Why we check our phones so much, Part 2: Scrolling as escapism and regulation
On scrolling versus checking.
"Most scrolling is looking away from something, not for something"
There’s a difference between checking our phones and scrolling on them.
Checking is directed. We open the app because something specific is waiting, for us, or we think there could be. There’s something to find out. A particular piece of information, and purpose, for us to grab the phone.
Scrolling is different, in that it has no goal. The thumb moves, the screen changes, and nothing in particular is being sought. We’re passing time and open to whatever we see that grabs our attention. And that is what this piece is about… the scrolling for the sake of it.
If I’m fully honest with myself, I scroll when I want to step away from whatever’s going on (or not going on) for me at that time. Avoiding housework, not feeling something I don’t want to feel, or wanting to feel a bit soothed by something I’ve come to find relaxing.
For a while there it was time-lapse lawn mowing videos (impressive and calming), then cow hoof trimming videos (restoring comfort for beautiful animals), and at the moment it’s bushcraft shelter-making videos (some of them are incredible!). I find them a good way to daydream about the cubbies I wish I’d made as a kid.
But in those moments of wanting to see something other than what’s in front of me, I don’t always reach for something specific. I just pick up the phone and start moving through content. Anything, really, so that I’m looking away from the room or feeling I’m sitting in. The scroll is a door out of a moment I’d rather not fully be in.
This is regulation of a kind. Not a sophisticated kind, but a real one. Our nervous system is uncomfortable, and our phone provides a change of scene: a reliable, low-effort change when what’s in front of us feels too much.
Why acknowledge it, and write about it? Because it’s worth understanding what we’re actually asking the phone to do, because that helps us understand why it keeps feeling insufficient.
What it costs
The scroll soothes briefly, and that’s real. But it also has a delayed cost that’s easy to miss in the moment.
The first cost is whatever we’ve avoided. When we scroll away from something, it doesn’t go away, it just waits. We come back to it in roughly the same state we left it, except now we’ve spent twenty minutes somewhere else. Sometimes slightly worse, because we’ve added the background hum of everything we absorbed in the scroll to whatever was already sitting there.
The second cost is the quality of the rest. Scrolling before sleep, which most of us do and most of us know is counterproductive, isn’t really about sleep hygiene. It’s about the avoided thing being loudest when everything else goes quiet. The scroll is the last act of avoidance for the day, before the mind ruminates on the avoided thing anyway.
The third cost is harder to pinpoint, but it’s probably the relationship between difficulty and capacity. The more reliably we escape discomfort via the phone, the less practice we get at sitting with it.
Our tolerance doesn’t build. The next uncomfortable moment arrives, and our reflex is the same, and we avoid, rather than increase what we can sit with, and how much we can handle.
What’s actually going on
The emotional drivers behind scrolling and checking are different, but they share something. The phone is the path of least resistance when sitting with something feels like too much.
For checking, the underlying need is connection. For scrolling, the underlying need is relief. Neither can fully deliver. But both are always available, and that’s the problem.
I did this recently when an important conversation hadn’t finished the way I wanted, and instead of sitting with it, I picked up the phone.
Twenty minutes of bushcraft videos later, nothing had shifted. The conversation was still unfinished. I was still in the same room with the same feelings, I’d just been briefly somewhere else.
That’s not a verdict on the scroll.
Sometimes briefly being somewhere else is what we need. But it helps to know the impact of what we’re doing, because the phone will always be there when we reach for it, and it will always offer a door.
Knowing why we open it is available to us.
Three things to try.
1. Name what we’re scrolling away from.
When we notice ourselves reaching for our phones without a specific reason, we can pause and ask: what would we rather not be fully in right now?
We don’t have to fix it. Just naming it helps.
2. Give the discomfort a time limit.
If something is sitting with us, try setting a ten-minute window to actually sit with it before reaching for the phone. Let it exist without immediately leaving. This is harder than it sounds, and worth trying.
3. Notice what the scroll produces.
After a session of scrolling that started from that reaching-away place, notice honestly what we feel. Lighter? The same? Slightly worse? Whatever we notice is information.
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