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Why You Can't Stop Scrolling (and What Lao Tzu Would Say About It)

Published 4 min read

You open Instagram to check one message. Forty minutes later you are watching a stranger renovate a kitchen in another country, and you can’t remember deciding to stay. If that sounds familiar, you are not weak. You are doing exactly what the app was designed to make you do.

Why doomscrolling is so hard to stop

Three features of modern feeds keep your thumb moving:

  • There is no bottom. Infinite scroll removed the natural stopping point that pages used to give us. Without an end, the brain never gets the signal “done”.
  • The rewards are unpredictable. Most posts are dull; every so often one is funny, outrageous or about you. Psychologists have long known that rewards on an unpredictable schedule are the hardest habits to break. It is the same principle that keeps people at slot machines.
  • Bad news grabs attention. We are wired to scan for threats. A feed full of alarming headlines feels urgent, so we keep reading “just in case”, even when it leaves us anxious. That is where the word doomscrolling comes from.

None of this is solved by telling yourself to try harder. Willpower is a tired guard at a gate that is open all day.

What Lao Tzu noticed

The Tao Te Ching is a short book of 81 chapters attributed to Lao Tzu, a sage of ancient China. It says nothing about phones, but it describes the over-stimulated mind with uncomfortable accuracy. Chapter 12, in James Legge’s 1891 translation:

Colour’s five hues from th’ eyes their sight will take;
Music’s five notes the ears as deaf can make;
The flavours five deprive the mouth of taste;
The chariot course, and the wild hunting waste
Make mad the mind; and objects rare and strange,
Sought for, men’s conduct will to evil change.

Tao Te Ching, ch. 12 · tr. James Legge (1891)

Replace “the chariot course and the wild hunting” with “the autoplay video and the endless feed” and the chapter could have been written last year. Too much stimulation does not make us see more. It dulls us. The more we chase the next bright thing, the less we can enjoy any of it.

The chapter ends with advice: the sage “seeks to satisfy (the craving of) the belly, and not the (insatiable longing of the) eyes.” In other words, tend to what actually nourishes you, not to what merely catches your eye.

The Taoist alternative: don’t fight, redirect

Taoism has a word for acting without strain: wu wei, often translated as “non-action” or “effortless action”. It does not mean doing nothing. It means not forcing. Water does not argue with a rock; it flows around it, and over time it wins.

Applied to your phone, wu wei suggests that the answer is not a heroic act of self-denial but a small change in the current. Three practical ideas:

  1. Add a pause where the habit starts. The urge to scroll lasts seconds. If something stands between the impulse and the feed, the impulse often passes on its own.
  2. Give your attention somewhere better to land. An empty pause invites the mind straight back to the feed. A few lines worth reading give it a place to rest.
  3. Notice how you feel afterwards. Lao Tzu writes that “he who knows himself is intelligent” (ch. 33). Simply observing how forty minutes of scrolling leaves you is more persuasive than any rule.

For more concrete steps, see our guide to reducing screen time without relying on willpower.

Why we built an app around this

We made Taoism: Doomscrolling Blocker to put those three ideas into one small habit. When you open an app you have chosen to block, such as Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, it pauses and shows you a short passage from the Tao Te Ching or the Zhuangzi first. You read for a minute, then choose: close the app, or continue for a set time.

Sometimes you continue. Often you don’t. Either way, you decided, rather than the feed.

And if a passage stays with you, the whole Tao Te Ching is in the app to keep reading. If you are new to it, our beginner’s guide to the 81 chapters suggests where to start.

The short version

  • You can’t stop scrolling because feeds are designed to have no stopping point and unpredictable rewards.
  • Fighting the habit head-on rarely works for long.
  • Lao Tzu’s advice still holds: too much stimulation dulls the mind, and the way out is to stop chasing the eyes’ cravings and return to what nourishes you.
  • A short pause, filled with something worth reading, is often enough to change the current.

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