tl;dr Don’t keep your charger handy. Don’t have a good charger. Lose your phone (at home). Don’t have a phone case. Have a phone case.
Quite literally "cold-turkey'ed" from 4.5-ish hours/day to 2 hours a day in a single day, consistent over the last few weeks.
I set up my second phone with a custom homescreen, and installing the 'bad' apps on there (Instagram, Youtube, NYTimes in particular). I dont use it for other apps.
Now if I want to scroll, which I still do sometimes, I have to walk to a specific chair next to which my 'addiction phone' is, I'll scroll for 10-15 minutes, and get back to the real world. I used to have particular issues with scrolling during vibe-coding sessions, and I'm genuinely surprised how well this approach worked for me.
The sense of slowness creates the conditions for pausing and being mindful of what you're doing.
In spirit, this reminds me of the return to slow/analog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084980
Consider it the no- or low-alcohol alternative to full speed. https://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
I didn't make it slow and buggy on purpose though. Apple did that for me with Liquid glass. Which I guess works!
This isn't a personal problem. It is a social one, and there lies the solution. These apps are engineered for addiction, to Dubai our attention and lives. The companies behind them should br punished and their employees ashamed.
Society must curb socially and environmental nocive organizations.
Hard blocks (gotta re enable noprocrast here asap) and behavioral nudges like keeping an ebook with page open positioned inconveniently close and my phone out of reach work better for me.
I guess this is done on the device as a VPN via Apple's NetworkExtension config. But instead of a normal VPN where traffic goes through a server, the app just locally applies rules based on the app the packet came from and then routes them normally to their destination.
This probably uses a vpn? It’s important to think about how to stop me disabling it casually. I use Opal which blocks my settings page too. Which works great but frustratingly it blocks my legitimate needs very often too!
I use it to straight up disallow a bunch of apps and websites (tiktok, Reddit, YouTube, etc.)
For a while I even uninstalled safari which you can just do with this. Not having a browser at all on your phone is a neat experiment and really changed how I interact with tech on the go.
I did eventually install safari back, but overall I prefer the Apple Configurator setup a lot over any of these kinds of apps.
People doomscroll primarily to avoid certain thoughts/feelings/situations.
The way out of it is to:
1. Note that you're avoiding something.
2. Identify what it is.
3. Face it.
This is an addiction and reaching for the phone is just what gives relief to whatever pain one might be experiencing. Just removing that is laying ground for a substitute.
I was reminded of when Apple started slowing down the CPUs on older phones. Would be nice if you could just configure that on first run. "How addictive would you like your phone to be, sir?"
Here’s something else you can try: take off your phone case. My phone screen is scratched to hell and I think it runs slower from dropping it without a case so many times.
Someone should run a randomized trial with screen time against phone case usage. I wonder what would show up. Imagine the human connection and true critical thinking that would happen with just a 1% decrease in screen time!
This model would not suggest the results seen in studies like this:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11846175/
(The intervention was not "face the roots of your problems", it was "stop using your phone so much", and it produced positive impact.)
I would not last 5 minutes.
I'm occasionally offline outside planes and the amount of times I pull out my phone to "google something really quick" is high.
You can already disallow apps without an MDM, but I'm curious what else you can do with it. I generally uninstall apps like Instagram so it takes a minute to even download it again, but it gives me a way to download it, post something and delete it once a week or so.
A perfect solution that works 100% is not the goal. Small influences that can help you change behavior can still be beneficial. Maybe they doom scroll 5% less because of this tweak? Still a positive change.
Ask your spouse or a friend you trust to set screen time passcode. You can’t bypass it and you’re not going cold turkey either or losing an important utility like Safari.
Doom scroll all you want in 2 mins then it’s locked for the day.
I have succeeded and it’s been 3+ months.
There was also Twitter, which had also solved the problem by itself. After the take-over, the quality of content rapidly plummeted so hard, at certain point I just didn't feel like ever visiting the site again.
So I'm almost thankful to these companies for actively pushing people out like that, y'know? I'm just sorry for people still stuck in there, it must be even more miserable presently...
I mean if someone wants to try something in this direction, but without the misery, I'd suggest things like making the screen monochromatic, which will make the content seem less appealing to the brain, but without that being a nuisance.
May 28, 2026
I bought a brand new iPhone and immediately made it slow on purpose.
Last year I got a brand new iPhone 17 shortly after it came out. It was a bit ironic to spend that much on a phone just to build the thing that would slow it down.
Slowing down your own phone on purpose sounds… unconventional, but I had a good reason for it.
For a long time I struggled with doomscrolling. I tried the usual stuff (cold turkey, app blockers) but they didn’t address the craving, and they were easy enough to bypass on top of that, none of it worked.

How far would you go for a chocolate cookie?
If you had a little machine in your pocket that baked a fresh one any time you wanted, you’d eat way more cookies than you do now, probably one every time you got mildly bored.
But if the closest cookie were a four-hour drive away, you’d eat almost none, even if you love cookies.
Or if there were a cookie in your kitchen, but it was stale, you’d mostly leave it alone.
The phone, of course, is the cookie machine in your pocket. So how do you make the cookies harder to get, or less appetizing? Slow it down!
There are not many options to make a phone slower, but there is one that also happens to be the Achilles heel of many apps that cause you to doomscroll: Internet speed.
Showing a new video every time you mildly flick your finger up, at nearly instant speed, requires a fast and stable internet connection.
Knowing all that, I decided to build VineWall, an iOS app that can control the internet speed of some apps, and use this control to make the “cookie” more stale and harder to get.
It squeezes the apps, tighter and tighter!

Unlimited speed

Capped speed, mild blocky
Right off the bat the speed is capped at the speed of a spotty cellular connection. It is not enough to stop any app, but enough for the videos to get “blocky” and not look as crisp as we are used to.
As the scrolling continues, the throttling increases and video image quality decreases. Apps that rely on text content (such as Reddit, X, Threads), will start to show gray boxes instead of images.
Eventually you will spend more time staring at loading spinners than anything else, and at this point a question starts to sit in the back of your mind: Do I really want this cookie?
END