Maybe you’ve broken your doom-scrolling habit, and if so, good for you. Some of us, however, are still guilty. But there might be a way to get all of the news you need without diving into a pit of despair.
If you’re a doom-scroller, the chunking method could help keep the habit under control while improving your mental health and allowing you to stay up-to-date on news.
The chunking method is pretty much what it sounds like. You’ll “chunk” your news consumption into timed sessions. The recommendation is to create two chunks of time of 10-15 minutes in the morning and at night. Catch up on what happened overnight in the morning, and at the end of the day see what missed while at work. Once your time is up, stop scrolling.
Kindle Paperwhite
Instead of scrolling, try reading a book, and with the Kindle Paperwhite, you won’t have the temptation of internet surfing.
Obviously, implementing the chunking method is going to take some willpower. You’ll need to be able to resist scrolling outside of your chunks, and there’s some major incentive to do so.
Sabrina Romanoff, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist, spoke with Well+Good regarding this habit change and explained that doom-scrolling can make your sympathetic nervous symptom do double time sending you into fight or flight and spiking stress hormones that disrupt sleep. When you set an intention to only consume a finite amount of news via the chunking method, you should be able to regulate your stress levels—at least when it comes to processing said news.
If you find yourself endlessly scrolling on your phone in bed or hitting snooze a few extra times to check Twitter, implementing the chunking method could help you feel more in control and less stressed.
