My morning routine goes something like this. Every weekday, I wake up to the sound of one of Apple’s default alarms and reach for my phone to turn off the noise. Then, without fail, I embark on scrolling through Instagram, squinting at the bright screen like a mole that has just emerged from hibernation. Five, 10, 30 minutes can easily pass by while I’m flicking through other people’s holiday photos, learning about the best way to tie your hair into a slicked-back bun or listening to a Californian surgeon explain a celebrity’s dramatic facial transformation. Sometimes I watch videos in which other people show off their productivity-enhancing, aesthetically pleasing morning routines. They tend to be a merry-go-round of matcha lattes, matching athleisure sets and reformer pilates classes, rather than what I do: endlessly pressing snooze and holding my phone too close to my face in a dark room.
The most irritating part of all this? It’s the fact that I don’t even get much enjoyment out of scrolling; instead, I start the morning frustrated by my lack of willpower. In my heart of hearts, I know I’m being bombarded with pretty pointless ephemera. I know that watching an influencer buy an iced latte and a pastry to “romanticise their day” won’t improve my own quality of life. I don’t even really care about mastering slicked-back buns, because I look like a founding father when I tie my hair up. Yet this habit proves impossible to break. And I’m surely not the only one whose first moments of the day are thrown off kilter by social media: according to one study, 80 per cent of smartphone users check their device within 15 minutes of waking up. So what is the impact of this compulsion, and how can we break free from it?
First, though, it’s worth taking a look at why so many of us find ourselves sucked into what’s happening on our tiny screens before we’ve even contemplated eating breakfast or brushing our teeth. Part of it must surely be down to our relationship with our phones themselves. Modern working culture, in the UK at least, encourages us to always be switched on, primed for emails and chat notifications outside of our official hours. Is it any wonder that our first action is to see whether all hell is breaking loose in our inbox, and then, phone already in hand, to have a little scroll through social media as a treat?
Some jobs, too, require you to be on top of what’s going on in the world before you’ve even sat down at your desk, whether that’s keeping abreast of sales figures or watching the stock market. My personal morning scroll habit kicked off in earnest when I used to start my working day with a 7.30am meeting; beforehand, it was a given that we’d have already sifted through the headlines beforehand, even if that meant doing so in our own time.
Then there’s the apps themselves. Social media platforms, as we’re all at least vaguely aware by now, have been developed to trigger the brain’s reward system. When we get a new notification or flick onto a new TikTok video, we get a hit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that helps us feel pleasure. It’s not just the act of scrolling itself that gives us a little dopamine reward, but the very anticipation of doing it, so we end up wanting to keep going for longer and longer.
When we stop, our dopamine levels drop back down. Hence the “just one more Instagram story…” trap that’s so easy to fall into. “We’re so used to having something popping into either our email inboxes or social media accounts that gives us that little feeling of being connected,” says psychologist and psychotherapist Dr Charlotte Armitage, founder of No Phones at Home Day. “However false or temporary [that may be], we still seek that out.”
But scrolling is a case of diminishing returns. The more we do it, the more we need to do it to get that same boost. And in order to regulate our dopamine levels, the brain ends up decreasing its transmission, reducing it to below the normal baseline. This creates what’s known as a dopamine deficit. The symptoms may well be all too familiar: lack of concentration, tiredness, irritability. Tick, tick, tick.
Frontloading your day with scrolling is also a particularly bad idea because it impacts how our brains shift from sleeping to being fully awake. Slow, low-frequency delta waves tend to occur during deep sleep, helping the brain and the body recover from the previous day. Then, as we move into a lighter sleep, they are replaced by theta waves, associated with relaxation and creativity. As you wake, the brain produces alpha waves, for that in-between state when you’re conscious but aren’t really focused on anything.
The brain, Dr Armitage says, “needs to really wake up, adjust, settle, then [you can] get up and get ready”. But if, like me, you tend to grab your phone as soon as you open your eyes, you’re essentially forcing it to prematurely jump towards the next stage: you’re leaping from feeling half-awake into a state of alertness, characterised by high-frequency beta waves. These usually occur later in the day when we’re deeply focused on a task – they’re helpful when you’re working or trying to solve a problem, but if they crop up too early, they can be overwhelming and leave us feeling stressed out.
Diving into your social media feeds first thing, then, is a bit like drinking a can of Red Bull with your breakfast, rather than a glass of water. And that’s before we’ve even started to reckon with the actual content of the posts and videos we’re being exposed to. Unsurprisingly, reading depressing news on Twitter/X or seeing how marvellous everyone’s lives look on Instagram can throw our emotions off course first thing and set the mood for the rest of the day. Beginning the day this way means that “we’re already overwhelmed” before we’ve properly woken up, says Dr Armitage. “You’re seeing all these things that are going on in the world and you haven’t even left your bed yet… That’s a really odd thing.”
So what can I actually do to try and break free from the early morning doom scroll? Much of the advice online is well intentioned but a little on the impractical side. I know my own limitations, and frankly, it’s highly improbable that I will ever be the type of person who starts their day by reciting positive affirmations in the mirror or doing a quick meditation. Dr Armitage has some more straightforward advice. “The way we stop scrolling so much is by becoming consciously aware of how much we scroll,” she says. “In order to do that, we need to make it a little bit harder to reach [the apps]. That’s when our brain will kick in and say, ‘Do you really want to do that?’”
As a first step, Dr Armitage recommends “tidying up” the apps on your phone. “Put all the social media apps onto a different page, off the home screen, and put them into a folder there, because it’s much more effort to get to them,” she says. This can jolt us into realising what we’re actually doing. “Even changing the order of your apps every month will remind you to be more consciously aware,” she adds. Switching on “do not disturb” or putting your phone into aeroplane mode can be helpful too, ensuring that you aren’t immediately greeted by a backlog of notifications when you wake up.
And if you’re really bold? Armitage suggests “not having the phone in the room at all at night”, and instead leaving it elsewhere. “You’re getting ready, you’re starting the day, whether that’s on your own, with a cat, with your kids, whoever. But you wake up, and then the phone comes in, not the phone being the first port of call in the morning.” Looks like it might be time for me to invest in a proper alarm clock.
