I don’t know if it’s the political climate, the clinical depression, the fatigue, the brain fog, the existential dread, the anxiety, or a combo of all of the above (probs that one), but I have been scrolling on social media A Lot lately.

According to my phone’s Screen Time, my current daily average time spent in social media apps is just over 3 hours. Which seems like a lot to me?? I don’t know what the average amount of time spent on social media is for American adults, so I can’t say how my screen time compares to others. But it doesn’t really matter anyway how it compares to others because what actually matters is how it makes me feel. And it makes me feel bad.

For a couple of reasons.

For starters, there’s the obvious, big, glaring, very-much-ingrained “must be productive” capitalistic whisper (read: shout) in my ear that I’ve been struggling to silence since I left my job almost two years ago. The whisper (shout) tells me that I oughtn’t be idle, and social media is idleness, and I need to go do something to better society.

But even if I ignore that, there’s also the fact that mindlessly scrolling social media doesn’t usually make me feel particularly good.

It’s true that—to some extent—social media provides me a feeling of belonging and connection I don’t always get in real life. Complex chronic illness symptoms combined with most people not understanding (or making an effort to understand) can make it hard for me to maintain a lot of irl friendships.

In my experience thus far, people have mostly waited for me to “get better,” which isn’t going to happen, and during times of critical and near-fatal illness, they’ve fallen off the map or tried to simply ignore my illness (perhaps not realizing my illness is a core part of who I am). None of which is a unique experience. Most chronically ill people could probably tell a similar story.

So, yes, I get something from my participation in social media. But there’s a difference between talking to mutuals, making fun posts (it really can be a creative outlet), yapping into the void, etc., and scrolling mindlessly through neutral or negative posts when I want to be doing something else but I can’t seem to stop just scrolling even though it makes me feel more anxious, depressed, and just generally awful. Something’s gotta give.

Solutioning

Naturally the first thing I tried as an iPhone user was setting up time limits for the apps in Screen Time. For those that don’t know, this is an iOS feature that allows you to have an app automatically close after however much time you specify. When the app closes, you can bypass the restriction for a minute, 15 minutes, or for the rest of the day. It turns out I am exceptional at bypassing that restriction for the rest of the day.

Which is to say that using time limits didn’t work for me. And it isn’t because it’s so easy to bypass them. I think it has more to do with the fact that a daily time limit isn’t really what I need so much as a time limit for each time I open the app. Because sometimes I’m not doomscrolling. Sometimes, I’m actually catching up or participating in a conversation or making a video or scrolling to engage with other people. And so with a daily time limit, for instance, if I spent time this morning doomscrolling, then I go to do the things I actually feel good about on social media this afternoon, that time’s already used up.

I also didn’t love that time limits boot me from an app, regardless of whether I’m in the middle of something. Tough love has never worked for me. I don’t want to be bullied or handed an ultimatum by my phone.

After doing some thinking about it, I decided that the ideal solution for me would be a check-in after x amount of time spent in a social media app to see if I’m doomscrolling and offer an alternative if so.

Now, I know there are other third-party apps out there you can install that probably do this. In fact, I’ve seen folks talk on Threads about how they have things set up so they have to get real digital permission from a friend to re-open an app. That’s not for me. Nor is a third-party app in general, because the idea of granting a third-party app access to all of my apps wigs me out a little.

So instead I turned to the Shortcuts app.

What I came up with

Using automations and shortcuts, I came up with a solution that asks me if I’m doomscrolling after 5 minutes in a social media app. My options to respond are:

• “yes, close the app”—takes me back to the Home Screen
• “yes, do something else”—takes me to a note entitled “doomscrolling alternatives” with links to Duolingo, the NYT games app, and several articles I found via my rss reader app that I want to read
• “nah, I’m good”—let’s me go about my business
  

I also have a habit of picking up my phone between chapters when I’m reading, so I set up another shortcut that turns on my reading focus state when I tap on a widget. Then, if I try to open a social media app while my reading focus state is on, it’ll close the app immediately and ask me if I want to keep reading or if I’d like to do other things now. If I say I want to do other things, it turns off the focus state and I can do whatever I want.

The initial shortcut is admittedly imperfect. The Shortcuts app can’t actually tell how much time has been spent in a specific app, so I’ve had to rely on setting a focus state for doomscrolling, and checking to see if it’s still active after a wait time. While I have another automation and shortcut that turns off my doomscrolling focus state if I close one of the social media apps, it does not stop the original shortcut from running. This means I could open an app, be in it for less than 5 minutes, close the app, then return to one of the other apps that sets the doomscrolling focus state before the original time is up, and get the original message. It also means I might get multiple of them back-to-back if I opened multiple of the apps that kick it off in quick succession.

But even so, I’m ok with my setup so far, because it’s already doing its job. After setting up the initial automations and shortcuts on Tuesday, my social media screen time dropped by half on Wednesday. And after setting up the reading focus state shortcut yesterday, my screen time is even lower today.

It’s of course far too early to know if any of this will work long-term, but in the meantime, I’m happy to spend less unintentional time on social media—and also I’ve had a lot of fun figuring out how the Shortcuts app works. It scratched an itch that hasn’t been scratched much since I left my job, and I’ve already made several other shortcuts and widgets since.

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Stay tuned, I guess. 🤷🏻‍♀️