Like many people here, I found myself saying "just five more minutes" before bed, only to lose an hour or more scrolling.

Because of that, I'm building Aveira, a smart alarm clock designed specifically to interrupt late-night scrolling.

During designated sleep hours, the clock detects prolonged phone use. If you're still scrolling, it activates an alarm that only stops once you place your phone on the clock's docking station.

I'm not here to sell anyone anything—I genuinely want feedback from people who struggle with this habit.

Would something like this help you?

What would make it more effective?

What features would you add or remove?

Any honest criticism is appreciated.

1 hour since i deleted Instagram and TikTok - I already feel smarter but still miss it

Every time you feel that irresistible urge to pick up your phone and check a notification, you’re not experiencing a lack of discipline—you're experiencing an evolutionary glitch.

For 99% of human history, our survival depended on four main variables: Danger, Food, Tribe, and Reproduction. Incuriosity in the wild was literally a death sentence. If our ancestors didn't scan the horizon constantly, they didn't survive.

Silicon Valley didn't invent a new psychology; they just weaponized an old one:

• Red notification dots mimic high-contrast survival signals (like berries or blood). Your ancient brain physically cannot ignore them.
• Pull-to-refresh feeds mirror the variable reward mechanics of scanning an empty savannah—dopamine spikes because of the uncertainty of what's next, not the content itself.

We often spend years asking "What's wrong with me?" when the real question should be "What survival problem was my brain originally designed to solve?" Your brain isn't broken—it's just running 300,000-year-old software in an environment it was never designed for.

I recently launched a visual essay channel (THE HUMAN CODE) breaking down this exact neurobiological mismatch with full visual animations and audio design. If you want to dive deeper into the science behind it, you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ZqMFkT-1vJ8?si=UdHj85axMeFMQ-c1

Curious to hear your thoughts—which modern technology feels like the biggest mismatch for your brain right now?

Today I realized fully that I F 32, am addicted to screens and scrolling. I have known that my phone and screen use was/is on the heavier side, not even counting work here which is also on a screen, but never thought much of it or diminished, disregarded or was oblivious to its impact and symptoms.

Well something is different today, a lot of signs came together and I was able to see them clearly from an observer perspective, not just inside the tunnel, I am actually aware. I have dry, irritated eyes, feel restless and can't concentrate. I know it's the sweet irony of me writing that on a screen, but I set a timer for 10min. I am here because I seek out a community that understands, is in the same boat or has crossed that river already. And accountability, advice, ideas, and maybe a few kind words.

I plan to come here every day for at least the next 2 weeks (with a timer once again) to share how I am dealing with it, what I learned and what's currently happening. Trial and error, and you'll be part of that if you like. I'll be reading and reacting to any comments until the time is up, so if you have any thoughts, advice, just want to say hi, ideas for hobbies I could replace this doomscrolling with, I'd be grateful.

So far for this day, I have activated greyscale mode, decluttered my home screen on my phone and deleted a few apps and turned off 80% of notifications.

Time is up. See you tomorrow.

https://youtu.be/EPqItSmEaFE?si=TG62Dc0sJvYfp9aZ

Around 2 years ago, I used to spend a couple hours on tiktok a day, and another couple of hours gaming. I was severely addicted. I decided to quit the online world. Now, I don't use tiktok, and barely game, mostly sometimes with my friends. I still have a vague online presence. I have a very small youtube channel where I just upload tutorials and I upload my 3d models to printables. I noticed that when I do interact with the online world, like for example I play some game for a bit, or I watch a youtube video, I am then REALLY overstimulated. It feels like someone just punched my brain, im dizzy, like i'd just spun around in a circle for a while and stopped abruptly, and I feel sluggish, tired, and just mentally slower than usual. This feeling usually stays for the whole day, and it's way worse if for example the youtube video I was watching had some sort of aggressive editing, flashing lights, jump cuts, music, i.e was edited in the way that mrbeast videos are edited nowadays.

This feeling is IMO natural. If I time traveled 100 years back to the past, and showed the same content to a person from that time, they would probably feel the same way, they were just not used to this type of stimulation and so am I.

I usually don't care about this, but it is a curse sometimes. It made me basically allergic to television. TV where I live has the same, aggressive, over-exaggerated pace as any other thing nowadays, especially the news. And my family LOVES watching the news. If i visit my grandma, there is a 90% chance that news are on, and I hate it. When I visit my family, it makes me feel the same, awful, overstimulated feeling, and I'm miserable when I'm at their house.

I'm writing this whole thing cause I'm looking for some kind of support I guess. I would really like to know if I'm just some sort of over sensitive weirdo or maybe some of you guys are going through the same thing as me? I would be really grateful for any sort of comment.

It might not be explicit porn in the old sense, but it is still implicit porn, suggestive porn, indicative porn.
It’s always something like:

“when he does X and then…”
“when she says Y but…”
“pov: you understood the joke…”

Basically, it lets people use their imagination to connect the dots.
All under the disguise of:
“Do you get it? It’s about sex hehe 🤭”

Even humour itself seems to be porn now.
The internet idea of comedy is basically:
SEX!!! 🤭 ahahahaha

And I genuinely don’t get it.
People worry about what shows their kids watch, what websites they visit, what “bad content” they might find, but then those same kids can get that and worse from 20 minutes of scrolling social media.
Not even from searching for anything.
Just normal scrolling.
The feed itself leaks sexualisation everywhere.
The jokes, the captions, the comments, the trends, the “relatable” posts, the memes.
It’s not even hidden anymore. It’s just softened enough to look like humour.

So I actually want to stop my addiction because I am literly doom scroll until 2 am or more and rotting out there like hell crazy.

Does anyone have ideas how I can stop it?

I have not been using instagram for so long now because it doesn't add any value to my life. But I have been continuously active on reddit. I started to use it because I had a lot of questions and there answers in needed. I really felt safe telling my problems to strangers but I feel odd telling them to people i know irl. But i feel I waste a lot of time scorlling, refreshing and waiting for replies or upvotes.

I'm just wondering why social media is so addictive? For example, I'm not on instagram or facebook, I'm trying to leave YouTube, but now I discovered X. I just spent almost 1 hour surfing through X with no sense, just for default I guess. Maybe this is dramatic but I'm genuinely worried about this, the empty distractions are everywhere.

Thank you for reading and sorry for my English.

It froze the player and website entirely, worked fine before. I tried Ublock Lite with the following filters but it doesn't work :

www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer

www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer

www.youtube.com###related

Does anyone have a workaround or alternative?

hello, i am writing this because i don t know what to do anymore, i live without social media and dumped down my pc but i am still not ok, i have hobbies but i can t really enjoy them anymore, i want to go out of the house but all of my"friends" are not really my friends and i am kinda alone...what should i do?

What the fuck should I do, seriously. I have to stop using the phone for what? 99% of the things they say require to have someone/touch the grass and I can't. Im currently (even if I stay hours and hours on the phone) doing my first puzzle (1k pieces) and making a card game. I tried drawing but I stopped 1 month ago, idk, but horror drawing were cool even if I stopped 3 months ago when I started all of a sudden doing romantic anime drawings. ts is everything I can do.

Btw: watch out of the window? There are no cars, nothing. There's just other houses so it sucks watching at a house in front of u

What do you think is the bigger problem that needs to be fixed - attention span / focus issues or phone addiction?

1. English isn't my first language, so I apologize if there are any grammatical errors.
   
2. This post is NOT meant to step on anyone's toes. I do not want to offend anyone, I just want to have an open discussion and this is something I've been thinking about for some time and would like to hear others opinions on it.
   
3. I have ADHD myself and got diagnosed in my early 20s.

I am a woman born in the 90s, I grew up in a time where the internet exploded and in my mid-late teens everyone had smartphones. The content was still limited to "your friends", and your feed was filled with "content" from the people you followed/were friends with.
Through the years I've crossed paths with kids of different ages, and now I have a 14 year old stepdaughter, and with her comes the teen friends. Since I'm diagnosed with ADHD myself I am very interested in the topic of neuro divergency, and like many others I've read about all of the 'over diagnosing' of ADHD in the later years. I know that there might be wrongly diagnosed people out there, and the raise in ADHD has its reasons on both ends, of course.
But I've been thinking a lot about how the current social media and constant stimulation our brains get from staring at a screen all the time, affects us. So many kids/teens I've met in the later years who are "clearly showing signs" of ADHD (for example), and with such severity where their parents are getting them evaluated. But I wonder if they're basically affected by being glued to their screens all the time?
I don't really know how to explain why I'm getting this feeling. It's just a feeling of how many kids (and adults) today seem so distracted. Easily explained: It's one thing having trouble focusing in school because you daydream, or because your head is full of buzz all the time. And it's another thing to losing your keys and wallet several times because you're simply too distracted to keep focused because you're constantly looking at your phone.

The scary part is how addictive the screens are. There's this swedish psychiatrist and author, Anders Hansen. He wrote a book: The Attention Fix: How to Focus in a World That Wants to Distract You, which I recommend to everyone. It's very interesting. Anyways; he said that there's nothing in the world, not even drugs, that releases dopamine as our phones/screens do.

I just wonder if our screens can cause symptoms of ADHD, if so; how many of today's kids could actually be wrongly thought to have ADHD, when it's in fact just severe dopamine addiction caused by screens?

I spent a week camping by the beach. We had internet, but the signal was so bad that loading a single post could take several minutes. That naturally limited my phone use to about 30 minutes a day. I was also busy looking after young kids most of the time, so I barely had any reason to be online.

Between being away from screens, spending time at the beach and in the forest, and actually living in the moment, it felt like my brain finally got a reset. I've been struggling with internet addiction for over a decade, so this was a pretty big deal for me.

I'm back home now, and I've already slipped into some of my old habits. But one thing I've noticed is that I can actually sit down and not immediately think about the internet. That's something I couldn't do before. Now I just need to make a real effort to protect that progress instead of falling back into the same cycle.

Pray for me.

One dashboard that project all markets conditions, check it out GMDMarkets worth 24k/y by Blumberg

This was quote from Juvenal, also he got another one:

"The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses"

It really feels to me that when I would play games, watch p.orn, or scroll trough social media or even watching sports, I am losing energy, then I am depleted and not ready for "action" if it make sense. I am not sharp and fully present.

Now check the society right now, where in past for what is happening we would be cutting heads to be honest and nothing anywhere. Like in my country central europe.. politicians constantly steal, imho if there would be men like in Rome the warriors it would cleared in 2 weeks... Its like there was this study that testosteron in men dropped down by heavily in 50 years, and you see it in our society too.

all the consumption is like trance state, hypnosis.. Just take a screenshot how you look when you play video game or watching porn or scrolling, and dont tell me you dont look like zombie, because I do.. this is little bit of rant but its insane to observe

I made the act of scrolling itself extremely tedious while still being able to access Instagram and the likes. When I scroll, I need to put the effort to drag through a wave that takes up the screen overlaying the feeds. With every scroll becoming less automatic and a choice, I cut my screentime in more than half! The problem really is in the infinite feeds and scrolling mindlessly.

I have been attempting to cut down on my overall screentime. I am a person who is fairly introverted and has a lot of free time. I have a few amount of hobbies, the main ones being reading, writing, walking and drawing; i will also include my studies - specifically within a philosophy class - as a hobby as i enjoy reading up on it, and i would like to have a benefit of better schoolwork as well as lesser screentime.

I have these activities, i read, write and walk every single day as a pastime, but still i feel completely consumed by a large amount of freetime. I have volunteer work which I do and am currently looking for a part time job, even with these things, my whole life consists of it having extreme timefulness. You can sit and do nothing, which in itself is almost meditative, but its resultant is a lack of actions to perform. I want to commit myself to a little amount of screentime but feel lost in the amount of time that i've realised there is.

As I mentioned prior, I am an introverted person, I have few friends, and my greatest friend is my boyfriend... I see him twice a week typically, one is for a walk and this is great as we both get away from the internet and get to spend quality time together.

The other time I see him, it's usually with friends, on this other time it is always involving a huge amount of screentime, and i dont want to give away a good social life to remove myself from screens. I can make allowances for watching movies and things like that, but a lot of our relationship also involves playing videogames together, sometimes for multiple hours a day. I like spending this time together, I dislike that it puts me online for multiple hours and generally the videogame begins to bore me while i still want to spend time talking, leading me to feeling that i've overused the internet, but the alternative option is to lose a part of our relationship, and this expands itself to my other friendships too.

To me it seems, with lessening my screentime it will ultimately cost me some parts of my relationships, and it leaves me with a whole lot of time which i dont know how to spend. It also seems impossible to properly distance yourself from the internet as daily activities revolve around it. How do you reduce screentime without isolating yourself? How do I create a balance with my time?

I used to be like that, to be honest. As an Asian person I used to lurk in Asian online communities, mostly on reddit, and learn about Asian issues and conversations and politics. In fact I used to just watch and consume political medias of all sorts of things.

Now I've managed to ground myself; tryinf to fight the anxiety of fomo, paranoia of mob mentality, detaching myself from the hyperfixation of social issues etc. It wasnt easy but compared to years ago, ive improved.

Sometimes I see redditors, mostly Asian, who would post a lot of political posts and I get sad. Nothing wrong with being political but ive been there, and you become shrouded with the idea of politics that you lose yourself. You lose your daily life, your lived experience, in the exchange of online community that doesnt even exist in the first place. And the politics that you indulge in becomes nothing more than a sensational and controversial posts where people argue and fight over who is correct. Seeing people literally selling their soul to attach themselves to something like reddit makes me so sad. Because knowing from experience, it is hell. I just wish there would be an easy way to save these people from hell that theyre trapped in. Sometimes I get angry because of how much "they ruined me" but most importantly i want them to get better. Cause this is seriouly ruining everyone.

Idk, just a sad thought ive been having these past few days. Maybe theyre not as bad as i imagine, but cant help but feel bad.

I am looking for videos or creators on youtube that are actually interesting to watch/consume instead of just baiting for views and attention. I believe transitioning to this type of content first will make it easier to avoid falling into a youtube rabbit hole where I just watch random videos for hours.