How do I stop scrolling?
By No Rush · Updated October 28, 2026
The short answer
Make starting a little harder. Take one app off your home screen or log out of it, and put your phone in another room for an hour a day. Quitting everything at once is harder to keep up. In one study, an hour less a day held up better after four months than a whole week without a phone.
Why is it so hard to stop scrolling?
Your phone gives you something within a second, and people repeat what pays off fast. Everyone learns that way, so it says nothing about your character. In a large experiment, Hunt Allcott and colleagues estimated that about 31 percent of the time people spent on their phone was more than they themselves wanted.
How to avoid scrolling?
Make the app harder to reach. Find the one you open without thinking and take it off your first screen, or log out so you have to sign in again. In the first days you will probably look for it a few times. In the same experiment, people who chose their own daily time limit used their phone 16 percent less.
Is it better to cut down or to quit completely?
In one study, cutting down lasted longer. Julia Brailovskaia and colleagues split 619 people in Germany into groups for a week. One group used the phone an hour less every day. Another put it away completely. The hour-less group felt better, and four months later more of that was left than in the group that stopped completely.
Is social media bad for you?
It's less clear than headlines suggest. Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski looked at data from more than 350,000 teenagers. Screen use explained at most 0.4 percent of the differences in how well they were doing. That doesn't settle it for you. Whether an evening of scrolling costs you something, you can judge better than a study.
What do I do instead?
Decide beforehand what goes in its place, or the empty moment pulls you back. A book on your pillow, the kettle on when you get home. In a study by Marieke Adriaanse and colleagues, a plan that only said what people would not do worked worse than a plan with something to do instead.
In the No Rush app
The app has a step called "One app a tap further away": you pick one app you often open without planning to and take it off your first screen. Another step has you put your phone in another room for an hour, with the sound on. What you do in that time is up to you.
No Rush app
An iPhone app for people who feel stuck. It sets out one small next step at a time and tells you why that one. It is not therapy.
Sign up free Take the test For iPhone. Coming soon to the App Store. The first seven days are free in the app. After that, you choose whether to subscribe. Sign up now and the app stays free for you, for life.
Sources
- Allcott, Gentzkow & Song (2022). Digital addiction. American Economic Review, 112(7), 2424-2463. doi.org/10.1257/aer.20210867
- Brailovskaia e.a. (2022). Finding the "sweet spot" of smartphone use: Reduction or abstinence to increase well-being and healthy lifestyle?! An experimental intervention study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 29(1), 149-161. doi.org/10.1037/xap0000430
- Orben & Przybylski (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173-182. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1
- Adriaanse e.a. (2011). Planning what not to eat: Ironic effects of implementation intentions negating unhealthy habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(1), 69-81. doi.org/10.1177/0146167210390523
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