Comment by Tade0
4 hours ago
This is a method, but it's the underlying issue that needs to be resolved.
People doomscroll primarily to avoid certain thoughts/feelings/situations.
The way out of it is to:
1. Note that you're avoiding something.
2. Identify what it is.
3. Face it.
This is an addiction and reaching for the phone is just what gives relief to whatever pain one might be experiencing. Just removing that is laying ground for a substitute.
> This is an addiction and reaching for the phone is just what gives relief to whatever pain one might be experiencing. Just removing that is laying ground for a substitute.
This model would not suggest the results seen in studies like this:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11846175/
(The intervention was not "face the roots of your problems", it was "stop using your phone so much", and it produced positive impact.)
While a popular refrain, this is not the only reason one might engage in avoidance. Furthermore, even if it is rooted in a pain, not everyone will be motivated optimally by thinking of it as something that must be analyzed and extracted. One can simply be bored without it being a pathology.
My understanding is that when someone uses the term "doomscrolling", they mean something negative.
If one is so constantly bored that doomscrolling turns into an addiction, then that person most certainly is suffering from some kind of psychological imbalance. Occasional boredom is normal, constant boredom is not.
This should be at the top. It pisses people off because we reflexively think “I’m not a weak-willed procrastinator” or “I’m no addict” or “it’s not that simple”, but it is the truth, and the way to fix it, and harder than it sounds. We get frustrated looking for a dopamine hit elsewhere so we get it from a source we know. Running away from that source isn’t enough to end up running towards the behavior we want, there are a million different undesirable ways to get the hit.
That is something I want to eventually incorporate into VineWall.
My goal is to have VineWall to detect user patterns and use this information to help the user cope with the situations in a more healthy way
"don't change anything unless you can completely solve the root cause [assuming you have accurately identified it]" is really not backed up by research.
Plese refer to point 3. of my list. That is change.
which is implied to be only after step 2, which is essentially "find the cause", yeah.
there's plenty of benefit to be had from reducing harm while searching (or when wrong about the cause).
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