Quit Doomscrolling - Six Everyday Habits To Zen

Okay! I’m going to start this by purely expressing my frustration. I woke up one day, a year and a half ago, and was done denying this addiction that I had developed. It crept up on me slowly but had all its grips deep in me. I was scrolling on my phone endlessly for hours, and my screen time had reached an all-time high of fourteen hours.

Before we dive into discussing mindful practices, it’s important to understand why we doom scroll. Understanding the why behind every habit, especially those we’re trying to break, and bringing it to our conscious awareness is key to overcoming it.

The way I see it, every habit, especially that of doom scrolling, is a combination of two things: boredom and the need for a quick dopamine rush. When we doom scroll, it’s an easy quick fix to fill a void with a feeling of pleasure. A void of time and space. This is just as quickly or in several hours followed by overstimulation and intense feelings of apathy and maybe even shame or guilt. It really is a vicious cycle that causes us to continue doom scrolling, but this time to run away from those bad feelings of laziness and procrastination that arise from within.

Here we will walk through five mindful practices you can adopt into your everyday life that will help regulate your dopamine to experience a more zen-ful everyday. I will split them by how you can do this for your mind, body, and soul.

For The Mind:

Read Books
Allow reading to become a part of your everyday routine. I suggest incorporating reading in the morning with your first cup of coffee or right before bed. The key here is to find a genre(s) that actually excites you. Most people shy away from reading because they haven’t found topics or subjects that get them excited about it. Exploring and finding genres you resonate with will keep you glued to your books, sometimes just as much as you’re glued to your phone. Growing up, I never enjoyed reading because I was only surrounded by comics and fiction novels in my childhood home in India that did not speak to me. Later on in high school, I was bombarded with more fiction throughout the school year and summer readings. Only a few years ago, I realized that I actually did enjoy reading, but they were on books related to spirituality and self-development. Hence, I say - finding the right genre is key, and the only way to find that is by exploring many different genres and tuning in to ask yourself, “What do I get excited by?” Whatever the answer is, I’m sure you’ll find books related to it.

Practice Mindful Cooking
This one really kills two birds with one stone. Not only is mindful cooking great for your mind, but it’s undeniably also great for your body. What is mindful cooking? It is the practice of being fully present in the kitchen while you cook, where the pleasure comes from making the meal itself rather than rushing to find pleasure in consuming it. Ways to practice mindful cooking include simply taking your time with chopping up your vegetables, feeling their texture as you slide them off the cutting board and into the pan, closing your eyes to smell the food you’re cooking, and taking a moment to look at all the different colors of your ingredients. Mindful cooking can be as simple as that. Of course, we can take it one step further and put more effort into learning healthy recipes and creating a more nutritious meal for ourselves. The takeaway here is to take that time away from scrolling on your phone and invest it in the foods you consume.

For The Body:

Find and Practice Your Self-Care Routines
Our bodies are incredible. They allow us to do so much every day. There’s an intelligence that lies within our bodies that we don’t always acknowledge and very much take for granted. We don’t think about the intelligence that lies within the process of digestion or how the air molecules of oxygen we breathe are transferred from our lungs into the red blood cells in our veins. There are several other processes that take place that even scientists have not discovered yet. For the human body that does so much, the least we can do is take care of it in ways that we can. As much as it’s important to be mindful of the foods we intake, as discussed previously, it is just as important to spend time taking care of our external selves. I know skincare and haircare were never as big as they are now. There’s an immense sense of pleasure that arises in taking care of our skin and hair. Taking time out of your day to take a long hot shower, smell the scents in your body wash and shampoo, feel the lotion on your skin as you’re applying it, wear a hair or face mask once in a while, or best of all, draw yourself a bath are great ways to practice some self-care. The key here is to get away from your phone and give your physical body the full love and attention it deserves for everything that it allows you to do. A healthy, happy-feeling body will make you feel more youthful and energetic to take care of everything else you need to for the day.

Find Ways To Move Every Day
If you’re a gym-goer, you’re great. You’re on the right path and probably can skip this paragraph. For the rest of you non-gym-goers, this is for you. I also fall into the latter category. The gym isn’t for me. The typical run on a treadmill for cardio or lift weights to muscle train just does not work for me. However, I do like to move my body. Research says a minimum of twenty minutes of some kind of aerobic movement a day that gets your heart rate up is necessary for healthy weight maintenance. Obviously, if your weight goals are to get a six-pack or shed fat, you’ll need more, but I’m speaking about what’s recommended as a minimum. For me, my movement comes from dancing in the luxury of my living room. Some days are more intense than others, but those twenty minutes are mine to get my blood flowing while I’m away from my phone, dancing like no one’s watching and everybody’s watching at the same time. Other ways to move your body could be going on walks or choosing to climb stairs over taking the elevator. The creativity is up to you.

For The Soul:

Incorporate Meditation and Prayer
On another self-help podcast, I heard the host say that the practice of prayer is speaking to God (or the universe, higher power, higher-self however you want to name it) and asking for guidance. While the practice of meditation is silencing your noise and listening to God’s responses. Bringing this back to doom scrolling, while you’re deep in it on social media, there’s so much of other people’s lives thrown at you. You’re constantly consuming what your friends, neighbors, or random regular people’s lives, which is mostly nothing but external noise to you. I agree that there is always something to learn from everyone, but all this learning, when not backed up with actual practice for the betterment of your own life, just goes away as quickly as the few milliseconds it takes your thumb to scroll to the next piece of content. When you incorporate meditation and prayer into your life, you’ll learn about the most important person in the world - YOU. The daily practice of asking and listening is vital in connecting you to your interests, desires, goals, and aspirations. A lot of inspired action and ideas come to you when your soul is in a state of calm and peace. Meditation and prayer have a large part to do with it.

Journaling
This is a fun one, especially for us overthinkers. Nothing as simple as a piece of blank paper and a pen that can pour out your deepest desires and thoughts, giving shape to those jumbled-up feelings and emotions you feel daily. Some days, journaling could take up the front and back of five pages, and some days it just needs a single sentence. The practice of journaling is absolutely life-changing, and the best part is that there is no one right way to do it. You can use as many or as few words as needed. Doodles are absolutely allowed; in fact, I encourage it. And no subject is off-limits. Those on a healing journey swear by the power of journaling and the ability it gives you to transmute icky low feelings to mere insignificant thoughts that don’t define you.

Bonus:

When your mind, body, and soul are in sync, something magical happens. Your soul feels safe enough to express itself through your interests. Your mind then takes that feedback and builds ideas to help you bring those interests into passions you can practice, and your body follows along for the ride as it becomes so convinced that it is its purpose. And this is the sweet spot you want to be in every day. This balanced approach is what you need to handle the many life challenges you’ll need to resolve daily.

In conclusion, when you replace your pleasure senses with mindful everyday practices for and within yourselves, there’s no need to look for external stimulants to fill spaces of boredom, as there rarely will be spaces of boredom. You’ll be so enthralled in the beauty of creating and living your life that you won’t even have the time to doom scroll.