The #1 Reason You Can’t Stop Doomscrolling (and How to Stop)
I.K. Randhawa
The Fear Series
Facing Fear, Finding You
About You
Doomscrolling happens because you’re disconnecting from internal chaos and unconscious permanent internal fears. Facing Fear, Finding You (December 2025, 236 pages by I.K. Randhawa) teaches you to face fears of failure, inadequacy, and not being good enough instead of escaping them through distraction. Delete the apps, admit you’re avoiding something, and face your fears. Break the doomscrolling addiction by addressing what you’re running from.
TL;DR – What You’ll Learn in This Post
Doomscrolling isn’t just a bad habit, it’s disconnection from internal chaos
The real problem is that you’re avoiding unconscious permanent internal fears through distraction
Distraction addiction happens because we’re running from internal suffering
Facing your fears transforms chaos into peace and ends the need for constant escape
Three steps to stop: (1) Delete the apps, (2) Admit you’re avoiding something, (3) Face your fears
Doomscrolling is humanity’s current bane of existence.
There you are, waiting for the kettle to boil, or your food to cook, or any other daily event where you’re having to wait for something, and you immediately grab your phone and start scrolling. And scroll. And scroll.
Until your outside world wakes you up from the trance in some way, which may or may not be the smell of burnt food.
Annoying and unfortunate.
It’s also not just a “bad habit.” It’s disconnection: The real reason you can’t stop doomscrolling.
You want to escape, truly disconnect from the uncomfortableness you feel in your heart and mind.
The internal chaos is easier to live with when you’re spending as much time as you possibly can by disconnecting from it with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and everything else.
It’s horrible. You know it is.
You want to stop scrolling and do something that feels genuinely amazing, not just cheap dopamine. You try to change. You start reading a book, really enjoy it, but don’t read it again.
Why? You’re too tempted by the deception doomscrolling is selling to you. That deception is that you’ll feel 10% better without giving any effort to it.
When in reality, you know that you always feel worse.
If this is you, it’s not happening because you’re weak, or can’t change.
It’s happening because we’re living in a world spoilt with distraction. Today, there are so many platforms with unlimited content providing us with endless ways to avoid ourselves. Distraction has become the primary way people cope with internal suffering because the system is designed to keep it this way.
It’s not all bad news though.
You can absolutely stop doomscrolling. You can stop wasting your time on pointless content. And you can overcome this distraction addiction.
You can also do more. You can end the chaos of your mind. You can find peace, purpose, and personal freedom. And you can enjoy spending time with yourself without distraction or escape. You can stop needing external entertainment to get you through every day of your life, and actually enjoy it instead.
And, in this post, I’m going to guide you through three steps you can take today to help you stop doomscrolling and start connecting with yourself. Let’s begin!
Step 1: Remove the Temptation (Delete the Apps)
I know you don’t want to. But you need to.
Trust me, you’re going to feel so much better when you do.
I enjoy my privacy, so I don’t have any social media. I have had YouTube and TikTok though, which have thoroughly wasted my time.
The first time I downloaded TikTok, I intended to be on it for 20 minutes, and stayed there for 4 hours instead. That shocked me, and I deleted it immediately.
No way was I going to let this app, this escapism, waste more of my time.
Then there was the matter of YouTube, but that was a bit harder because I’d been watching videos through all my years as a teenager. I tried to convince myself that I could limit it, but the problem was that the more time I spent passively watching these videos, the harder it became to put myself into a state to actually do something productive.
So I deleted YouTube too. And, I’ve signed out of my account on Safari so I don’t get any video recommendations.
And you know what, this has served me very well. I’m an author at 25 years old, having written and published my book in 18 months. And because I refused to let myself be distracted, I’ll have this achievement, and so many more, for the rest of my life.
You see, the problem with doomscrolling isn’t just the immediate time it steals from you while you’re on the app. It’s also the horrible passive consumer state it puts you in for a long time afterwards, which makes it so much harder for you to put yourself in an active builder state to actually do things with your life.
So delete the apps. Do it, and don’t think too much about it. You can always redownload them later if you realise that your life is nothing without them
And if you find that your life actually is so much more without them, you can later delete your accounts and thoroughly commit to creating an incredible life for yourself.
Step 2: Admit You’ve Been Avoiding Something
Ok, once you’ve got rid of the distraction temptation, you need to be honest with yourself about something big.
You have to admit that the doomscrolling was happening because you were avoiding something else. It wasn’t because you “just like it.”
Don’t tell me it’s not that deep, because it is. This thing, this behaviour is wasting your time, brainwashing you, and making you feel like shit, all at the same time. I am being a bit direct here, but it’s true.
You know it is.
There’s a deeper reason for the doomscrolling, and distracting yourself from all of the chaos you’re feeling in your inner world—all the fears, thoughts, emotions, regrets, memories—is that reason.
It won’t be just one thing you’re avoiding, or one fear. There is so much chaos going on inside that you don’t even know where you’d begin to address it. All you know is that you want to avoid it. Even if only your subconscious knows that right now.
Maybe it’s the fear of failure.
Or the fear of change.
Or an embarrassing memory.
Or ten.
Plus everything else.
Distracting yourself doesn’t make any of it go away. It doesn’t calm the chaos. It just leaves it there.
So, admit it: You were doomscrolling because you were running away from the chaos in your mind.
Admit it and give yourself a real chance to change your internal world.
Chaos doesn’t have to be your reality anymore. I know that, because that’s what I have, and am, changing myself.
Step 3: Face the Fears Instead of Escaping Them
So, as I mentioned above, fear will be one of the things that you’re avoiding.
What I didn’t say was that fear is one of the greatest things causing the chaos in your inner world, and will be one of the biggest things that you are avoiding.
That’s why I chose fear as the topic of my first book: I realised it was the thing that was causing my greatest suffering.
Unconscious Permanent Internal Fears to be exact, which take the form of:
- Fear of failure
- Fear of making the wrong decision
- Fear of being seen
- Fear of not being good enough
And what do you do with all of this fear? Well, you face it.
Facing it means to look closer and get to know it. Really understand what you’re afraid of, why you’re afraid of it, and how you have been responding to it.
Learning all of this information gives you a chance to earn the power of knowledge, which means you can actually do something to start changing your inner chaos to peace. You can fight those fears. You can move past them.
And you can get to know the real you in the process.
This is where true freedom from doomscrolling begins.
When you face what you’ve been avoiding, you stop being addicted to the constant distraction. You don’t want to escape anymore because you like where you already are. Love it, in fact.
And this is exactly what my book Facing Fear, Finding You was written to support you with.
Step by step, it guides you to:
- Break patterns of self-sabotage, doubt, and anxiety
- Identify how you’ve been responding to your internal fears, and how to change that
- Create emotional safety in an unpredictable world
- Build internal safety skills that can actually serve you
- Snap yourself out of automatic fear-responses using conscious responses
This is where peace and power begins.
“But What If I’m Not Avoiding Anything? I Just Enjoy Scrolling.”
This could be true. I love scrolling on Pinterest. It feels hopeful and positive and helps me to visualise and manifest my dreams, like my future home. I leave it feeling great, even though I haven’t spent hours on it.
So the questions to ask are:
- What types of content are you consuming?
- How long do you scroll for?
- Is it easy to stop?
- How do you feel after you stop?
- And does it feel like a smart investment of your limited resource of time?
Scrolling is kind of unavoidable for us now. But doomscrolling is something else entirely, and actually is avoidable.
If part of you knows that you’re scrolling because you want to avoid being with yourself, then this blog post is for you.
Bringing It All Together
To stop doomscrolling, try out the three steps outlined in this post and see what happens. Give it an honest go as an experiment.
You need to:
1. Delete the Apps
1. Accept you’ve been avoiding something
1. Face your fears
When you do this, your mind quiets down. You become genuinely happier. Or rather, you realise that what you thought was happiness before, really wasn’t because you know what it feels like now.
And that is more precious than anything else.
Which is why it’s worth the effort.
Your Next Step
So, if you’re ready to stop distracting yourself and start actually enjoying your life, I invite you to read my book Facing Fear, Finding You.
It’s the exact guide you need to help you through the overwhelming task of unraveling all of that chaos and transforming it into real power.
One fear at a time.
I.K. Randhawa (pronounced I.K. Ran-dha-wa) is on a mission to guide those suffering from internal chaos and emotional overwhelm through deep internal exploration, so they can find peace, purpose, and personal freedom. The British Punjabi Sikh author and Internal Explorer is committed to exploring humanity’s greatest internal challenges with an intuitive, soul-driven approach. From fear to trust, grief, integrity and much more, each book serves as a demonstration of inner exploration to empower her readers to become Internal Explorers themselves.
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FAQ'S
Answers
Find answers to common questions about the author, her books, the Internal Explorer Protocol, and her approach.
Q: Is deleting apps really necessary? Can’t I just limit my usage?
A: Based on my experience, limiting doesn’t work as well as deleting. The problem isn’t just the time spent scrolling, it’s the passive consumer state it puts you in afterwards, making it harder to do anything productive later on. Delete first, see how you feel. You can always redownload if needed.
Q: What if I need certain apps for work or staying in touch?
Q: How is doomscrolling related to internal fears?
Q: I tried deleting apps before and just redownloaded them. What’s different this time?
Q: What if my fear isn’t listed in your examples?
Q: How long does it take to stop the doomscrolling habit?