Are You A Stress Scroller?!

Do you sometimes question the relationship and dependence you have with your phone??

We’ve all caught ourselves mindlessly scrolling before. Some of this can be explained by the addictive design of social media platforms and apps, with content now being tailored to our interests, and notifications constantly grabbing our attention.

For some people, it’s not a problem and they don’t report any negative impact on their lives. For others however, and I have certainly seen this with clients, it can have a negative impact on things like sleep and increasing feelings of stress and anxiety. So why is this??

When we are highly stressed, as many of us are in the modern world, we can get stuck living in our sympathetic nervous system. This is more commonly known as the fight or flight part of our nervous system, which is very useful if we do encounter danger and need our body to help us survive with a nice big hit of adrenaline, but not so great if we constantly exist in this state day to day!

Living in this state can lead us to feel highly anxious, uncertain and chronically stressed. When this happens, my clients will often report that their screen time will go up, and they can find themselves scrolling and wasting hours a day on things like the Daily Mail App, looking at the News, Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook. I’m sure you can relate to this when you suddenly realise you’ve wasted the last hour looking at random people and videos! If done in the evening this can then have the knock-on effect of disturbing your sleep, with the light from you screen disturbing your natural wake and sleep cycles.

There is some science to why we do this. When we are highly stressed it is thought we subconsciously look for things that we can use to gain a sense of control and to make us feel more at ease. An example of this is trying to take in as much information as possible as we believe it will help us manage ‘the threat ‘ ( or stress!) or whatever we feel out of control of. This is why we can often find ourselves scrolling, in an attempt to take in more external information. Some of this information, might actually be useful.

However it can also work the other way and ramp up our anxiety and stress, as instead of feeling safer from collecting this information, we often just see more and more information about other things we aren’t in control of and actually signal to our brain that there is a real threat to be stressed and anxious about! Can you think back to a time where after scrolling you actually felt more anxious?

So I hope you can see how excessive screen time and scrolling can have a negative impact on sleep, stress and anxiety, which is only going to negatively impact our overall health.

But never fear! If this is you, here are some tips of how to start to limit and reduce your screen time!

1.     Write down and set yourself clear phone usage boundaries. How much time a day do you want to use it for? What do you want to use it for? What don’t you want to use it for? What times will you use it between? Put pen to paper and have clear aims to hold yourself accountable to.

2.     Have a screen lock password and reduce the automatic lock time. This means that there is a barrier in place which makes it harder for you to simply pick up your phone and start scrolling!

3.     Use your phone for as little as possible. Don’t rely on your phone to be your alarm, calendar, notepad, timer, clock, map etc. The more you can use other specific tools, the less time you will be on your phone and the less chance there is of scrolling

E.g. Buy an actual alarm clock so your phone isn’t the first thing you pick up in the morning!

4.     Try an app that limits your screen time. There are lots of these out there now you can use but Qustodio, Forrest, Freedom, OffScreen and Bark all have good reviews and you can set your own parameters, manage specific apps and get kicked off your on phone when your usage gets too high!

5.      Greyscale your phone!! This is a great one to do as you won’t get the addictive dopamine hit from all the colour that keeps you scrolling on your phone. Nothing looks quite as exciting in black and white.

Go to Settings, Accessibility, Display and Text Size, Colour Filters and then select Grayscale. Done!

6.     Don’t charge you phone in the bedroom. If you don’t have your phone charging by your bed it’s a lot harder to use at night time and there is less temptation to do so. This opens up more time to do something like reading, journaling, breathing practice or mediation to set yourself up for a good nights sleep.

7.     Physically distance your phone. Have somewhere where you leave you phone at periods of time in the day so it’s not always on you, in your pocket or in your hand. Finding somewhere for it to live at night time away from the bedroom is particularly impactful.

To wrap this up, I would just like to show you how this ties in to fat loss! The less stressed, anxious and tired you are, the more likely you are to live in a healthy body.  And if you aren’t at your ideal health or weight already, you are seriously upping you chances at achieving your targets, as your ability to stick to and follow a plan will be greatly increased.

Remember! Stressed, anxious and tired people tend to overeat and drink whereas well rested, centred and calm people don’t!

I hope you found these tips useful and you can start to implement them into you day and reduce your screen time and stress scrolling!

If you have any questions on this or are interested to work with me then CLICK HERE

Have a great week!

Lizzie x