So You (and Me) Are Addicted to Scrolling — Now What?
Last month I wrote about my experiment with a social media fast and how I subsequently fell off the wagon and started using again. Now it is January, the season of purification, and I am still on the ‘Gram and have not given it up for the new year, nor set any goals related to diet and exercise. I am not even doing Dry January. However, I am inspired and intrigued about doing something wholly un-American…using my phone and social media in moderation.
Moderation is really a scoundrel in the purity test world we are living in. Extremism and performative activism have made being moderate feel a little like taking the easy way out. Plus, the word “moderation” sounds as boring as the notion seems and is contrary to our social training to want and do more. I think of moderate as “mid,” vanilla, ok, or even the shrug emoji, but moderate is a word like “weird” and “normal”; my moderate could be someone else’s extreme, or vice versa. To define moderate phone and social media use, I have decided to use my phone’s screen time tracker and set a goal to be on my phone for less than 2 hours a day, and perhaps less than 15 minutes on social media. In other words, not all the time, but also, not zero time. You know - a moderate amount.
Now, I’m annoyed with myself that I have to set these parameters, because in an ideal world, my time on a phone would be zero. Cell phone free I could always be in the present moment and therefore living my healthiest life. But zero is not possible for me, and attempting to embrace an extremist policy has never worked out well. Remember, I have tried to quit, many times.
I am thinking that to be a moderate phone user is all about time management: If I choose not to scroll on my phone when I have a free moment, I might need to be doing something else. And, likely, something else with my hands. So in the spirit of resistance, I am currently playing a little game where I try to spend more time working with my hands, and therefore less time scrolling on my phone. A delightful side effect has been the connections to teaching that I have explored while doing these manual tasks, which have been more meaningful than I anticipated.
World Building with Legos
In response to a conversation we had about how much I dislike the holidays, my friend Jessica said that I should try doing more playful things to celebrate, to bring a more childlike joy to the season. My husband and I don’t have kids, and neither does my one sister, so it has been decades since our holidays have been experienced, either first or secondhand, through the eyes of a child. So for fun she gave me a set of Legos called “Tiny Plants” from their Botanical Collection to work on over the holidays.
Well, let me tell you…what a concept! Over Christmas break I would have my coffee with my husband and build one of the Tiny Plants at the kitchen table while chatting idly (and he scrolled on his phone (!)) and I have now fallen in love with Legos. I actually didn’t play with Legos as a child and I don’t know why, but now I am asking for another set for Valentine’s Day, and my birthday, etc. I just adore my little Lego plants.
The strange part of this story is that I have used Legos in my classroom for a few years now as an opening activity on the first day of teaching essay writing to freshmen, despite never having played with Legos myself. I put a pile of Legos on my students’ desks and ask them to build a house. They are immediately hooked; it’s probably the most engaged they are all school year. Once they finish, their writing prompt is, how is writing an essay like building a house? They always share beautiful connections between the foundation of the house and the thesis of a paper.
Lego building in the English classroom is an idea I had years ago when I took a class in makerspace learning and design thinking, because I want so badly for my students to create as they learn, play being so healthy for us. I wonder why I have been so ready to allow my students to be playful, but not myself. When I am building Legos, I don’t think about anything else and I am squarely in the present moment, which is the definition of meditation. Is more play an antidote to scrolling? Why are we so quick to assume play is only for little children? While I build Legos instead of scrolling on my phone, I also dream about other hands-on ways to teach writing in the spirit of writers as builders of worlds and ideas.
Stitching: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!
My friend Sarah and I took a Sashiko stitching class at a local art studio a few years ago and we have been stitching ever since. These days, in addition to stitching dish towels (I have happily yet to move on to more complicated projects), I think of stitching as something to do with my hands instead of scrolling on my phone. Recently, I was at my mom’s house having a glass of wine with my family, and as we talked I worked on some stitching. At one point my mom asked, “Do you always have to be doing something? Is it hard for you to just be still?”
Yes, it is. Instead of getting mad at her, I just admitted it. Especially coming off a semester of teaching and completing a graduate degree, this holiday it took me days…ok, weeks…to get into vacation mode. Like so many of my peers, I am always doing something, so it is now hard to stop the cycle of motion. I know this isn’t good for me. But because of this momentum, some people need structure around relaxing - they don’t just stop working and turn off their mental engines, dipping into a zen state. In a recent episode titled “2025: The Year of Intentional Living,“ on her podcast Ask Lisa, I heard our favorite psychologist, Lisa Damour, talk about how leisure time looks different for us all and that we shouldn’t give ourselves a hard time if our version of leisure includes producing something. Her words felt inclusive for us overachievers who usually feel either ashamed or excluded by conversations about slowing down.
And stitching is slow work and reminds me how much my attention span has shortened since using an iPhone and social media, which helps me empathize with my students. My current students were born in 2009, so they have never known life without smartphones. I have been teaching since 2007 and witnessed how much young people’s minds have changed, but let’s be real, so has mine. The first time I skipped a few lines while reading a hardcover novel was my sign that I need to slow my mental processing down.
One of the gifts of stitching to my teaching curriculum has been referring to themes as threads throughout a work. A visual of a thread is an open invitation to consider how we build connection and how we are all connected, and how writers weave motifs throughout a work to inspire, challenge, and question us. While teaching Jane Eyre, Megan and I ask our students to identify a theme, or thread, that is resonating with them personally and the students build a “theme thread” as brainstorming for a “sacred reading” essay, the essay being sacred because they are connecting the novel to their own hearts and lives. Using string, paper, and scissors gets the students off their screens, which they always appreciate. The last time we built our theme threads, a student told me, “I have been on my laptop since 8 this morning without a break!” It was 2:30 p.m.
Calligraphy: Doodle, Draw, or Stare out the Window as an Assignment
This fall I took a calligraphy class taught by one of my colleagues, Andrea Pujol. I have always wanted to learn calligraphy because I have been a lifelong doodler, and drawing letters combines my love of language and my enjoyment of spacing out. Now I sometimes practice my letters instead of scrolling on my phone, especially at night when I am watching the news. While doodling I am reflecting on the disappearing art of writing by hand, despite scientific evidence that (hand) writing is good for your mind.
In a recent NPR piece titled “Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning,” writer Jonathan Lambert notes, “A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing ‘sync up’ with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.” There has been a lot of research about the learning and cognitive benefits of handwriting, but typing is the skill we use most as a culture. And this is fine, but we can do both. Sometimes teachers are urged to jump on technology out of the fear of falling behind and dragging their students behind with them. I’ve been teaching long enough now to see the pendulum swing very hard toward the tech-based classroom. And there is good reason for this – the world will require technology proficiency from our students.
But my colleagues and I ask our students to keep a paper journal and frequently begin class by free writing with a pen or pencil. During this time, I join them, or I practice my letters. I tell my students, “You may write, doodle, draw, or stare out the window, but you can’t be on your laptop.” What if, instead of scrolling, we all wrote in a small journal instead, or simply doodled? If my thumb needs to be active, then maybe it can just be active by gripping a pen or pencil.
Just Say No…Or Maybe, Just Say Sometimes
My practice is simply this: my body and my mind are the only places I have autonomy, and I need to claim this sacred freedom by training myself to resist spending all my empty minutes scrolling on a phone. If this takes the physical discipline to haul around my stitching and sketchbook, so be it. Something has to be done. And I can’t seem to quit cold turkey. Time on my iPhone is benefitting someone else, mainly the executives sitting in the front row at the inauguration.
But! Here comes the other side of the truth–lots of great things happen on my phone, too. I love seeing a former student launch her cooking account on Instagram. I love the photography and the book reviews and the conversations around rest that happen online. I also love checking the weather and reading the newspaper.
Maybe these habits I am forming by physically doing something with my hands is how I eventually arrive at using my phone in moderation. And if I can be a moderate phone user, how will this measured approach help me stay in step with my students, but also empower our conversations about cultivating time away from technology, which they desperately need? Can even the small act of considering moderation help them think critically about their autonomy? I know young peoples’ social lives happen online. But we talk frequently on this blog about resisting as a way of critical thinking, and even two fewer minutes a day of phone use are two more minutes of the day that young people have to themselves and their own minds.
Kate Schenck is currently reading Babylonia by Costanza Cosati and starting her spring flower seeds indoors.
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