19 Easy & Rewarding Behaviors You Can Do Instead of Doom Scrolling
Tiny habits you can implement today
A couple of months back I found myself checking my phone more often than usual. Looking back, the reason was (and still often is) pure escapism: when stuff doesn’t go well in the relationship, work, studies, or anywhere else, I often turn to what’s easy.
Checking Medium, scrolling on social media, reading news, and looking for the next app that’s gonna revolutionize my daily workflow slowly take up more and more time.
The implicit assumption is that whatever I do with my phone will help me overcome “the dip”. But it rarely does.
If you have a similar struggle, welcome on board.
Why we end up spending more time on our phones than healthy isn’t a mystery.
- The smartphones are small Skinner Boxes of operant conditioning that reward us with dopamine each time we perform an action.
- We habitualize our phone behavior up to a point of muscle memory —overtime, your thumbs become sentient individualistic units, craving the touch of the smooth and shiny surface.
- Everyone else is glued to their phones. When you look around, wherever you are, you’ll see someone holding a phone (if you don’t see anyone, you’re looking at your phone). This makes it top of mind in nearly all scenarios.
- The apps are engineered to suck our attention.
I could go on and on but you know the story. You’ve read it gazillion of times and there’s no need for me to repeat it. It’s distilled form might be something like this:
Phones are both boon and a curse depending on how you use them. The use and misuse are often indistinguishable (you might doom scroll while thinking you’re “interacting with followers”). The net result is that there’s probably no one who, when asked if they’d like to increase their phone time, would say yes.
The last sentence is the premise of the following content. In what follows, you’ll learn about alternatives to doom scrolling. I’ve used every one of them to (occasionally, let’s be honest) battle my phone addiction. These aren’t a silver bullet, but they often nudge you in the right direction.
With each bullet, I’ll provide actionable advice that makes it more likely you choose the alternative to doom scrolling. The goal is not to uproot your current habits, but to create an environment conducive to behavior change.
Small and steady wins.
We will cover areas of obtaining knowledge, sport, mindfulness, home, and hobby.
This post isn’t linear so feel free to jump around.
The two criteria that serve as constraints are:
- The substitute for doom scrolling must be simple and tiny enough to do instantly.
- The substitute must be (subjectively) better than doom scrolling.
With that in mind, let’s begin.
Learning/knowledge building
1. Listening to audiobooks/podcasts
My experience is that audiobooks need to have a narrative. When there isn’t one, they’re hard to follow. Without a narrative, I can be sure that my monkey mind will find something shinier to focus on.
Podcasts usually don’t succumb to this predicament since there’s enough interaction going on.
I use Scribd for audiobooks and Spotify for podcasts.
Actionable advice: Sign up for the free trial on Scribd and find 2–3 audiobooks that interest you.
2. Watching documents on YouTube or Curiositystream
I recommend squeezing in a documentary in the evening or when you take your first major break of the day (for me around lunch).
Instead of doom scrolling (net benefit: 0), you might learn something useful (net benefit: this many *shows distance with his hands*).
Actionable advice: Put 2–3 docus on YouTube on your watchlist.
3. Reading articles, books
For reading to work, it’s necessary to remove as much friction as possible. I have a list of links in Notion that I can read straight away. I also usually have a few books open on my ebook reader so I can pick one that suits the occasion. The goal of having something ready is so you avoid the perils of searching for the right thing, Netflix-style.
Actionable advice: Get Pocket, Notion, Evernote, or any other management system and save 2 -3 articles that you’d like to read.
4. Watching courses
Coursera, EDX, Udemy, Skillshare. There are dozens of courses available online for any skill you might imagine. Most of them are even free. Here again, it pays to have something ready for you should the idea pop into your head.
Actionable advice: Sign up for any of the above. Save a couple of courses on your watchlist.
Sport
5. Stretching
I do a lot of bouldering (around 3–4 times a week), so stretching is something I should do more often. It relaxes the muscles and improves the mobility (and probably a dozen other benefits you’d find googling the “benefits of stretching”). The goal is to have a set routine you can do without thinking.
Actionable advice: Spread out your yoga mat in the middle of the room and do nothing with it (at first).
6. Running
I’m gonna be honest — I rarely run. If I do, it’s barely 2 KM upon which I’m a wheezing wreck. Needless to say, that doesn’t exactly make me come back for more. But I know the problems: trying to do too much (instead of 2km, I could do 1, or even 500m) and the irregularity (once a month, not even that). To learn from my mistakes, you’d be well advised to start small and regular.
Actionable advice: Put your running shoes where you can see them.
7. Walking
Or you don’t run at all — you walk. That’s also an option. Walking is the activity of great thinkers, it makes the juices flow and connects the dots. It’s as if your brain needed the pure mechanical movement to build synapses between neurons. I walk the same route so there’s no thinking involved. The phone, naturally, stays home.
Actionable advice: Set a reminder for a short walk a couple of days from now. See if you feel like doing it. If not, postpone it.
Home
8. Repairing stuff at home
The problem I have is that many things at home that ought to be repaired are just nuisances. As such, walkarounds are usually what I do: instead of fixing the leaky faucet, I put a bucket underneath. Instead of taking out the trash, I just throw it out the window. Well, only one of those examples is correct.
The point is, whenever I do fix something, I feel like a great engineer, a mastermind in control of my own life. Try it.
Actionable advice: Identify one small thing that you can repair in your home and form a battleplan of how you’ll tackle it.
9. Cleaning up
Washing the dishes, wiping the floors, vacuuming, dusting… stuff that every kid hates. Weirdly enough the older I am, the more I enjoy these activities. As Morgan Freeman put it in Bruce Almighty:
“People underestimate the benefit of good old manual labor. There’s freedom in it. Some of the happiest people in the world go home smelling to high heaven at the end of the day.”
Actionable advice: When you finish this piece, do one of the things I listed above.
10. Organizing
Some stuff could be organized better, you just can’t be bothered. I get it, who wants to sort out their documents or clothes in the wardrobe? Not me, that’s for sure. But I went ahead and did anyway. I was surprised at the sense of satisfaction it provided me. Plus, now the clutter is gone. Stuff I haven’t worn for ages is ready for someone else and I can now find the documents I need in single-digit minutes (as opposed to double or triple digits…).
Actionable advice: Look for and discard one thing from your wardrobe.
Hobby
11. Cooking
I’m a firm believer that anyone should know how to cook at least one dish well. I started years back with risotto, expanded to all sorts of curries and chilies. Now my passion is ramen. All of these aren’t complicated, yet extremely delicious if done well.
Actionable advice: Look up one recipe and try to learn it. Invite others for added pressure.
12. A hands-on project
The physical act of making things by hand is by its very nature restorative, contemplative, and centering in a way that computers will never mimic. — Gary Rogowski
The important part is “hands-on”. Whatever you do virtually doesn’t matter. As long as there’s no tangible proof of you doing something, the mind has trouble assigning praise. That’s why, even after a long and productive day of doing stuff on your computer, you feel as if you accomplished little — the proof isn’t there.
Outstanding on my list of projects I’d like to do at some point is, for example, building a birdhouse. Given my limited prowess with tools of any kind, this might end up hurting the birds but hey, no one said I have to put it outside.
Actionable advice: Pick up a hammer and see what you can do with it.
Mindfulness
13. Meditate
There are often two flawed assumptions regarding meditation. One, we think that only long and tedious sessions are necessary to reap the benefits. And two, that being scattered and bored and annoyed are somehow signs of failure. Not true.
From my experience, as little as one-minute meditation helps to ground you. And being all that above is rather the point: if you already were equanimous and balanced and enlightened, you wouldn’t need to sit down and meditate.
Actionable advice: Go on App or Playstore and look up “meditation timer” or “guided meditation”. Get the first thing that pops up.
14. Journaling
There are proponents of journaling like Benjamin Hardy, PhD. They swear that whatever you do in life can be traced to that magical moment of you sitting down at 5 AM and jotting down your innermost thoughts. All the power to him and you if you believe that. Never worked for me though.
Still, I occasionally sit down and write whatever troubles me. Sometimes it’s just a sentence, sometimes it’s a full-fledged blog post that leaves my fingers that day.
The point is: you don’t know until you sit down and type. Which is what you won’t do glued to your phone, doom scrolling into oblivion.
Actionable advice: Keep a journal at hand, make it visible. Who knows, sometimes you might pick it up.
15. Spending quality time with your partner (or a friend)
I’ve been blessed with a wonderful girlfriend whom I love spending time with. Also, we’ve been together for over 4 years now. The honeymoon mojo is long gone. This means that we often, out of laziness or inertia, forget that we need to invest time in the relationship.
There are dozens of things you can do for or with your partner that take up minutes, not hours. You can have a conversation. You can share a coffee during your midday break. You can caress. You can sit outside on the balcony, speechless, watching the sunset.
Actionable advice: Show some love to your partner. Pick one of the above and do it the second you get the chance.
16. Listening to music without doing anything else
99% of the time, music is a featureless background for me. I love it, don’t get me wrong, but I also can’t simply sit the fuck down and do nothing else but listening to music. Well, 99% of the time that is. The 1% is when I do sit down and do just that. This often takes the form of listening to classical music such as Chopin, Debussy, or Einaudi. When I listen I always wonder: “why don’t I do this more often? It’s awesome!” The answer is: “because you have a black hole of attention sitting in your pocket, that’s why. “
Actionable advice: Listen to one song of your favorite composer without doing anything else.
17. Yoga
“I have an app for that.” This phrase fits yoga well. For 2 years I’ve been using Down Dog. In that relatively short span, the app went from pictures of poses to HD videos showing you exactly what to do and how to get there; different exercise foci (wanna improve your hip flexibility? there’s an option for that); various types (from quick flow — my favorite, to full practice and hatha yoga); and much much more. The free version is enough to get you started, the paid version is money well-spent.
The length, for some types, is as little as 4 minutes. I encourage you to start with that, bearing the criterion 1 (start tiny) in mind.
Actionable advice: Get Down Dog and do 1 beginner-friendly yoga session.
Awesome Combos
The beauty of the above activities is that you can combine them. Here are my 3 favorite combos to get you started.
Audiobook or podcast + exercise
Jogging and audiobooks fit well together. For me, the narrative makes it easier to bear the pain. The same goes for stretching.
Documentary + exercise + quality time with a partner or a friend
There’s nothing better to stay active during a documentary. You stretch, improving your mobility and flexibility, and learn something new. Win-win. Add spending time with your partner and you’ve hit the jackpot.
Walking + journaling
Take a notebook with you on your stroll. Since you don’t have your phone on you, you might even stumble upon some ideas. Jot them down and look them over when you’re back: are there some gems?
All you need to know
Not spending time on your phone often means knowing what the alternative is.
You can use this post as the starting point. Adapt and move on from there. Make the behaviors yours.
The more behaviors you’ll have in your arsenal, the more likely you are to choose one of them as an alternative to doom scrolling.
Now excuse me, I have to check my messages…
