To wonder what the best way of reducing scrolling and time on social media is

[Fl100p555]

The default way seems to be to go cold turkey and just delete apps however there are good parts of SM I wish to keep and I think deleting isn’t necessarily realistic. Or is it?

I want to reduce my hours on it and scrolling hugely though.

Would setting a time and limits work? Has anybody got any suggestions or found anything that works? What is the ideal amount of time to allow in a day? I was thinking of maybe an hour.

Lots of great tips on here!

This is something I'd recommend to do so that you get more clarity of why and when you reach for the phone.

Start a very simple diary. Observe in a few words what happens to you / around you just before you start scrolling.

Find the trigger, the pattern that makes you reach for your phone. For example, waiting for the kettle to boil, when you think about a certain friend or situation, when you feel alone, irritated, bored, have time to kill, when you wait in line. When you sit down to relax, when you open your emails and get on a detour. Whatever it is for you.

Write down the actions you did that lead you to pick up your phone, the thoughts you ad just before you started scrolling, and what were you feeling. This can be tricky at first and doesn't need to be done perfectly, just try your best to list it.

Once you have that intel you can overcome temptation more and more.

Turn phone and computer off before dinner and after breakfast
Use the phone just as a phone, particularly if at work, driving, looking after young children.

Give yourself time, like a hobby, to go on social media - set one hour per day at a time that suits.

The Mindfulness Bell app does something like that, I think. I don't think you can set it to recognise when you're using a particular app though, so you'd have to start and stop it manually.

If you have Netflix, I watched The Social Dilemma last night and it made me think of this thread. Really worth a watch if you want to understand more about why these things are so addictive and what effects it has on people.

I did think parts of the programme were a bit naff - the whole dramatised storyline and the image of people in an office somewhere actively trying to get the boy's attention back to his social media feed was misleading/unhelpful (it doesn't work like that) and I find this frustrating because it builds an image which is not correct. And there were some narratives in the programme along the lines of "they" are doing this on purpose to keep everyone subdued, which I think was misleading too. They kept it very carefully unpolitical because I think they want it to appeal to both sides of any current divides. That's probably the right decision in terms of not making people instantly discount the entire thing, but something about it made me uncomfortable as well.

I think ultimately the motives of FB, Google, etc are not actively malicious, but we SHOULD be aware that their motives are financial, rather than what benefits us as the user, just like tobacco companies, gambling companies, Coke, McDonalds, etc. And that there are definitely malicious actors willing to jump on these platforms and use them to mislead people on purpose, and while the big tech companies pay lip service to trying to stop this, they will only ever do the bare minimum there and not solve the actual underlying problem because that does not benefit them financially.

Are you wasting all your time at work scrolling for 8 hours a day? Or ignoring kids if you are at home with them? I don't understand how you have that amount of free time to spend on the phone

I’ve just deleted all my games on my phone except Candy Crush - not ready to go cold turkey on that yet…
im thinking about deleting social media apps on my phone but leaving on my iPad but there’s a couple of good FB pages that I like having access too (stuff for my kid’s groups and a local info page that’s great for road / weather updates that’s saved me from traffic disasters on my way home. So dilemma…
but the time I spend on my phone aimlessly scrolling is awful 😢

if you have an iPhone you can set time limits on apps. I would suggest an hour limit per day for all social media apps - that’s what I do

I’ve set a 30 mins mumsnet limit and 3 hour limit on all other non essential apps. Not touching my phone before 8am and not taking it into bed at night - will leave on charge in other room. Starting with manageable goals!

Some phones have app lock options which stop you using them after a certain amount of time via the digital wellbeing settings.

Disabling notifications helps hugely though.

I installed an app called kobo so that I can read e-books on my phone, and that helped me to stop the doom scrolling. I recommend Lou sanders book, fern Brady's book, 'ten things I hate about me' by Joe tracini, 'love nina' by Nina stibbe, and 'went to London, took the dog' also Nina stibbe. All these books were easy to read and kept me off social media. There's also the borrowbox app if you have a library card - you can read magazines on there, as well as e-books.

Haven’t RTWT but a tip I learned on mn was to buy a phone jail. It locks for a certain amount of time so you can’t access your phone. You can still answer calls.

Timer apps and such don’t work for me. I need to have no access. I also switch my phone off which stops me looking at it.

I bought a smart watch for this a month ago when my little son got angry and said I'm always on my phone. He was right and it spurred me into action.

I can now put the phone in another room but still get notifications of calls and messages on my smartwatch so don't have to worry I'm missing anything important. Has limited my scrolling.

Also set my alarm this morning and kept my phone out of the bedroom - I'm sure I've lost hours of sleep every week by scrolling before falling asleep and then in the night when waking.

Mumsnet is my downfall! Need to find a way to limit time on here.

The guardian has also just started a weekly newsletter to help people cut down on their scrolling - I signed up to it yesterday

Going to catch up on updates and suggestions. So I now have an alarm clock in my room and it helps a lot! No scrolling before bed or whilst getting ready to go to work( just leaving now and gave myself 10 mins whilst eating breakfast). I got so much paperwork done last night and read a whole short story. If it’s downstairs you just can’t be arsed to go and get it. I also woke up in the night and instead of reaching for phone to check time which results in scrolling I just went back to sleep. It’s a start.

So bloody difficult. I’ve deleted Facebook app but end up logging in online. Once I go on tik tok that’s an hour gone easily (despite telling myself 10 mins).

I love reading and am trying to do 50 books a year this year. I’ve spent the last couple of months always having a book on the go-carrying it around the house with me and when I find myself doom scrolling I make myself pick up the book. It worked for a few weeks but then here I am again and I really did have to try. But I felt 100% better when I read more and scrolled less.

leaving my phone plugged in in a certain room also helps.

ots awful and addictive isn’t it. Good luck x

I have benefited from setting my phone to greyscale (using bedtime mode). It makes scrolling much less addictive

I’ve deleted the SM apps but then bookmarked the links to the web versions and saved them with an icon to the Home Screen, so it acts as if it were an app. The web versions of SM don’t have reels and the algorithm is different so hugely reduces scrolling time without losing the good bits!

I've been using an app called Erika. It's really good