i have been powering through a basic level book and a stupid, low stakes manga to start reading but its not at all relaxing to me. to me its an Activity. my only actual method of rest is scrolling on the phone. hobby doesnt relax me just another thing to do. right now my hands itch for insta reels (im on my laptop). i badly want to read more but i just cannot. it exhausts me. other than scrolling, my only other ”rest” is listening to music and cleaning around. everything else is Activity that requires Energy. i cant relate to people who read to relax. i feel intellectually inferior and i try to power through because i know its good for you. sometimes i consider just accepting that i am what i am (certified Intellectually Disabled) and just giving up. just be a stupid simpleton, nothing else just consume consume consume, scream when im hungry and do nothing. i wish i could forget how to read and speak all together.
Firstly, I would like to preface by saying this is a tough addiction to beat, and is the addiction that defines our generation. Do not beat yourself up about this. I’m sure I speak for most of us comrades here to say that we care about you and your health.
That said, I’ll echo what other commenters here have said: 100% try a dopamine detox for u, for a full week or two. If it’s possible for you, inform your close friends/family what your are doing and that you may be harder to reach for a week. Basically, I would just turn off your phone and only use it when absolutely necessary, turning it off as soon as you’re done. Make sure to get a plethora of material that can at least somewhat entertain you without digital devices necessary and make them as convenient as possible to get to while making your phone as difficult as possible to access. Stick your phone in a drawer or something and have a stack of good books and maybe a crappy cheap MP3 player on your desk if you can find one. Granted, this is just about the most extreme option.
If the nuclear option is a bit impractical (which, for most people, it will be) I would set your phone to completely 100% grayscale and use the app ScreenZen or Mindful to set screentime limits for apps and block websites and such. If you care about privacy, I would turn off the network access for these apps as they require a lot of permissions that can be easily misused, and can work 100% offline. Mindful is open source and has privacy in mind, but if you’re properly paranoid (me), you’re gonna wanna get rid of its network access anyways. I personally find ScreenZen without network to be more useful as a leash to keep yourself on. It’s the only app I have found that allows you to set time limits for websites and allow cooldowns for apps rather than just completely blocking it after a certain point. Mindful might be more your speed during your detox phase because it completely hard locks sites and sets strict time limits for apps, but it’s up to you. Both have anti tamper protections that will prevent you from changing the settings unless absolutely necessary. I can let you know more about how I would personally configure them if you’d like. I would keep Mindful on for at least some long stretch of time—even after the detox has ended—before loosening the leash a bit by switching to ScreenZen, because you don’t wanna end up in the same place again.
On computers things get a bit more difficult, but scrolling is honestly not as stimulating on pc, at least to me. Regardless, you wanna take steps to prevent the scrolling from happening anyways. Fair warning: I never personally struggled with desktop scrolling, so I never did this, but there are anti scroll browser addons like this one for only chrome and this one for firefox and chrome (I can’t find one for safari on desktop lmao). I’m sure there are other methods too in order to bypass. You’ll have to experiment with that yourself unfortunately.
Best of luck to you in your journey. May you reclaim your brain.