Doomscrolling. We’ve all done it. You pick up your phone to look up one small thing, open a browser, immediately forget what that thing was, yet somehow six hours later you’re still scrolling. Instagram. TikTok. A news organization’s social media page that is very carefully designed to make you angry, anxious, or afraid so you’ll keep clicking.

That’s not an accident. This is how those platforms make money, and they’re extremely good at it. They know how to grab your attention and keep you emotionally hooked, either by pushing content that makes you feel outraged and stressed out, or which gives you a big ol’ dopamine hit by confirming your biases.

A lot of people try to fight doomscrolling by carefully curating their social media feeds, like unfollowing certain accounts, avoiding news, or sticking only to content that feels light or harmless. I’ve done that, too. I don’t go on the hellsite known formerly known as Twitter at all anymore. My time on Bluesky is very limited. And my Instagram feed is aggressively curated. That’s where I go for posts about funny animals, art, travel, recipes, and crafting. No politics. No religion. Nothing designed to spike my blood pressure.

The problem is that even a carefully curated feed is still a feed. You’re still staring at a screen. You’re still scrolling. And you’re almost certainly spending more time doing it than you meant to.

What’s worked better for me is something the internet, ironically, has started calling analog doomscrolling.

There’s nothing especially doom-filled about it. It’s really just a mindset shift, a way of redirecting that urge to scroll back toward the kinds of things we used to do before the internet took over everything. Reading aimlessly. Flipping through books. Following curiosity without an algorithm deciding what comes next.

I suspect analog doomscrolling looks different for everyone. For me, what usually happens is that whenever I feel the urge to check social media, I pick up a book instead. Specifically, a book that’s meant to be dipped into, not read straight through. Now, I know that none of these categories of books below will be anything new to anyone. What I want to focus on is shifting the way we view them, making them alternatives to endless, mindless doomscrolling.

Sometimes what’s needed is literally a dictionary. I’ll flip through at random and look up words I don’t know, or words I half-remember. That probably sounds crazy boring, but it turns out dictionaries are actually kind of fascinating, especially when they’re not traditional ones.

One of my favorites is The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. It’s a collection of words that name feelings and experiences we don’t usually have language for. The very first entry is chrysalism, which describes the cozy, content feeling of being inside during a thunderstorm. What a great word to know! That one word is usually enough to send me flipping through the rest of the book.

More rambling below the cut – click it!