How to Stop Mindless Scrolling

You swipe upwards and more posts appear: an ad, a meme you’ve already seen, and a question everyone already knows the answer to – posted just to get comments. “I should stop this mindless scrolling and get back to work,” you think.

But deep down, you know that’s impossible. Work feels so daunting right now. You have twelve decisions to make before you can write up this proposal, and you don’t know the answers to any of them.

Scrolling, on the other hand, is easy. It’s so easy it seems like it’s happening without your conscious control. You’re just watching your thumb flick and new images appear. Will you find something to make you feel better?

Not exactly: it’s a post about politics saying exactly what you disagree with. It’s wrong in so many ways at once that your counterarguments have a traffic jam on the way out of your mouth and you’re left speechless. Yeah, this isn’t relaxing anymore.

“If I’m not going to work, I should at least take a walk and get some exercise,” you tell yourself.

But that brings a pang of guilt. How can you leave your desk when you have so much work to do?

The only thing that feels doable right now is to keep scrolling. It solves exactly zero of your problems, but it takes so little energy that you’re stuck there. You’ve fallen into the Guilt Trap.

The Guilt Trap: A Common Reason for Mindless Scrolling

That’s what I call it when you’re stuck between something you should do, and something you want to do. You should write your proposal, but you’re absolutely not going to. You want to take a walk, but that would mean admitting that you’re giving up on writing the proposal right now. 

It’s too hard to make the decision, because you’ll feel bad either way. So instead of making it, you default to something you don’t have to consciously choose, something that has become automatic. For most of us, that’s mindlessly scrolling social media. 

Of course, mindless scrolling won’t save you from guilt in the long run. What kind of day would you rather look back on: one you spent staring at your phone, getting vaguely stressed out by bad news and people who seem to have their lives more together than you? Or one that you spent outside, getting exercise and fresh air, and having spontaneous ideas that will make your work easier to do later?

Escaping into your phone won’t save you from the overwhelm, either: that proposal still has to get written.

The Guilt Trap is the worst of both worlds: you’re not being productive, and you’re not taking a restorative break so you can be productive later. The only reason you slide into it is because it’s easy.

Inner Conflict: The Root Cause

You might think that if you’re doing something just because it’s easy, that means you’re lazy. But that’s a misconception. There’s actually a very good reason why you’re stuck in the Guilt Trap.

What’s going on is, one part of you thinks you’re going to feel overwhelmed if you try to do your work, and it really wants to avoid that feeling. Meanwhile, another part of you really wants to do the work, because it feels so awful to fall behind on something important. 

So you’re not suffering from too little self-discipline – you’re suffering from too much inner conflict.

And in order to get out of the Guilt Trap, you need to resolve that inner conflict.

In fact, if you don’t address the conflict, you won’t really solve the problem, even if you force yourself to stop mindlessly scrolling by deleting your Instagram app or throwing your phone in a river. The scrolling isn’t the root of the problem, but a symptom of it. If you didn’t have social media to bury your head in, you might just be zoning out, eating a snack you’re not actually hungry for, or developing a newfound interest in cleaning out your closet. But the indecision would still be there.

On the other hand, when you resolve your inner conflict, decision-making gets easier. Both hard work and fun breaks start to feel possible, which means it’s not a huge deal which one you do first. In fact, inner peace (in the simple sense of not having an inner war going on) ushers in a virtuous cycle of work and rest. It becomes easier to take action on your work, and then you can take a break guilt-free, which means you genuinely enjoy your break, and then the break leaves you feeling ready to work again. I call this the Painless Productivity Cycle, in contrast to the Painful Productivity Cycle you get from inner conflict.

So I’ll show you three ways to release that inner conflict so you can stop your mindless scrolling and get back into the flow.

Strategy 1 to Stop Mindless Scrolling: Change Your Energy

First, let’s see if you can make a small change in your state right now so that going into work mode becomes possible. 

Sometimes, work feels too difficult just because you don’t have the right kind of energy flowing at the moment. Maybe you’re feeling lethargic, but your task requires high energy. Maybe you’re feeling antsy, but your task requires a kind of calm, focused energy. Often, it’s not that you don’t have enough energy, but that you’re not tapping into it right now.

If this is what’s going on, then you can resolve your inner conflict just by changing your energy. Your work will stop feeling so impossible, and so starting on your proposal will be the obvious choice. 

There are lots of ways to change your energy:

• Turn on music that reflects the way you want to feel. (For bonus points, dance to it!)
• If you have too little energy, do some light stretching and movement. This gets your blood flowing, which can make you feel more energetic. It doesn’t have to be a whole yoga class – just stand up and start stretching and moving in whatever way feels good. You can start by just moving your hands and then get more and more of your body involved as your energy grows.
• If you have too much energy to focus, you can discharge that energy through your body, by exercising, or through your mind, by writing down everything you’re worried about.

This should make you feel better! But it may or may not make it easier to get to work. So if it does, congratulations! You figured out the source of your problem and you addressed it. If not, we’ll try something else.

Strategy 2 to Stop Mindless Scrolling: Take Some Me Time

Sometimes, you won’t be able to get yourself to dance to fast-paced music. Those ideas will sound as impossible as the work does. If that’s the case, you probably don’t have enough energy to go into work mode right now. Maybe you need to go into rest mode first. 

Of course, you fell into the Guilt Trap because choosing rest mode triggers your guilt for not working. It’s like giving up! As long as you’re sitting at your desk you can pretend you’re just about to stop the mindless scrolling and get down to business.

But if you face your situation head-on, you can appease the part of you that says “no rest until your work is done.”

First, be honest with yourself. Name the fact that you don’t have the energy to do your work right now, no matter how much you want to.

Next, make a plan for how you will do the work once you’re rested. Carve out a specific amount of time to get the rest you need, so that the work-oriented part of you knows you’re not going to slack off forever. And pick a time to return to this project.

If you’re still feeling iffy about taking a break, see if you have enough energy to prepare for your later return to this project. There may be some low-energy tasks you can do that will make it easier to dive straight in later, like pulling up the files you’ll need to reference or making a list of questions you’ll need to ask.

Make sure to write down any thoughts you’re having about the work task so that you know it’s safe to take your mind away from work without losing critical information.

At this point, you’ve done everything you can to set your post-break self up for success. Did that do the trick? Can you let go of work now and come back to it later? 

If so, that’s great! The root cause of your inner conflict this time was that you just needed a genuine break. 

On the other hand, sometimes you’ll find yourself unable to truly get your mind off of your work concerns, or you’ll successfully take a break but run into the same problem as soon as you try to start working again. In that case, our search for the root of your inner conflict continues.

Strategy 3 to Stop Mindless Scrolling: Address Your Fears

So, you tried giving the anti-work part of you some more work-friendly energy. You tried giving the anti-rest part of you some assurances that taking a break doesn’t mean abandoning work forever. But it turns out, they have some more concerns that you haven’t addressed yet.

It turns out, a lack of energy isn’t the only thing that can block you from doing your work. Fears can also be a powerful force for procrastination. Fears like:

• “If I start doing my work and I get stumped, does that mean I’m not as smart as I thought – or even that I don’t deserve to be in my line of work?”
• “If I take a break when this work needs to be done, does that mean I’m an irresponsible person?” 
• “If I make a mistake while doing this work, will everything fall apart?”
• “If I put this work out into the world, will people judge me?”

Feeling undeserving, unsafe, or unaccepted is an awful experience, so parts of us figure it’s better to just avoid the work by mindlessly scrolling than to risk feeling that way. It’s really understandable, but it’s not very practical — you have work to do! So let’s look at the process of relaxing these fears.

Identify Your Fears

First, you have to figure out which fears are driving your procrastination. It’s not always obvious, because even feeling these fears is uncomfortable. Sometimes all we notice is that we feel tired, hungry, or antsy — the fear itself is hidden from our conscious awareness.

My free quiz, What’s Your Procrastination Type?, can help you get a sense of the kind of fear that’s pushing you into the Guilt Trap.

It’s a quick way to start to explore your motivations!

Transform Your Fears

Once you’ve figured out what fears you’re reacting to, it’s time to work with them. You can’t just nap these fears away — you have to address them directly. 

But you might find that if you simply explain to yourself rationally, “it’s okay if I get stumped, nobody knows all of the answers all the time, it doesn’t mean I’m stupid or an imposter,” it doesn’t really work. Your head might say “yeah, duh” while your stomach stays just as knotted, just as convinced that you need to avoid that work and that feeling of not knowing.

Or you might find that you can soothe your fear by calmly explaining how silly it is to yourself the first time, but that the fear just keeps coming back, even though you know better. And each time it comes back, it gets a little harder to ignore. Eventually, you run out of willpower, and the fear wins.

But it is possible to feel in your bones that it’s okay to not know everything, or to not please everyone, or to make mistakes. It’s just that we don’t learn those truths the same way we learn that 2 + 2 = 4. This kind of understanding happens on a subconscious level, so it requires experiential learning. Going from perfectionist to self-accepting isn’t a matter of taking in more information; it’s a matter of personal transformation. That’s why I offer transformational coaching: because all the productivity tips in the world don’t make a difference when what you need is that transformational “aha” moment.

Once you’ve had that full-body realization that it’s safe to do your work human-ly rather than perfectly, then facing your work gets easier. You don’t have to push yourself or trick yourself into working anymore, because the fear that was pulling you away from it isn’t active anymore. All the energy that used to go into fighting your inner conflict can now go into the work. 

Often, what stops people from addressing these fears is the worry that if they stopped being a perfectionist, they would perform at a lower level. But as the Guilt Trap shows us, wanting to perform perfectly often sabotages us more than it helps us. Resolving these fears can actually free you up to finally stop the mindless scrolling and do the best you can.

Check Out Painless Productivity

I specialize in guiding people into this experiential realization that they don’t have to do everything perfectly. My one-on-one coaching engagement, Painless Productivity, blends practical support with this transformational coaching in order to help you get stuff done without all the angst.

If you’d like to find out whether this kind of coaching could help you, check out the details of Painless Productivity. I don’t let anyone buy it without making sure they’re a good fit first, so if you’re considering moving forward on it, just book a free consultation and I’ll chat with you about whether it’s the right choice for you.