Old habits die hard. I wake up in the morning, and my gut instinct is to scroll.

America is back to being weird and scary as fuck and the urge to preserve my mental health is in constant tension with my wish to stay “informed.” I thought that getting rid of the social media apps on my phone would mitigate this- you can’t obsess over what isn’t there. The muscle memory remains, though. The habit. The “wake and bake” of the 21rst Century where our first instinct on resuming consciousness is “Shit, better fix that” and roasting our minds to a blackened husk on information before we go about our day.

I don’t have that anymore. I have YouTube and a couple of webcomics I follow, but I still feel the need to scroll something and get some insight to the world- in this particular way- that I missed out on while I was foolishly trying to sleep.

I flick between YouTube’s news stories and the webcomics to my remaining social media business app. No feed there, just “who answered your latest scream into the void.” I don’t see anything from anyone unless they specifically message or mention me. It’s about as “transmit only” someone can get on social media- screaming as loud as you can, but only answering anyone when they tap you on the shoulder. I won’t lie, I miss some of the community I had on social media and the interactions with friends, but it was taking too much of me.

I flick through my junk-mail-stuffed email, to even my goddamn bank balance. Anything that can be scrolled gets scrolled. It’s ridiculous and I know it, the idea of “staring at this little prism and stroking it like a dead dogs fur will show me all I need to fear the world” is still embedded in my hands.

The Pez candy dispenser was famously designed to mimic the motion of a cigarette lighter to help people quit smoking. E-Cigarettes began the same way, mimicking the feel and use of an actual cigarette. What would the Pez dispenser of a social media feed look like? Has someone made a social media fidget? If they have, it probably costs $20 a month to get rid of the ads. I’d rather just eat the Pez by the roll.

Apps like “one sec” exist, but they just act like a child-lock for your phone and disrupt the instinctive motion/dopamine release. When you try to open a social media app, they interrupt with “Are you sure you want to do that?” It can keep you off social media so much for sure, but it’s not the same as breaking muscle memory. Just having a “healthy” alternative isn’t enough either. Duolingo loves to advertise the benefits of doing 15 minutes of language lessons versus the benefits of doomscrolling (I’ll take nightmarish visions of a green owl over chronic anxiety and depression any day.) but it’s not nearly as easy to replaces a habit as start a new one, especially if that new habit is radically different. You don’t scroll Duo. Duo scrolls you.

Routines and habits are boon and bane to people with mental illnesses and addictions. The same strong, repetitive compulsions that keep us locked into unhealthy behaviors can help us break free of them- if we replace them with something better and then maintain them. One of the cooks at the winery asked me if I thought it was weird that he needed to start his day in a specific order and that it felt “off” if he didn’t.

“Not weird at all,” I told him, pouring hot water over the tea bag I’ve substituted for a canned energy drink lately. “For folks like you and me, habits are the bookmarks in our day. They’re the plot ‘beats’ in the stories of our lives, reminding us of where we are in the day and keeping us grounded.” We all have little rituals in our day that things don’t feel right without. Those things that now feel so natural we can’t remember how we lived before we got our morning coffee, that first cigarette on the way to work, or that drink after work with the fellas. Once upon a time, my Ritual of Stroking the Doomprism made me feel like I was informed about the world I was about how hop out of my safe warm bed to join. It came with a price long in paying that I no longer want to honor, and I don’t even want to replace the ritual, but my hands and instincts haven’t quite gotten the memo yet.

Let’s think for a moment together- what do we get from doomscrolling? According to the Mayo Clinic, doomscrolling is an escape mechanism for anxiety. It’s very much a case of “what I know about can’t hurt me as badly”- and it just so happens that all of the news is either bad or good and affirming your worst fears. Staying informed through social media, they say, isn’t so bad- letting that need to be “informed” consume your life and mental state is not, and they recommend regularly checking in with reality and your mood.

Dear Mayo Clinic- reality and my mood are both currently deeply fucked, and I am interested in your ideas on how to fundamentally reboot both. As it is, I get my information more carefully, and have (largely) dispersed feelings of despair with crafts and hobbies. You can’t feel powerless when you tactilely create something that wasn’t in the world before.

Lying in bed, my cat seems to belive she has the answer. Seeing either of her humans awake and poking those weird little rectangles that make them act funny, Cleos first instinct is to insert her fuzzy little face right between ours and the rectangle, nudging at the active hand for scratches and pets. Cleo clearly lives in a softer fuzzier reality where the news of the day is “I get food, I get pets, I get to nap with the humans.” Setting the phone down to oblige, I can feel myself laugh and buy in. “Yes, kitten. Daddy is silly- you need your scritches.” Immediately my mood elevates, and reality is more pleasant. Maybe the Mayo Clinic should add “get a cat and knit a scarf” to its article.

Stay Classy,