Scroll, Swipe, Like, Repeat – The 21st Century Drug That Has Everyone Hooked (Including Me)

“You’re an addict.” I heard my Dad say from the kitchen as I was mindlessly scrolling TikTok one day when I came up to visit them. I went to say something from the myriad of excuses I had concocted in order to defend myself.

I’m tired.

I’m having a day off.

Why do you care, it’s not the worst thing I could be doing. I could be doing drugs.

But before I could get any of that out Dad had gone outside to work on something in the garden. I didn’t want this to ruin the weekend, so I decided to drop it. But this time something was different, sure my parents had made comments about how I should spend less time on my phone, but I usually pushed it aside, or I’d have a thousand reasons as to why the screen time on my phone was as high as it was.  

I went back home and that thought of Dad calling me an addict was still nestled into the back of my brain. I’m not sure if it’s because I know what addicts look like, I work in healthcare and see them all the time. Surely, I wasn’t one of those people. Addicts can’t function without needing their drug of choice, and I could… right? After all I work 32 hours a week, I study full time, I live independently. These are not the things addicts can do, or at least that’s what I thought.

There were three catalysts per se that helped me realise that what Dad said wasn’t just a snide comment to try and get me off my phone. It was the truth.

Catalyst number 1 happened one night after a particularly stressful day at work. Logically I knew I needed to get as much sleep as I could because I had an early start the next day, but I couldn’t stop going over a trauma that had happened at work. So, I opened TikTok to scroll for “five minutes” to re-regulate. Well, five minutes passed and suddenly it was 2am (I needed to be at work at 6am). To say getting through work the next day was a struggle is an understatement. Everyone I worked with couldn’t help but say that I looked deathly pale, my bosses asked if I was unwell and if I needed to go home. I looked at myself in the mirror and what stared back at me was reminiscent of the addicts I had so vehemently tried to separate myself from.

“When I caught myself in a mirror at work I nearly cried, because the person staring back at me was someone I didn’t recognise. Gone was my smile, the light in my eyes. Here was a shell of a human just trying to survive.”

This photo was taken that night. I don’t know what prompted me to take this photo but looking back I’m glad I did. But man, it makes me sad as well.

Catalyst number 2 happened about a week or so later. I looked at the state of my room which I had told myself I would clean that day. There was washing all over the floor, I couldn’t even tell what was clean and what was dirty, there were empty dishes piling up on my desk, my bed was unmade and there were papers splayed all over the floor. I started to hyperventilate, I could feel an anxiety attack coming on simply from looking at the state of my room. My room which I had told myself was just messy but not unmanageable. I fell to my knees and called my Mum knowing that there was realistically nothing she could do in that moment being 95km away.

When I asked her what I should do she said simply “go on a walk, go outside, see some sunshine.” I remember rolling my eyes, because going outside wouldn’t fix the problem, or at least what I thought the problem was. See in my head my problem was the fact that I had a messy room. But my Mum ever in her wisdom knew that the problem wasn’t that. My room was simply the mouse that jumped on the boat which made it tip over. I only have just been able to realise that now as I’m writing this.

(Image Credit: Pamela Allen/Who Sank the Boat)

So I went out and laid down on the grass at the park near my house I read the first few chapters of whatever book I had grabbed, from memory it was Wuthering Heights, yeah I know real cheery. But believe it or not after about 30 or so minutes sitting in the sun away from a wifi connection and my phone I felt, better? But if that were the case then it would prove what I had always feared. I was in fact an addict, and my phone was ruining my life. So if I knew logically that the phone was ruining my life why couldn’t I seem to kick this habit. After all it’s not like I haven’t tried to address this problem before. I’ve tried all the “typical” things like turning off my phone, uninstalling the apps that I had deemed were an issue and none of them seemed to work. That would soon be revealed to me a few days later.

Catalyst Number 3 came a few days later when I was babysitting my younger cousins and as I was putting the 7 year old to bed he grabbed what I am affectionately calling “the smiling mind turtle” but it was essentially a speaker in the shape of a turtle that had a bunch of meditations to help my cousin regulate and go to sleep. It was in this moment of silence – outside of a turtle shaped speaker telling him (and subsequently me) to breathe deeply and let all the worries from the day melt away that for too long I had used my phone to temporarily mask all the feelings I had when it came to work, and it was causing me to have all these overwhelming feelings bubble up inside of me that my body (and brain) didn’t know how to deal with. So instead I continued to swipe endlessly hoping that it would provide my brain with a little bit of quiet (spoilers, it didn’t).

“I was using my phone as a bottomless pit to separate me from reality so I didn’t have to really acknowledge what was going on inside my head. ”

Ok, so now I was at a point where I had accepted I was an addict, I had reached my breaking point and now I had the reason why I used my phone as a drug. Except something was different. This time my mentality had shifted, I wasn’t tackling this issue from a place of self hatred, I was treating myself with compassion. If my theory was correct and I was an addict then that wasn’t a failing, I wasn’t worthless, I was sick. And when someone is sick you don’t kick them when they’re down. I needed to treat myself with the same compassion and kindness that I treated my patients.

You’re probably wondering, but Jaya it can’t have been that bad. You said that you were working almost fulltime, studying, going to dance almost three times a week. And I wish I could tell you that you were right. And yet my screen time would say otherwise.

These are real screenshots of what average weeks on my phone used to look like. My average was about 9/10hrs a day on my phone.

If these numbers scare you then they should. When I looked at my phone and saw that I had spent over 13 hours on my phone and that it wasn’t a ‘once off thing’ well lets just say that if I wasn’t treating this situation with compassion it would have definitely sent me down a negative spiral.

Almost overnight I was able to cut my screen time down by sometimes more than half, and no joke it has improved my life for the better

So how did I manage to get my screen time from 10+ hours to the 2-4 hours you see here? Well first I needed to not get rid of the apps, or at least not in the ways that I had done previously, hold tight let me explain.

Previously I had tried to go the full cold turkey method, but the issue there was I still had access to my phone and there were no safeguards in place to stop me from redownloading the apps or turning on the phone. I needed something to show me that the apps hadn’t gone anywhere but I couldn’t access them at that point in time.

Yes Apple does have the ‘screen time’ setting, but that is easy to bypass and I did it almost instinctively. I’d set a ‘screen limit’ but when it did that then I would just say ‘ignore it’ for the rest of the day. Not very effective.

Then along came Opal. This app has changed my life. I simply use the free version and not only has it cut my screen time in half it has made my world seem a little brighter both mentally and physically.

So what’s different now? What has Opal done that is so different? Well I would argue that it is the fact that my app use and screen time has been ‘gamified’ in a manner of speaking. The way I have set it up is that my social media apps (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) can only be opened 3 to a max of 5 times a day for a total of five minutes at a time. On days that I have work or uni my phone is essentially locked from 5am-4pm (my working hours), and from the hours of 10pm-5am I cannot access anything on my phone outside of iMessage, phone calls, my alarm clock, my bank card and smiling mind.

Now yes, there are ways to bypass the settings but what’s different about Opal in comparison to Apple’s screen time is that I have to wait 30+ seconds before I can even navigate the app to unlock things or reset them. Usually about 15 seconds in my brain has moved onto something different and I can’t be bothered to finish waiting for the 30 seconds to end.

“It’s the lack of fulfilling the instant gratification that my brain had come to crave thanks to the likes of TikTok which makes Opal SO effective. ”

Our phones have been designed in a way to make it seem like no time has passed when in reality it has been hours. TikTok especially is a bottomless pit of content. You can never truly reach “the end” and our brain thrives on that. The fact that it isn’t a closed loop form of entertainment like say a book or a film means that there is always something ‘new’ to watch, which then gives us an instant hit of dopamine which our brains craves. And yet I would challenge you to count how many times you see the same thing on TikTok, I’m not talking about similar videos, I’m talking about the same exact piece of content, because trust me it happens more than you think.

So why have I written this article? Well besides the fact that I now have all this free time that I didn’t know I had (I’ve started and finished two books in the span of three weeks, after not reading books for about four months). I wanted to let people know that they’re not alone.  Screen addiction has become the drug of our generation.

“Under the false guise of connection our phones have been disconnecting us from our reality and we didn’t even know it. ”

So I encourage you that if you too feel like you’ve been stuck in an endless loop of scrolling, swiping and liking to take a deep breath, see some sunshine, maybe download an app that locks social media and above all make sure to treat yourself with kindness and compassion. Because as my Mum always says, change starts with self-compassion, not with shame.