How I am breaking my doomscrolling habits to regain control

Topics mentioned: social media, worries about the news and the world

About: Rose explains how scrolling on social media was starting to take over her feelings, and what she's now doing to help her regain control.

Scroll. Swipe. Refresh. You know that moment when you look up from your phone and realise nearly an hour has disappeared for no reason at all. You can barely remember what you were even looking at, only that one notification turned into another, then another, until suddenly your entire mood feels heavier than it did before you picked up your phone.

Before I even get out of bed, my phone has already bombarded me with the latest headlines or a local tragedy. It is a relentless, 24/7 stream that follows me everywhere in my pocket. For a long time, I felt completely consumed by it. The constant flood of bad news, comparisons, and pressure on social media slowly started shaping the way I saw my own life. While I realised I cannot control everything happening around me, I had to accept that I can control how much of it can make me feel.

For me, feeling overwhelmed did not just come from how much time I spent on my phone. It came from the constant comparison trap on my timeline. Every time I opened an app, it felt like another reminder of where everyone else seemed to be in life: friends, family, and sometimes even strangers (influencers) getting into relationships, buying houses, driving new cars, or starting families. All the things that still haven’t happened for me at 25.

I am genuinely happy for other people, but that does not stop the feeling of looking at your own life and wondering why you are so far behind. Social media creates this quiet pressure that you have to become the absolute “best version” of yourself before you deserve anything good to happen, whether that is love, success, or simply feeling settled in your own life.

Over time, I realised real life does not actually work like that. People move at different speeds, and life is far messier and more unpredictable than the polished versions we scroll through online, but when those highlight moments are constantly pushed in your face every single day, it becomes difficult not to absorb the pressure. After a while, I noticed it was leaving me drained, anxious, and constantly feeling like I was falling behind.

Once I started paying attention to which posts consistently left me feeling anxious or emotionally drained, I realised I needed to change what I was surrounding myself with online. I cannot control what other people post, but I can control what I choose to engage with and what I allow into my day.

Instead of letting an app decide what I see, I started being more intentional with my feed. I began engaging more with theatre content, updates about books, or TV series, new music, yoga tutorials, local events, and even nail and beauty videos.

It sounds small, but noticing my triggers helped me set boundaries that actually worked for me. Sometimes that meant muting certain words or accounts, and other times it simply meant interacting more with content that made me feel inspired instead of inadequate.

I’ve realised I do not need to delete every app on my phone to find balance, but I do need boundaries. For me, it became more about recognising when I need to fully step away from the online world before it starts affecting my mental state. Recently, I set myself a realistic goal of limiting my social media screen time to around 30 minutes a day, and I unfollowed accounts that constantly triggered feelings of relationship envy or inadequacy.

To make those changes stick, I stopped keeping my phone in my bedroom. I also stopped going on social media first thing in the morning because I realised it was putting me in a negative mindset before I had even left the house. Now, I try not to check my phone until my lunch break or when I get home from work instead of constantly reaching for it throughout the day.

At night, I try not to scroll before bed either. Instead, I read, watch a film, write, go to yoga, or meet up with my best friend after work. Small things, but things that remind me there is still a world outside my screen.

I still want to stay informed online and on social media, but I realised there is a difference between intentionally reading the news and endlessly consuming whatever an algorithm throws at me.

I also had to learn how to spot the difference between genuine content and content designed purely to keep me angry, anxious, or endlessly scrolling. Now, if a headline or video immediately makes me feel anxious or annoyed, I pause before engaging with it. Most of the time, those posts are designed for clicks and engagement, not to actually inform people.

I do not think social media is entirely bad, and I do not think doomscrolling is something people can fix overnight. I do think we deserve more control over what we consume every day and how much access it has to our minds.

Learning when to log off and stop absorbing everything happening online has genuinely made me feel lighter and more in the present. The internet will still be there at times, but now I am trying to make more space for the life happening in front of me too.