Why do we doomscroll when we're stressed?

The reason we doomscroll when we are stressed is because it is a primal urge to scroll.

To do what? To scroll?

Evolutionarily, when you and I and all of the other humans were living in tribes, there was a night watchman who would keep tabs and look out throughout the night while the tribe slept. And now we are all our own night watchmen. We scroll and scan for danger. It is a way for us to feel safe. The reason we do this is because when you are feeling a sense of stress, you are governed by your amygdala. It is what's moving your brain forward. And so when your brain is driven by the amygdala, you are thinking only about survival and self-preservation. And scanning for danger is a way you feel safe. So what do we do in our modern times? We don't have a night watchman. We scroll. It's a way for us to scan for danger, to make sure that we are safe, that nothing is happening. And then, unfortunately, what happens is as we are scrolling, we see the headlines and the news and social media, and these are not benign entities. They have a direct impact on our brain chemistry. Clickbait works on the biology of stress. And news consumption and media consumption has a direct impact on our brain circuitry.

And so doomscrolling, I have had countless people say, I can't help myself, Doc. I just don't know. I remember several years ago during an election year, and we are currently in an election year, but I remember during that election year, I had a patient who told me, and I've written about this in the five resets. I had a patient who told I watch TV day and night. I watch the news day and night. I thought, I laughed like, Oh, that's a hyperbole. That can't be possible. And in fact, when I dug into his daily habits, his routine, he truly had his TV on day and night. It wasn't his fault. So if you, maybe you hear this and you think, I don't watch the news. Of course, right? A lot of young people don't actually watch TV. They watch on their phones. But why is it that you are scrolling and consuming news until 2:00, 3:00 in the morning? Why? I don't know. We all do it. And it's because it is your stress response. Your amygdala is driving that behavior. Not you, it's your amygdala. And so when you reset your stress, get your prefrontal cortex back in control, decrease the volume of your amygdala escuela, then you don't doomscroll as much.

It makes perfect sense to me that doomscrolling is the same thing as being on the night watch. Because if you think about your job, if you're the one that's protecting the tribe, vibe or your family, is you're standing there and you're scanning. You're looking for anything that seems out of place. You're looking for anything that's surprising, which is the exact same thing that you do when you doomscroll.

That's right. You're hyper vigilant.

Yeah. And here's the other thing that happens is because you are constantly met with a new post or something surprising. Here you are. It's like hearing the branch snap Outside the tent. What was that? And then there's another one, and then there's another one, and then there's another one. And so you're not going to go back to sleep because you keep hearing things that are keeping you in a state of needing to watch out for the tribe. Now you're sitting in modern in life, and you are doing that same evolutionary behavior, only you're now staring at the phone and all the branches cracking or every single little thing that's going by which keeps you awake. Because I've often wondered, why the hell Did I look at my phone at 8:30 last night? And next thing you know, I look up. It's 10:45. I've bought three things off of Instagram that I did not need. I have just mindlessly scrolled, and now I'm pissed off at myself because I should have gone to bed and wanted to have been in bed well over two hours ago. And I've spent money on things that I don't need that I now don't even remember buying.

And it is this constant loop. But the way you're explaining it as your Your amygdala is activated, that's what's going on, and that's what's having you fall prey to this behavior. And so the solution is to reset. The solution is to deactivate the amygdala because it is chronically screwing you up. Wow.

Turn down that volume. The reason you, from 8:45 till 10:45, you were experiencing something called revenge bedtime procrastination. It's something that all of us do. What is it? Particularly women. When your day is not your own and you are moving in a million different directions, competing priorities, parenting and work and all of the things that we have to do to manage our homes. It happens to all people, not just women, just parents and students. It happens to so many people when you, again, a patient story in the Five Resets is about a student who experienced revenge, bedtime procrastination. I talked to my sleep medicine colleague and I said, What is the number one tip you can give people for better sleep? And he told me, Ask every single patient that you see or every single person you see who is struggling with sleep, what are you doing 2 hours before bedtime? Let's say you want to go to bed at 9:00 PM, and you're up till midnight or 1:00, what are you doing 2 hours before? And case in point, you just describe what people do. You are on your screen. And revenge, bedtime procrastination is a manifestation, a toxic manifestation of hustle culture.

When your days are not your own, the children finally fall asleep, everything is calm, your work emails have calmed down. It is 8:30 at night, and you finally have some me time. So you procrastinate bedtime. It's like a rebellious teenager. You have that sense of like, I'm not going to bed at 9:00. I haven't even had any time for myself. I'm going to stay up. And then you stay up and you make bad choices and you buy different things or you binge watch TV. Again, a little bit of this is healthy. It's called hedonic happiness. We can talk about that later. A little bit of this is healthy. But when it becomes chronic and ongoing, and then you notice that you're going to bed every night at one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning and you're unable to get good rest and you wake up tired, and the next day you say, You know what? I am going to go to bed early. And then the same thing happens night after frustrating night. There was a study that found that it's not about knowledge and action. Every single person who was engaging in this revenge, bedtime procrastination, knew that they should go to bed early.

That wasn't the issue. It's not that behaviors change because you know better. It's behaviors only change when you do better. You talk We talk about this all the time, but the actual science showed that this is not a gap in knowledge. Everyone knows that early bedtime is important. It's a manifestation of hustle culture because even in spite of knowing that, Hey, an early night would do me well, you still say, No. I'm not going to because I have had a crappy day, and I'm not going to have a crappy day. Go into my night, I'm going to have a little bit of me time. So that's that.

If you were to literally just stop the doomscrolling and put your phone somewhere other than your bedroom at seven o'clock at night, and you create that boundary, and then you don't sleep next to it, and you don't look at it first thing in the morning. If you were to simply do that, your sleep would improve almost immediately.

Your sleep would improve immediately. The entire tenor of your day would change, and you would feel so much more grounded. You would feel whatever symptom that you're having of stress, there are many, it would have an immediate impact on your stress and your burnout. And Over time, if you continue to do that day after day after day, you will be a changed person.

What are your favorite boundaries?

One of the most important things is to keep your phone off your night stand and invest in a low cost alarm clock instead. What I love is your five second rule. When you get up out of bed, over 50% of people check the news or check their phones and check their emails. Think about what that's doing to your brain, what that's doing to your amygdala. If you are stressed and burned out, chances are you didn't sleep very well that night, or if you had a good night's sleep, great. But then immediately it's triggering all of these chemicals and the cascade in your brain. Instead, keep your phone away from your night stand. When you open your eyes, take in the morning light, and then do the five-second rule and get up out of bed. Then maybe go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, do some stretches, and then check your phone.

Okay.

So that is a key geographical boundary. What's another boundary? During the day at work, keep your phone out of sight so you decrease that primal scroll, keep it in a cubicle drawer, keep it out of arm's reach, 10 feet away from you in a cubicle drawer, just so it is not in your reach. The reason is because when you have that primal urge to scroll, what you want to do is you want to override it, and you want to create more intentionality around your media consumption.

I'll share personally that our executive producer, Tracy, will not allow me to have my phone when we are in a meeting. She will reach over if I grab it and It's literally like a mom, guide it out of my hand, put it away. And I'll tell you, she's right. You're just distracted. So even if it's near me and I have made it a habit, there's a a task table here at work where I set up when I'm in Boston, and my phone is always right over there. I don't have it on my person. I try not to carry it around. I try to put it back over there because I know how I just grab it and just grab it. Dr. Adidi, what's What's one hack you can do for better focus?

One thing you can do, Mel, is to put your phone in grayscale. When I really felt like my phone, who's in control me or my phone, and there were many moments in my life where I would say, It was my phone. Now, it's very much me. But I would switch my phone to grayscale, and just doing that with my screen made all the difference because all of the colors and the brightness and everything is just very enticing. So when it's grayscale, it makes it less enticing. It actively changes your brain. And How does it change your brain? Well, because big tech, they know exactly what they're doing. So when you have colors and patterns and beautiful images and this user interface, it makes it more enticing to continue using. Think about when something is black and white. If you switched your phone to grayscale today, try it today, switch your phone to grayscale, and it just becomes less enticing because the chemicals aren't going off in your brain, the neurotransmitters, because it's just boring.

Well, what I love about the way you're teaching this is that I've certainly heard a ton of people talk about the connection between stress and social media and stress and your phone and the need to get off your phone, and these topics. But when you explain it in terms of your amygdala turning on, and that your amygdala putting you in fight, flight, or freeze, Somehow knowing that makes this way more tangible. It also makes it way more important to me that I follow this advice and I pay attention to when the amygdala is in the show versus when I'm running the show. And these boundaries and this second reset is a way for you to run your life rather than letting the amygdala just kick into high gear and keep you hostage to all of this stuff.

That's right. I think my approach comes from decades of being a medical doctor and seeing patients. So every single thing that I offer to my patients During my talks in this book, The Five Resets, every single thing is free. That was really important to me because I have had patients from all walks of life with different resources, and that was critical to me. The second thing that I really aim to do with every single strategy I offer, of course, it's science-based, but that it is time-efficient. If we all could spend an hour getting a massage and then getting an acupuncture treatment and then going for a walk and all of the wonderful things that are available to anyone who has the means to do the time as well, then great. But for most people in everyday life, you have in over-scheduled life a million competing priorities, and often you put yourself last on that list. Stress and burnout, your own stress and burnout, your own mental health is like, Oh, I'll get to it when. But if not now, then when. And so really making sure that these strategies are easy and practical and can be something that you do today.

Many of these things you can start today. And it is all when it comes to your brain and rewiring your brain and body for less stress and more resilience or less stress and less burnout, these incremental changes a little bit every day can actually rewire your brain. It is not some big grand gesture that does it, like a massage once a month. Great. A nice bandaid. It'll help you. When you get a massage or when I get a massage, it feels great for a day. And then the next morning, I wake up and it's the same old stuff.

Now I know why, because the amygdala Is the issue. That is a thousand % what you're teaching us.

It's always the amygdala.

It's literally the amygdala. If the person listening wants to get a better night's sleep, As a Harvard-educated medical doctor and professor, what would you tell the person listening to do tonight in order to get a better night's sleep?

I always lead with self-compassion. So first is, if you are not sleeping well, you are not alone. It is not your fault. When you have better days, you will have better nights. Take sleep and your difficulty with sleep as a simple sign or a symptom of something that you want to work on. You can target it head-on with a lot of these strategies. Keep your phone off your night stand, invest in a low-cost alarm clock. First thing when you wake up, don't scroll, try to do something else. The other thing that I would say is two hours before bedtime, Limit your screens. Again, nothing is overnight. It doesn't work like magic. But if you start these today, give yourself eight weeks, but you will see a difference within a week. By the weekend, you should start feeling better. These things take shape quickly because your brain and your body are rewiring all the time. Your brain is a muscle. Neuroplasticity, a very fancy science word, but it means your brain is a muscle. It's not a grab bag. What you got for birth is what you got for life. It's not what it is. Your brain is like a muscle, just like a bicep.

So in exercise, the thing with sleep that's fascinating is that with exercise, if you did two-pound dumbbells, like 100 rolls with your biceps, you'd know that it's doing something. I mean, it's not going to do as much as a 10-pound, but you try it anyway. You're like, You know what? I'm going to try it. So think of your brain as a muscle. Try things out. Experiment. Understand that doing a little bit, a simple change, like keeping your phone off your night stand, could make all the difference and could be a game changer. It doesn't have to be this big, giant lifestyle overhaul. Also, your brain cannot handle big lifestyle overhauls when you are feeling a sense of stress, because even positive change, like all of these things that we're talking about, change is considered a stressor to your brain. Not all stress is created equal. The data shows that 70% of people are feeling a sense of stress and burnout at this very moment. My motto, how I was trained, was pressure makes diamonds.