Ask HN: Overcoming Doomscrolling Addiction | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Overcoming Doomscrolling Addiction

3 pointsatomicnature5 comments

Have you been addicted to feeds at various sites and just keep scrolling the feeds and lose a lot of time? I personally lose quite a bit of time every week in Youtube. Would be interested to know whether this is something others struggle with.

- When was the last time you found yourself doomscrolling?

- How often do you find yourself doomscrolling (hourly, weekly, monthly basis)?

- What methods have you tried to control doomscrolling?

- What has/hasn't worked personally for controlling your doomscrolling?

- Do you doomscroll both in desktop and your phones?

- Which sites create a strong impulse to doomscroll for you?

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There's a large group of people who suffer from this affliction. It's where the term originated from, after all. So know that you're not alone. The question is, what can you do about it?

You have to teach yourself and learn to be intentional about what you choose to do. Which isn't easy, but it's worth it. Before doom scrolling Instagram and Twitter there was Reddit and Digg and Fark and Slashdot before that. But before that was the original, the television.

It's a psychological thing. I'm not yet at the point where I can tell you how to get out of that loop, only that between TMS, meditation and mindfulness, therapy, ADHD medication, street drugs, and taking care of myself and listening to my body, I've broken out of it.

I used to lose days to scrolling all of Reddit but it's been months since I touched the stuff. I don't know what I did but I don't have the same fascination with absorbing all of the Internet that I used to. I was able to convince my subconscious that it turns out it's really mostly useless information that I'm never going to use, and I don't even remember most of it anyway.

> Which sites create a strong impulse to doomscroll for you?

Respectfully, why would you ask this? are you trying to shoot yourself in the foot by finding additional sites to doom scroll?

Thanks.

> Respectfully, why would you ask this? are you trying to shoot yourself in the foot by finding additional sites to doom scroll?

I am trying to learn more about the pattern in general. I am thinking of putting together some resources (tools - both software & mental) to help with the doomscrolling problem.

If I find that websites are taking too much time and pulling my focus, I use an extension to block the sites and enter a password to open them.

In many cases, while entering the password, I can think about whether it's really necessary to open the site, such as YouTube or my local newspaper's page.

This has helped me a lot to not go into the rabbit hole.

That's an interesting way of managing this - care to share the extension that works for you?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/block-website... works for me. Of course there are similar extensions out there.

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