Read this if you want to understand how and why you end up doomscrolling and bingeing each time you decide to indulge in a vice.
You’re at your desk, doing some work on a project.
It's going okay, when you get the idea to take a break. You tell yourself:
Two minutes. Two minutes to check what’s new on Reddit, and then it's right back to work.
Two minutes soon becomes fifteen.
Fine. It happens. But let's pause the tape right there.
If that was the end of it—if you thought, "It's okay, that was an interesting post and worth the extended time, but now let's get back to work. And then you actually did get back to work, it wouldn’t be a big deal.
But that's not what happens.
Instead, you decide to check TikTok—again, just for a few minutes—aaand an entire hour’s passed.
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Why did that happen? Why does that sort of thing always happen?
To answer, we’ll need to rewind this mental movie and take a closer look in slow-mo.
So, there you are, scrolling through Reddit. Then it hits you: you're wasting time. You resurface to the present moment. You look up and away from your phone and—there. Right then. Pause the tape.
It's subtle as heck and easy to miss, but in that crucial moment… you felt bad.
What was that feeling exactly?
Perhaps guilt as you realized that you broke your promise to focus, to have a distraction-free work session.
Or maybe you were irritated because fun time was over, and it was time to get back to work, back to the grind.
Whatever the precise emotion, it felt bad.
Logically, this negative feeling should compel you to get the heck back to work, shouldn’t it? In the same way that the pain of a burn stops you from touching a hot stovetop again, the pain of wasting time should compel you to, well, stop wasting time.
But that's not what happens. In fact, the opposite happens. You waste more time.
On the surface this seems irrational, but if we dig a little deeper, it actually makes perfect sense.
For you, browsing the internet is a vice. And the thing about vices—beyond their ability to entertain and gratify—is their unmatched ability to relieve bad feelings.
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This may not yet ring true to you, so let’s fast-forward another hour to see the vice in action again.
You’re flicking through TikTok when, as if from a stupor, you surface again for a moment. This time you throw your phone at the couch in anger. With the deadline approaching, cortisol floods your brain. You say to yourself, “What am I doing? Now I’m legit behind. I've screwed myself over.”
Now you’re stressed and anxious. Your brain pelts you with increasingly harsh self-critical thoughts. “I'm such an idiot. How could I let myself do this again?!”
All of that is extremely unpleasant.
What happens next? You guessed it: you’re hit with an intense compulsion to do something, anything, to get rid of these threatening sensations.
And guess what? The thing that can deliver just the right kind of relief, happens to be right there lying on the couch.
This doesn't mean you're flawed or a bad person. On the contrary, this is a survival instinct kicking in when it senses a threat. To your brain, stress and anxiety mean your life is at risk, and it needs to eliminate the threat. You need relief! Sitting down and doing the work? That takes time and effort, but your brain wants relief now. As far as it’s concerned, this stress and anxiety mean you could die. It wants the quickest, easiest, path to relief, and it wasn’t it now.
That’s messed up, right?
The cause of the bad feelings—the guilt, the stress, the anxiety… what's even behind much of the shame, depression, and regret that weaves in and out of your life—is the same thing that's incredibly effective at instantly relieving all those bad feelings.
In this cycle of distraction and relief, our vices become both the poison and the antidote, trapping us in a feedback loop that soothes as it harms.
As with all addictions, the drug both causes and cures the disease.
Runaway Feedback Loops
Here's the grim reality:
Through thousands of repetitions, you've learned that you can escape bad feelings by using your vices.
But when your vices also provoke bad feelings, it creates a vicious feedback loop that rapidly transfixes you into a zombie-like state. You end up doom-scrolling.
This is called the Doomscroll Feedback Loop.
🔑 Because vices cause and cure bad feelings, they create the Vice Feedback Loop.