How to stop doomscrolling

You know the feed is bad for you. You know it at 23:40 with the phone in your hand, and you keep going. That is not a character flaw. It is a design, and it can be designed against.

Updated 30 October 2026

Why trying harder doesn't work

The feed is infinite, the next post is always a thumb-flick away, and it is tuned by people whose job is to keep you there. Your side of the fight is willpower, which is lowest exactly when the scrolling starts: tired, in bed, alone with the phone. Telling yourself to stop is bringing a resolution to a slot machine.

What works is changing the cost of the next scroll, so the decision is made by the rested version of you and enforced on the tired one.

Four things that change the cost

1. Grey-scale and no notifications. Cheap, worth doing, and not enough. Your thumb knows where the icon is in black and white.
2. A pause before the app opens. Apps like one sec make you breathe for a few seconds first. Good against reflex opens, the ones you didn't decide on. Weak against the ones you did.
3. A closed door at night. A blocker that shuts the feed from 23:00 to 07:00. Works if the key is not a button or a passcode you know, which is where Apple's own Screen Time fails.
4. A door whose key is in another room. The feed is closed, and opening it for ten minutes means getting out of bed and walking to the kitchen. This is the one that holds, because the urge rarely survives the walk.

Setting it up in Tollie

Tollie is built around number four. It takes about four minutes:

• Pick the feeds. Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, YouTube, whichever you scroll.
• Close a window for the hours you doomscroll, usually bedtime. Or set a daily budget: 30 free minutes a day, then the booth closes until morning.
• Hide the key. Scan a corner of the kitchen. From then on a ten-minute pass costs a walk there. Not at home? Walk 100 real steps.
• Make it stricter if you need to. On the Strict level, the second pass in the same night costs more steps than the first. Going harder applies at once; going easier waits 24 hours.

The first week, Your week in Tollie shows which nights held. Most people see the feed lose within three or four nights, not because they tried harder, but because the walk did the trying for them.

Questions

What if I doomscroll during the day, not at night?

Use a daily budget instead of a window. Thirty free minutes, then the feed closes until morning and every ten minutes more costs a walk.

I doomscroll the news, not social media. Does this help?

Yes. Any app can go behind a booth, including news apps. Safari is the gap: Tollie blocks apps, not websites.

Isn't walking to the kitchen just annoying?

It is, for about a week. Then it is the reason you slept.

one sec is the name of another product, used here to describe it. Screen Time is Apple's feature.