You open Instagram to answer one message. Forty minutes later you’re watching a stranger renovate a kitchen, your shoulders are up near your ears, and you feel worse than when you started. You close the app, and ten minutes later your thumb opens it again.
That’s doomscrolling. Merriam-Webster defines it as spending an excessive amount of time scrolling through content that makes you sad, anxious or angry. The word took off in 2020, but the feeling is older than the word.
Short answer: To stop doomscrolling, don’t rely on willpower in the moment. Change the setup instead. Turn off notifications from the worst apps, move them off your Home Screen, set a daily limit that can’t be dismissed with one tap, and schedule a lock for your riskiest hour, usually late evening. Then decide in advance what you’ll do instead.
Doomscrolling is a design problem
Feeds are engineered to keep you moving. Infinite scroll removes the bottom of the page, so there’s no natural place to stop. Autoplay removes the decision to watch the next video. And variable rewards, where every so often the next post is great, keep your thumb swiping for the next hit.
None of that means you’re weak. It means you’re up against a product built by very smart people whose job is to hold your attention.
It also explains why trying harder hasn’t worked. In a 2026 Pew Research Center survey, 45% of US adults said they’d tried to cut back on their smartphone in the past year. Of those, only 25% said they were very or extremely successful. Another 52% said “somewhat,” and 23% said not very or not at all.
Why willpower loses at 11 p.m.
Willpower makes its decision at the worst possible moment: when you’re tired, bored or anxious and the app is already open. At that point “five more minutes” always sounds reasonable.
Economists have put a number on this gap between what we plan and what we do. In a 2022 study in the American Economic Review, Allcott, Gentzkow and Song estimated that self-control problems account for about 31% of social media use. The same study found that letting people set their own screen-time limits substantially reduced their use. In other words, a decision made in advance beats one made in the moment.
The research on how doomscrolling makes you feel is correlational, but consistent. Across three studies, Satici and colleagues (2023) found doomscrolling was linked to lower life satisfaction and wellbeing, with psychological distress as part of the link. It’s not clear which comes first, but the feedback loop is easy to recognize: you feel bad, you scroll, you feel worse.
A practical plan to stop doomscrolling
You don’t need all nine steps. Do the first five this week and add the rest if you need them.
1. Find your worst hour
Open your weekly Screen Time report (on recent iOS versions it’s in Settings > Screen Time) and look at when the scrolling happens, not only how much. For most people it’s one or two windows: right after waking, the commute, or 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.
2. Name the two or three apps that cause it
Not every app is the problem. Usually it’s one short-video app, one social app and maybe news or Reddit. Those are the ones that need rules. Leave Maps, Messages and your bank alone.
3. Turn off their notifications
Every badge and banner is an invitation back into the feed. Go to Settings > Notifications, pick the app and turn off Allow Notifications. Messages from real people can stay on.
4. Move them off your Home Screen
Press and hold the app icon, tap Remove App, then Remove from Home Screen. The app stays installed and is still searchable, but your thumb can’t open it on autopilot anymore.
5. Write an if-then plan
“If it’s 11 p.m., then the phone goes on the charger in the kitchen.” Plans in this if-then format, called implementation intentions, are a well-replicated technique for turning intentions into action. They work because the decision is made before the moment arrives.
6. Set a daily limit that holds
Give those apps a daily budget you can live with, for example 45 minutes total. The key is what happens when it runs out. If one tap gets you back in, the limit is just a suggestion. More on that below.
7. Lock your worst hour on a schedule
If your problem is 11 p.m., a daily limit isn’t enough, because you may still have minutes left. Put a schedule on that window so the apps lock no matter what. Our guide to stopping scrolling in bed has a full bedtime setup.
8. Replace it, don’t just remove it
A blocked app leaves a gap, and that gap gets filled with something. Decide what that is ahead of time: a book on the nightstand, a podcast for the walk, a crossword for the queue.
9. Aim to cut back, not to quit
You don’t have to delete everything. In a randomized study from Ruhr University Bochum (2022), people who used their phone one hour less a day for a week reported better life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, and the effects were still there four months later. One hour is a realistic first target.
Where Bricked fits
Most of the plan above is free and built into your iPhone. The part iOS doesn’t handle well is step 6: making a limit hold when you’re the one who set it. Screen Time’s Ignore Limit is one tap away by default, and you know your own passcode.
Bricked handles that one job:
- You pick the apps and set a daily limit. Your usage fills a brick on the Home screen, so you can see the budget shrinking.
- When the brick is full, the apps turn to brick until midnight.
- There’s no one-tap Ignore. Every unlock is a 5-minute peek. On Bricked+ you press and hold, and the hold grows each time that day, from 3 seconds to 60. On the free plan you wait instead, up to 5 minutes.
- Schedules lock your worst window automatically, for example 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
The free plan covers up to 3 apps or categories and 1 schedule, which is enough for the plan above. See how the iPhone app blocker works for the full feature list.
What Bricked can’t do
- It can’t block Reels or Shorts on their own. Apple’s framework works at the app level, so Bricked limits Instagram or YouTube as a whole.
- It can’t stop a determined you. You can raise your limit or delete the app, which removes the blocks. Bricked adds friction at the moment of weakness. It’s not a prison, and it doesn’t pretend to be.
- It can’t fix why you reach for the phone. If you scroll to escape stress or loneliness, the blocker buys you a pause. What you do with the pause is the real work.
When it’s more than a habit
Doomscrolling isn’t a diagnosis, and most people can cut back with a better setup. But if your phone use is seriously affecting your sleep, work, relationships or mood, and changing the setup hasn’t helped, talk to a doctor or a therapist. That’s a sign the scrolling is a symptom of something worth looking at, not a lack of discipline.
Curious how your numbers add up? The screen time calculator turns your daily average into hours per year.