You're on social media and you keep scrolling and scrolling your feed.

Sometimes you're actually entertained.

Other times you're just doing it out of habit, searching for something to entertain you for another brief moment.

You have no idea how much time has passed by and you're starting to feel sluggish.

You're in a daze and somehow you can't stop scrolling.

When you do stop, you check the time and one, two, or even three hours have gone by.

And you're like, what the heck have I been doing this entire time?

Social media is designed to keep us engaged.

It's designed to make us stay on the app for as long as possible.

By giving us quick dopamine hits, we've become addicts to the immediate gratification that social media provides.

Post after post, our brain is exposed to so much information and a skewed view of reality via this tiny little screen.

It's amazing the damage that social media can do to our minds and mental health, like breeding insecurities and comparison, or shortening our attention spans and making it harder for us to focus on deep work.

If you found yourself spending way too much time on social media, this video is for you.

I'll be sharing six tips to help you kick your social media habit and stop doom scrolling once and for all.

Before I get into the tips, I want to shout out today's sponsor.

So thank you to BetterHelp for sponsoring this video.

If you're struggling with your mental health, whether it's social media related or something else, consider trying therapy.

BetterHelp is the world's largest therapy service and it's 100% online.

Healing is a journey and therapy is all about deepening your awareness and understanding of yourself.

It's helpful to get a third person's point of view on your thoughts because sometimes they help you see things that you can't see.

It's also nice to get an outlet to express your thoughts and emotions and heal from any negative beliefs or patterns that have held you back.

With BetterHelp, you can tap into a network of over 25,000 licensed and experienced therapists who can help you with a wide range of issues.

To get started, just answer a few questions about your needs and preferences and BetterHelp will match you with the right therapist from their network.

You can then talk to your therapist via text, chat, phone, or video call.

You can message them anytime and schedule live sessions whenever it's convenient for you.

BetterHelp is more flexible and affordable than in-person therapy and you can also switch therapists at no additional charge.

Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash Aileen.

I'll also have the link down below so you can check it out.

Alright, let's get into how to stop your doom scrolling habit.

The first tip I have for you is to swap out your habit.

So you first want to become aware of when you find yourself scrolling on social media.

For me, I tend to do a lot of scrolling in the morning.

That's a bad habit, just waking up, taking my phone, and you just start scrolling social media, kind of to help you wake up.

Sometimes I also find myself scrolling when I'm taking a break from work, so I just open a social media app like, Hey, I wonder what's there?

And then you just end up scrolling for way too long.

So notice when you're doing this and then start to swap out the habit for something just as fun, just as energizing, if not more than what you were searching for.

So for example, with the waking up example, the scrolling is a way for me to kind of wake up.

So if you are in the same boat, do something else that also helps you wake up without social media.

So a way that I really enjoy doing is starting to play good music right when I wake up and letting the music kind of energize your body.

It just starts your day on such better vibes.

There are so many different wake up and morning playlists that you can find on Spotify.

I made my own personal wake up playlist a few years ago because I really love listening to big band jazz.

It just makes me feel so big and fun and it makes the day feel really grand.

If you also find yourself scrolling while you're taking a break, you can also turn to music instead, or you can do things like take a dance break, go for a walk, find a way to give yourself what you were originally looking for, which was some sort of break, some way to energize yourself, kind of switch into a new frame of thinking.

And you can do that without social media.

You can do that in so many other ways.

So let's start sharing ideas.

Comment down below with what you plan to swap out your habit of scrolling for.

So instead of reaching for your phone or social media, what else are you going to do instead?

The next tip, out of sight, out of mind.

So basically, put your phone away.

So if you find yourself reaching for your phone, spending hours scrolling on social media, one thing you can do is just put your phone away, put it in a drawer in a different room, especially if you need to get work done.

This is really helpful if you need to study or work or just focus.

Literally, put your phone on silent and place it hidden, somewhere out of sight, out of mind.

If you have the habit of scrolling your phone in the morning, another thing you can try is putting your phone in another room when you are sleeping so that when you wake up, your phone is not there.

You don't immediately reach for it and subconsciously just open your apps and start scrolling.

Even I don't do this, but I have heard that it's life-changing for some people.

And if you're thinking about like, oh, what do I use for an alarm?

Just use a traditional alarm.

Or if you have something like those smart speakers, you can tell it to set an alarm at a certain time for you so that you don't need your phone to wake you up.

This tip also applies if you are out.

So if you're out at a restaurant with your friends or family, try not to have your phone on the table.

Just put your phone away.

That will help you become more present.

I think a lot of times people leave their phone in view and they end up scrolling and checking it when they feel bored, just because they need something to do.

So practice just being present in the real world.

You know, don't look at your phone.

Look at your environment.

Pay attention to the sounds, what's happening.

Just be in real life for a moment.

The next tip is to set app limits.

So this is something that is a feature on phones now, where you can set limits for how long you allow yourself to spend on an app.

So I set an hour maximum per day that I'm allowed to browse Instagram and TikTok, Twitter, just any social media.

Even though it's really easy to cancel this limit when you want to browse longer, I feel that the notification is really helpful.

It helps you become aware like, oh, I've reached my limit of one hour for today.

And then it's up to me to decide whether I want to stick to my goal or not.

And it's okay either way.

But at the very least, it helps me become aware of how long I'm on an app.

Another thing that I do on the iPhone, there's something called downtime, where you can set certain times where everything kind of shuts off.

My browser shuts off, my social media apps shut off.

You can choose which apps you want to keep on and which apps you want to limit.

So I turn everything off at 11pm because my personal goal is to get off my phone, get off social media, and don't look at anything from 11pm and onwards, because I want to start winding down and getting ready for bed.

I don't want to be all wired and have all this new information in my brain before I sleep.

Because social media apps are designed to keep us on the app for as long as possible, we need to put in these limits to break us out of that system, because it's not as easy as willpower, you know?

So you need to have things that wake you up out of the zone so that you can go back to living your life in the present.

The next tip I have for you is to delete apps that aren't serving you.

So if being on an app is making you feel worse about yourself, if you find that it's really destructive to yourself and your well-being, delete it.

It's not worth it.

The whole point is, our tools are supposed to enhance our lives and make our lives better.

So if it's not making your life any better, get rid of it.

See how it feels to live life without the app.

It might be hard because all your friends are on it.

You want to know what's going on, but just try it out.

Go on a social media detox.

I can assure you that after you get over that hump, it will feel good and you'll notice how much more present you can be with the people in your life, because you don't have this distraction happening.

I have a few friends that completely got off social media and they're just happily living their lives.

All they do is keep in touch with their friends through texting and calling and seeing people in person, kind of like the old days, right?

Because social media is a big part of my job, I can't completely delete the app, which is why I have to put those time limits and stuff.

But even for me, there was a time where I, for example, deleted Twitter for like six months because it was just so bad for my mental health to keep seeing news after news and just so much information for my brain.

I just started feeling really frazzled.

It became a very bad habit to scroll that at night.

So deleting that and instead using that time that I would have spent scrolling on something healthier, like exercising at home, that really shifted my life in the past year.

The next tip I have for you is to go deeper and pinpoint the real issue why you spend time scrolling.

So this gets more reflective.

Instead of just blocking things on the surface, like all the tips before, this goes deep.

You want to reflect on why you find yourself scrolling, why you reach for the phone.

So I find that most of the times, it's because we want to avoid something.

Most of the time we are, you know, distracting ourselves on purpose because we're running away from something, whether you're running away from your responsibilities, whether you're just running away from your problems in life.

Social media is a way for us to numb ourselves, to escape into another world, to focus on something outside of ourselves so that we can forget about our responsibilities and our problems.

This is where shadow work comes in, because you want to take a look at your shadow.

What are you running away from?

What do you not like about yourself or your life?

And just see what's really happening.

What is the real issue here?

For example, one of the reasons that I realized I spent time scrolling so much was because I was procrastinating.

I was running away from doing things that were hard.

Scrolling social media is so easy.

It's so comfortable.

There's very little effort.

I realized that I was turning to social media when I was running away from something that was challenging in my life.

So I had to work through that limiting belief that I was afraid of facing my challenges and doing hard things.

And I talk about this in my recent video on how to overcome limiting beliefs.

I'll link that here and down below.

But I basically had to ingrain this new belief in me that I am capable of doing anything that is hard or challenging.

I can do hard things.

That belief has been so monumental in me being like, okay, I know I'm running away from what's hard.

Let me turn it off and let me just face what's hard, because I know I can do it.

Obviously it's still hard, right?

But it gives you a little more courage to be aware and to learn to face your fears, learn to face what's scary.

So reflect on why you turn to social media and why you end up scrolling for so long.

The last thing I'll share with you today to break out of your doom scrolling habits is to cultivate more mindfulness and practice being present.

Ultimately, this is the biggest skill you can have for just becoming powerful in your life.

The more awareness you can have in your life, the more mindful and the more present you can be in your everyday life, the more power you have to direct your life and fine tune it in any direction you want.

Because we tend to go off track when we aren't being that conscious, when we're just kind of on autopilot and we're distracted and we're not paying attention to what's really happening.

But if you can practice being more mindful and present, then you'll have that power to snap yourself out of it if you're in that autopilot mode.

And this is especially helpful for things like doom scrolling on social media.

So you build this mindfulness and this conscious awareness by doing things like meditating.

Another way is to practice tuning into your five senses, just at any point of the day.

What do I see?

What do I hear?

What am I feeling?

Or as you're eating, what am I tasting?

What am I smelling?

Our five senses are our gateway to experience the physical world.

So kind of tapping into and truly feeling each of those five senses is a way to be present in the now, in this place that we are living.

So yeah, the more you can hone that and practice that consciousness, you'll be able to snap back so much faster and be like, wait a minute, this scrolling is not productive.

I'm not even having fun right now.

And I think I should be doing something else.

I know I should be doing something else that's gonna serve me better than scrolling.

So building that mindset, it's a practice.

It's not willpower.