Doomscrolling - Tumblr Posts

By the time I get into bed, I find myself picking up my phone and just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. I stay up past my bedtime, despite being exhausted and knowing I'd be better off going to sleep. This behavior is called "revenge bedtime procrastination."

(via How to stop revenge bedtime procrastination and get better sleep)

"Revenge bedtime procrastination" refers to a phenomenon where individuals, who feel that they lack control over their daytime activities, intentionally delay going to bed as a way to reclaim a sense of freedom and leisure during the late evening or early morning hours. This behavior often involves staying up late to engage in activities such as watching TV, browsing the internet, playing video games, or using social media.

Hey, if you're ever feeling awful because you're super overwhelmed by the news, too overwhelmed to do anything, but you feel like you can't stop without being a horrible person who's just sticking their head in the sand...

Try thinking of it this way:

Maybe the moral thing to do actually IS to never look at the news...

so that you have the energy and will and lack of huge, petrifying fear needed to help

We've seen over and over again, especially in the climate movement, how often it's small, local efforts at making a difference that really start to change things

There's no moral value to being burned out and depressed.

Yes, knowing what's going on in your state/country/the world is good if it's something you can actually sustain

But if you have to choose between following the news/doomscrolling/etc. and actually having the energy to help?

I think that in the vast majority of situations, morally, you SHOULD choose to do something to help

Showing up to your city council meetings, or cleaning up trash in your neighborhood, or volunteering at a food pantry, or registering people to vote, or joining the underground abortion pill network, or doing a fundraiser for bipoc-led nonprofits, or mailing books to people in prison, or seedbombing native grasses, or phone-banking for a nonprofit you care about, or building benches and leaving them at bus stops, or knitting hats and giving them to unhoused people to stay warm, or starting a community garden, or sponsoring refugees for immigration, or taking a stand at school board meetings, or, or, or

all do infinitely more to help other people than doomscrolling and sharing depressing news posts ever will

laying in bed doomscrolling > being productive

Been wanting to brain myself with a hamer over some completely nothingburger vague nebulous internet drama, as ya do, so I’m starting to become really radical about the grasspill lately.

I couldn’t force myself to just stay off of social media entirely even though I knew I was in a place mentally that warranted a break, so I promised myself and my friends that the next time I saw anything in my feeds that annoyed the shit out of me, I’d get dressed, walk straight outside and pick up that trash by the treeline that I’d occasionally been complaining about seeing outside my window for the last few days. Didn’t matter what website it came from, the rules were set.

What do you know it didn’t even take 12 hours before I hit another “anime forehead vein bulge” moment over some YouTube comment shit and instead of wasting my keyboard warrior breath I got shoes on, put a podcast into my headphones, and literally just picked up litter out of the stormwater section of my neighborhood until staying that angry finally started to seem ridiculous. I got two garbage bags full of styrofoam, plastic, etc out of the woods and I’m actually feeling pretty damn good about it and surprisingly, not regretful of focusing my limited time and energy on something other than doomscrolling or bickering with strangers on the interwebs about esoteric niche ass discourse. I even found four more cicada husks for my collection (super cool)

I’m so not regretful of that that it’s probably going to become a running policy of mine now that the weather’s getting better here. Dumb bullshit pisses me off too much, I’m grabbing my net and I’m gonna go look for critters and scavenger hunt down more styrofoam packing peanuts I might have missed by the creek. Hell, maybe I’ll bring the dog too if I feel like it. Ending point is only the reminder for a LOT of you on the interwebs to consider just, anything spontaneous and outside of the box that seems literally designed to keep you chained here by your anger instead of your joy. In any game where once you start to introspect, you find out that you are more the ball for algorithms and trolls to score points with than you are a player, sometimes the healthiest option is to play something else for a change. Come back when it does something for you, on your own terms, by your own choice. Chase health over harm. Feed passion over despair.

so turns out mindlessly scrolling on my phone for 4 hours didn't actually make me feel better

fun fact: 90% of internet discourse could be solved if we stopped generalizing when making statements