Doomscrolling After Work
Ever wondered why, after a long day of work, if we start scrolling algorithmic feeds because we tired, we not feel better afterwards?
Algorithmic feeds are tiring for the brain, because the amount of context swithing that is happening is not natural, it creates anxiety and keeps us in a non-resting state. This is on purpose: feeds of high-dopamine tech are made to activate your brain and nervous system to get you to react, to get you to keep scrolling for more stimuli, not to calm your nervous system down and help you relax.
Watching TV has the same effect! It wants to engage us, not bore us, so it provides constant stimuli, context switching, changing shots, loud music and sound bytes to keep us hooked.
This is why I’ve stopped using these tools to rest. It just does not work, and it often creates a habit of escaping reality.
Embrace Boredom
Something I’ve tried to do is to do instead is to embrace boredom.
When I’m tired, bored or have nothing to do, my thought process used to be something like:
“I’m tired/bored/have nothing to do” → “I’ll pick up my phone / video game”
but I’m trying to change it to:
“I’m tired/bored/have nothing to do” → “If there is nothing to do, I’ll do nothing than”
and then I just sit on the sofa, or in a chair outside looking at the birds and trees.
This has worked really well. By embracing the quiet parts of the day and letting myself feel boredom, it gives me a little space to escape the constant stimuli, stress and hurries of the day-to-day life. It gives me space to think, to wonder, to let my brain come up with new thoughts. My brain gets the space it needs to ruminate and wind down, instead of being in constant reaction to the world, which in turn gives me back some agency. I get some agency back because I give myself the time to wonder what action to take next, or maybe no action at all, and that should be fine.
Often, in these moments, I get some creative idea of what I could do next, or get so bored that I actually start thinking about boring stuff like house-cleaning and chores.
What also ends up happening, is that I truly relax. Relaxing in nothing is a skill that many have lost. You need some ability to regulate your emotions to do that. But everyone should be able to sit in nothing and be fine with it. It is a prerequisite for actually having original thoughts and actions, and not just parroting what you see on screens.
How to do Nothing
This reminds me of a book by Jenny Odel called How to do nothing. Resisting the Attention Economy. It’s a great read that touches on these topics.
And speaking of books, one can only read a book if one is relatively bored, in comparison to the visual stimuli that we are habituated to since childhood, thanks to screens. It often happens that those who cannot sit down to read a book are the ones who really need to learn to sit down in boredom.
That was what happened to me! I was a video-game and TV show junkie, and when I first started reading books, it was difficult to focus for long periods of time to do it. But the brain is malleable and it can adapt.
In fact, books are just a superior form of learning and consuming information anyway. You need to be focused and actively engaging with the words to understand a book, whereas with TV you are not forced to be focused, atentful and in a learning mode at all. TV and video sharing apps actually incentivize its creators to create content that does the opposite of those things to its viewers. By being visually stimulating and providing constant changing stimuli, that medium becomes a form of entretainment, even on so-called educational content.
So take care of yourself and read more books :)