65 | How to Stop Doomscrolling with Two Simple Phone Changes

You didn’t plan to scroll. The day was going well, you were present and focused, moving through your tasks with intention. Then your phone buzzed. One notification pulled you in, and what followed wasn’t really a conscious choice. It was simply what happened next.

That’s doomscrolling. It rarely starts with a decision. More often, it starts with an interruption, and most of us don’t realize how much those interruptions are costing us throughout the day.

This is part two of a three-week series on breaking phone addiction through tiny tweaks to your phone setup. If you missed reading part one, it lays the groundwork for everything we’re building here. Last week, we focused on what you see when you pick up your phone. This week, we’re moving to a different layer of the same problem: what your phone sends to you before you even pick it up at all.

What Is Doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling is that almost involuntary loop of scrolling through content that leaves you feeling worse than when you started. News, social media, headlines, one thing leading endlessly to the next, long past the point where you intended to stop. It doesn’t feel like a choice in the moment. It feels more like something that just happened.

Merriam-Webster officially defines doomscrolling as spending excessive time scrolling through online content, especially news, that makes you feel sad, anxious, or angry. The word wasn’t even added to the dictionary until 2023, which tells you something about how widespread and recognizable this experience has become.

The Real Cost of Interruptions

Here’s something worth pausing on before we get to the tweaks. According to researcher Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, a single interruption can cost you up to 23 minutes and 15 seconds of focused attention. Not seconds. The better part of half an hour.

That quick glance at a notification, therefore, isn’t just a momentary detour. It’s potentially costing you the better part of half an hour of real, concentrated focus. Furthermore, you don’t even have to pick up your phone for the damage to occur. A buzz or a banner is enough to break your train of thought, and getting it back takes longer than most people realize. Multiply that across a full day and the scattered, stretched-thin feeling by evening suddenly makes a great deal more sense.

The good news is this: your phone doesn’t get to decide when it interrupts you. You do. That’s exactly what this week’s two tiny tweaks are designed to help you take back.

What Doomscrolling Has to Do with Your Notifications

Every notification your phone sends is an external cue, a signal specifically engineered to pull your attention back to the screen. When that cue fires, your brain responds automatically, often before you’ve made a single conscious choice. In other words, it’s the same habit loop we explored in part one, just triggered differently. Instead of a visual cue sitting on your home screen, it’s an audio or tactile cue interrupting you throughout the day.

Turning off even one notification, consequently, interrupts that cycle before it starts. Changing what you see when you do pick up your phone redirects where it leads you. Together, these two tweaks shift the dynamic in a way that willpower simply cannot.

Two Tiny Tweaks

Both changes take under a minute. Neither requires any ongoing discipline once they’re done.

Tweak One

Turn Off One Notification Completely

Pick the app that interrupts you most automatically, the one whose alerts pull you away even when you had no intention of picking up your phone. For many people that’s a social media app. For others it’s a shopping app, a news app, or email. You likely already know which one it is.

Here’s how to turn it off fully:

One important note: don’t settle for simply changing the notification type, switching from a sound to a badge, for example. Turn it off completely. Give yourself the full experience of that silence and pay attention to what you notice.

The internal shift this creates is more significant than it initially sounds. When you turn off a notification, you are deciding when you go to your phone rather than letting your phone summon you. That small act of reclaiming the decision changes the dynamic entirely. It’s also one of the most direct ways to interrupt the doomscrolling cycle before it has a chance to start, since you’re removing the cue that triggers the loop in the first place.

Tweak Two

Change Your Lock Screen to Something Intentional

This tweak works differently from the first. Rather than removing something, you’re replacing something. Specifically, you’re replacing a passive, default image with something that actively calls you back to what matters the moment your eyes land on your screen.

Your lock screen is likely the most-seen image in your life. Every time you check the time, reach for your phone, or respond to an interruption, it’s the first thing you see. Most people have never made a deliberate choice about what lives there.

A few options worth considering:

• A photo of your family that reminds you instantly why being present matters more than scrolling
• A Scripture verse image saved from your Bible app or from someone you follow
• A simple word or phrase created in Canva, something like “Be Present” or “Be Still”
• A wallpaper designed specifically to reorient your attention

That last option is also the easiest. The free Digital Wallpaper Gallery includes a curated collection of designs created specifically for this purpose, with words, phrases, and imagery designed to redirect your heart every single time you pick up your phone.

Whatever you choose, the goal is the same. Every time you reach for your device, whether intentionally or out of habit, the first thing you see pulls you toward intention rather than distraction. You’re replacing one kind of interruption with a far better one.

The Still Small Voice

There’s a passage in 1 Kings 19 that speaks directly to what we’ve been exploring today. The prophet Elijah is exhausted and overwhelmed, and God shows up. Not in the great wind that tears the mountains apart. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire. After all of that noise and force, Scripture tells us there was a still small voice, a gentle whisper. That is where God was.

It’s a passage worth sitting with in the context of our phones. When our days are filled with buzzing, alerting, and constant pulling at our attention from every direction, we are not living in the quiet where that still small voice has room to reach us. Reducing the noise, then, isn’t simply a productivity strategy. It’s a way of making yourself more available to what God wants to say to you throughout your day.

In that light, something as simple as changing your lock screen takes on a different kind of significance. That small choice means every time you pick up your phone, something is pointing you back toward what matters. Even a breath of reorientation, repeated dozens of times each day, adds up to something meaningful.

Two tiny tweaks: turn off one notification completely, and change your lock screen to something that calls you back to intention. Small steps lead to big impact.

Take It Deeper

If you want to go further than these two tweaks, the Focus Modes Made Simple workshop was built for exactly this next step. In one hour, you’ll learn how to set up your phone so it actively protects your time and guards your attention, supporting your spiritual rhythms rather than competing with them. It also includes a gallery of 40 digital wallpapers designed specifically for every different Focus Mode.

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FAQ

What is doomscrolling?

Doomscrolling is the habit of compulsively scrolling through negative or overwhelming online content, often without a conscious decision to do so. Merriam-Webster defines it as spending excessive time scrolling through content that makes you feel sad, anxious, or angry. It typically begins with a notification or a quick check and escalates into an extended loop of passive consumption.

Why is doomscrolling so hard to stop?

Doomscrolling is difficult to stop largely because it rarely feels like a choice in the moment. Notifications create automatic cues that trigger the behaviour before your conscious mind has a chance to intervene. Additionally, the unpredictable nature of social media feeds activates your brain’s reward system in a way that makes it genuinely hard to disengage once you’ve started.

How do I stop doomscrolling without deleting all my apps?

The most effective starting point is removing the environmental cues that trigger doomscrolling in the first place. Turning off notifications for your most distracting app eliminates the signal your phone uses to pull you back to the screen. Changing your lock screen to something intentional adds a moment of redirection every single time you pick up your device. Neither change requires deleting apps or relying on willpower.