How to stop doomscrolling when you should be working

Why the usual tips don’t work at 2:40pm

Search for how to stop doomscrolling and you'll get the same list. Turn off notifications. Set your screen to grayscale. Delete the apps. Charge your phone outside the bedroom.

Good tips. Do them. But notice what they assume: that your phone is pulling you in.

Researchers at the London School of Economics tested that. They put small cameras on people's glasses and recorded over 200 hours of normal phone use. Then they counted what started each pickup. Only 11% began with a notification. The other 89%? The person just picked the phone up.

So turning off notifications deals with about one pickup in nine. The other eight start somewhere else.

The phone isn’t the problem. The feeling is.

Think about the second before you last picked up your phone at your desk. Something was usually going on.

The spreadsheet was boring. The code wouldn't run. The client proposal felt too big to start. You weren't sure your pitch was good enough. Or you were just tired after three meetings in a row.

Nir Eyal, author of Indistractable, calls this the internal trigger: an uncomfortable feeling you want to get away from. Psychologists who study procrastination say something similar. Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl describe putting work off as a way to feel better right now, at the cost of your future self.

And your phone is the fastest mood fix you own. It asks nothing of you. It never runs out. It always has something new.

That's why willpower loses. You're not fighting an app. You're fighting a feeling, with an escape hatch sitting six inches away.

If you run your own business, it's even harder. Nobody notices the lost hour. There are no fixed hours to protect. And every hour you scroll comes straight out of your own pocket.

Step 1: Make a gap

You don't need to beat the urge forever. You need a few seconds between the urge and your hand.

Put your phone out of arm's reach while you work. Across the room is good. Another room is better. On your laptop, close the tabs you open without thinking. If you can't close Slack or email because they're part of your job, mute them for the next 25 minutes.

The goal isn't to make scrolling impossible. It's to make it slow enough that you notice you're about to do it. That moment of noticing is where everything else happens.

Step 2: Name the feeling in one word

In that gap, ask one question: what am I feeling?

Don't ask why. "Why" starts a story, and stories take twenty minutes. Just find the word. At work, it's nearly always one of six:

Anxious. Bored. Frustrated. Overwhelmed. Foggy. Self-doubt.

It sounds too simple to do anything. It isn't. A UCLA team led by Matthew Lieberman scanned people's brains while they looked at emotional faces. When people put the feeling into a word, the brain's alarm centre calmed down. The technique is called affect labelling, and it takes about four seconds.

Naming the feeling won't make it vanish. It makes it smaller. And smaller is often the difference between reaching and not. If you want to know what each feeling is really about, read why we doomscroll.

Step 3: Give the feeling what it actually needs

Now give the feeling something to do that isn't scrolling. Each one needs something different:

Anxious: calm your body first. Breathe in twice through your nose, then let one long breath out through your mouth. Repeat for a minute. In a Stanford trial, this "cyclic sighing" lifted mood more than meditation did, at just five minutes a day.

Bored: your brain wants more stimulation, not less. Stand up and stretch. Then set a tight ten-minute challenge for the dullest bit of the task.

Frustrated: get the tension out of your body. Unclench your jaw, roll your shoulders, shake out your hands. Then ask a curious question about the problem, whether it's a bug, a broken formula or a client who keeps changing their mind: "what would I try if this were someone else's?"

Overwhelmed: empty your head onto paper. Every email, deadline, invoice and loose end. Then circle one tiny next step and do only that.

Foggy: wake your body up. Get up, drink cold water, stand by a window for a minute.

Self-doubt: remember one time you did something like this before and it turned out fine. Be specific. Which project, which pitch, which client? What happened?

Two minutes is enough. You're not solving the feeling. You're turning it down so you can work next to it.

Step 4: Go back for 25 minutes, not forever

"I'll just work until it's done" is a trap. It's heavy, it has no end, and it sends you back to the phone.

Go back for one short block instead: 25 minutes, with a break already planned. A 2023 study of university students found that people who took breaks on a fixed schedule felt less tired and less distracted than people who stopped whenever they felt like it. They also got the same work done in less time.

Better still, put the block in your calendar the night before, so the day can't swallow it. We show how in time blocking. And our free focus timer runs the block itself, with brown noise or rain if you like. No sign-up.

The hard part: remembering all this in the moment

Here's the honest problem with any routine like this. Right now, reading calmly, it makes sense. At 2:40pm, with the urge pulling, you won't remember it.

Your brain isn't in planning mode when you're anxious or stuck, or when you've just walked out of a hard meeting. You won't recall which fix goes with which feeling. You'll just reach.

That's the reason we built CatchScroll. It sits on your laptop next to your work. When the urge hits, you tap the feeling. It talks you through the two-minute reset made for that feeling, then drops you back into your focus timer. Over time, it shows you which feelings pull you away most, so the urge stops catching you by surprise.

You can do all of this without an app. The app just makes sure you actually do it.

What about app blockers?

Blockers are useful. They take away the easiest exit. But they don't touch the feeling that sent you looking for one. So the urge often just moves: to email, to the fridge, to reorganising your files.

Even Eyal treats locks and blockers as a last line of defence, to use after you've dealt with the feelings behind the urge. We compare them fairly in do app blockers work?

What to expect in your first week

The first few times, this will feel slower than just checking your phone. It is slower. That's fine.

By the end of the week, you'll likely notice the same one or two feelings keep coming back. Boredom after lunch, maybe. Anxiety before a big deadline. Or self-doubt every time you start writing. Once you know your pattern, you can see the urge coming, and an urge you can see is much easier to let pass.