You're tired. Not "had a late night" tired. More like "bone-deep, existential, why-does-everything-require-so-much-f*cking-effort" tired. The kind of tired where you've technically had eight hours of sleep but still feel like you've been gently beaten with a sock full of obligations and then told to be grateful for the experience.
So you do the reasonable thing. You collapse into bed, grab your phone, and scroll. Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn (LOL), whatever. Just for a few minutes to "decompress." Three hours later your eyes are burning, your thumb's cramping, and your brain feels like it's been through a blender, but at least you relaxed, right?
Wrong. So spectacularly, measurably wrong that scientists have written actual papers about how wrong you are.
If you've ever wondered why you're always tired despite spending your evenings doing "nothing," congratulations! You've stumbled onto the answer. What constitutes rest vs scrolling through an infinite feed are two wildly different things.
(New here? This is what we mean by anti-wellness wellness and why there are ducks.)
Your phone is essentially a slot machine, and you're losing
Social media feeds are engineered using something called variable ratio reinforcement, which is the same reward schedule that makes slot machines the most profitable machines in any casino. The rewards (a funny meme, a satisfying video, a notification that someone liked your photo from 2019) are unpredictable, and your brain's dopamine system goes absolutely feral for unpredictable rewards. You know who else exploits this exact mechanism? Casinos. You're essentially playing the pokies in your pyjamas, except instead of losing money you're losing your entire evening and any chance of feeling rested tomorrow.
A 2025 paper in Perspectives in Public Health coined the term "dopamine-scrolling" and flagged it as a genuine public health concern, noting that social media operates through "reward mechanisms and variable reinforcement schedules" (Sharpe & Spooner, 2025). Neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz's landmark work on reward prediction showed why this is so effective; your dopamine neurons fire hardest not when you find something good, but in anticipation of finding something good, and uncertain rewards generate stronger dopamine responses than predictable ones (Schultz, 1997). So every swipe is a tiny gamble. Swipe, nothing. Swipe, nothing. Swipe, oh that's funny. Swipe, nothing. Your brain doesn't learn to stop; it learns to keep pulling the lever. Brilliant design, honestly. F*cking bastards.
Meanwhile, the average time a person spends on any single screen before switching to another has dropped from two and a half minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds. That's not a statistic about kids or TikTok addicts; that's all of us, measured across two decades of research by attention scientist Gloria Mark at UC Irvine (Mark, 2023). Forty-seven seconds. We have the collective attention span of a caffeinated goldfish.
So when you think you're "switching off" by scrolling, your brain is actually working overtime processing information, making rapid-fire micro-decisions (like, skip, save, swipe), and chasing the next dopamine hit from an endless stream of novelty. It's not a break. It's a second shift you're not even getting paid for.
The blue light thing is real, and it's worse than you think
You've probably heard the blue light lecture before, and your response was probably to buy a pair of those orange glasses and continue scrolling. Fair enough, but the research on this is pretty damning, and the glasses are doing approximately f*ck all for the actual problem.
A 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (which is about as prestigious as it gets in "scientists proving things" journals) found that reading from a light-emitting screen for four hours before bed, compared to reading a printed book, suppressed melatonin, delayed sleep onset, reduced REM sleep, and left participants groggier the next morning. The blue-enriched light from your screen, peaking around 450nm, hits specialised receptors in your eyes (called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, because scientists love a good time) and signals your brain's master clock to delay the whole sleep process (Chang et al., 2015).
In plain English: your phone is telling your brain it's lunchtime when it's actually midnight, and then you wonder why you can't fall asleep or why you wake up feeling like you've been assembled incorrectly. You're gaslighting your circadian rhythm nightly with a small glowing rectangle.
Doomscrolling is stress with better lighting
It gets worse, because of course it does.
The content itself is actively stressing you out. Research consistently links heavy doomscrolling to worse mental wellbeing and increased psychological distress (Satici et al., 2023), and a 2024 study of 800 adults found it evokes greater existential anxiety (Shabahang et al., 2024).
Existential anxiety. From your phone. While you're in bed. In your nice pyjamas. Amazing.
The likely mechanism is what you'd expect; when you're processing a steady stream of negative or comparison-inducing content, your brain's threat-detection systems don't get a break. Unlike a single stressful event, which your body handles and moves on from, doomscrolling delivers dozens of small stress inputs in rapid succession with no pause for processing or recovery. Someone's perfect kitchen renovation. A war. A celebrity's abs. A climate report. A cat video. Another war. Your ex looking annoyingly happy. It's death by a thousand tiny anxiety-inducing cuts, and no amount of lying in a comfortable bed, burying yourself in a goose-down duvet changes the fact that you've essentially invited a low-grade threat into your sanctuary, habitually, every single night.
Your brain has a "rest mode." Scrolling disables it.
In 2001, neuroscientist Marcus Raichle identified something called the default mode network (DMN), a system of interconnected brain regions that fires up when you're not focused on any external task. It's what happens when you stare out the window, let your mind wander, or sit in the bath thinking about nothing in particular. Your brain doesn't switch off; it switches inward (Raichle et al., 2001).
This inward mode isn't idleness. A 2012 paper literally titled "Rest Is Not Idleness" (for real life) found that the default mode network is crucial for processing experiences, consolidating memories, imagining future scenarios, and making sense of your place in the world. The researchers called this "constructive internal reflection" and argued it's essential for learning from your past and making better choices (Immordino-Yang et al., 2012).
Here's the catch, though; your default mode network is preferentially active when you're not focused on external stimuli, and it's largely suppressed when you are. The second you pick up your phone and start processing someone else's content, your DMN quietens down and your task-positive network takes over. In other words, every time you reach for your phone during downtime, you are literally preventing your brain from doing the maintenance work it needs to do. It's like interrupting a software update every 30 seconds and then complaining that your laptop is slow.
So what does actual rest look like?
Actual rest involves disengaging from external input and letting your default mode network do its thing. It's:
- Putting your phone in another room (not on silent in your pocket, actually in another room, where it can think about what it's done)
- Having a conversation with someone you like
- Going for a walk without headphones
- Cooking a meal (no, not two-minute noodles)
- Sitting outside doing absolutely nothing
- Reading a book (NOT self-help, for the love of God)
- Playing boardgames
- Spending time with people who enrich your life
Notice what's missing from all of these? Screens. Notifications. The crushing weight of the internet's opinions about meaningless shit.
Real rest isn't passive, though; it involves actively choosing to disengage from the noise, presence over performance, and remembering that your life is meant to be lived, not documented for strangers who don't give a f*ck about you anyway. Harsh? Maybe. But your phone doesn't love you back, and pretending otherwise is how we ended up here.
The inconvenient truth
We default to scrolling because it's easy, not because it's restful. However, easy and restorative are not the same thing, and if you're constantly choosing easy, you'll remain tired. Not sleepy-tired. Soul-tired, deep down to your core.
If the mere idea of putting your phone down for ten minutes fills you with dread, that's probably a sign you need to do exactly that. And if you want a foolproof way to start, try doing it in the bathroom. It's the one place where you're allowed to disappear without explanation, where no one follows you in (unless you have small kids, or pets, or a spouse who wants to know where the sandwich press is), and where you are granted some socially acceptable solitude.
Leave your phone in another room. Sit there for ten minutes. Prove to yourself that you can survive without your screen for 600 consecutive seconds.
Your phone will still be there when you're done. Unfortunately.
Read more
Chang, A.-M., Aeschbach, D., Duffy, J. F., & Czeisler, C. A. (2015). Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(4), 1232–1237.
Immordino-Yang, M. H., Christodoulou, J. A., & Singh, V. (2012). Rest is not idleness: Implications of the brain's default mode for human development and education. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 352–364.
Mark, G. (2023). Attention span: A groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness, and productivity. Hanover Square Press.
Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(2), 676–682.
Satici, S. A., Gocet Tekin, E., Deniz, M. E., & Satici, B. (2023). Doomscrolling scale: Its association with personality traits, psychological distress, social media use, and wellbeing. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 18, 833–847.
Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275(5306), 1593–1599.
Shabahang, R., Hwang, H., Thomas, E. F., Aruguete, M. S., McCutcheon, L. E., Orosz, G., Hossein Khanzadeh, A. A., Mokhtari Chirani, B., & Zsila, Á. (2024). Doomscrolling evokes existential anxiety and fosters pessimism about human nature? Evidence from Iran and the United States. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 15, 100438.
Sharpe, B. T., & Spooner, R. A. (2025). Dopamine-scrolling: A modern public health challenge requiring urgent attention. Perspectives in Public Health, 145(4), 190–191.
P.S. If you're reading this thinking "right, but I literally cannot put my phone down," fair. The free Reclaim Your Boring: 7-Day Neuro-Reset Protocol is seven days of structured boredom that costs nothing but ten minutes of your evening. Your dopamine system will hate it. Your brain will thank you.
P.P.S. I post about corporate burnout and mild anxiety without the toxic positivity over on Instagram. If that's your kind of thing, come say hi.
P.P.P.S. New here? What is anti-wellness wellness, and what's with the ducks? 🦆
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