ I eventually feel guilty enough to go back to what I was doing, and repeat!

✳️ How have you solved this problem for yourself?

Here's what I've done so far:

1️⃣ Started to educate myself about the “joy of missing out” and the importance of focusing on consuming only the information that is most likely to help me pursue my top 3 life / work priorities  
2️⃣ Removed most news and social media apps and replaced them with apps that let me keep track of and read long format content so that if I catch myself picking up my phone when I’m anxious, I can just sit in a corner, read one article, and go back to work
3️⃣ Designed my work / life environment in a way that everything that demands my attention happens at expected times and in expected ways. This includes dedicated time for social media, aggressively unsubscribing from things, aggressive suppression of notifications, and a range of things that I can broadly call: reducing decision fatigue.

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