At first, I genuinely thought it was harmless.
You know those evenings after work where you just want to relax a little?
You sit down for “five minutes,” open Instagram or YouTube Shorts, and suddenly you’re watching videos about how nobody is trustworthy anymore… how you should always be emotionally detached… how if your partner doesn’t do these five things they don’t truly care about you…
And because it’s everywhere, it slowly starts feeling normal.
But something I realised over time is this:
Your nervous system does not interpret all of this as casually as your conscious mind does. And I say this as someone who has been practicing mindfulness for almost ten years now. Meditation and quietness were always comforting for me.
Silence never used to feel uncomfortable.
Slowness never used to feel unbearable.
Being alone with my thoughts was actually something I enjoy.
Which is why one very ordinary evening shocked me so much.
Around three years ago, I came back from work and decided to watch an old episode of Friends. And Friends is one of my comfort shows. If I want to watch something new, I usually go for thrillers. But if I want familiarity or comfort, I watch something like Friends.
It was exactly that kind of evening.
And suddenly…
I was bored.
Not mildly distracted.
Actually bored.
I was skipping scenes.
Reaching for my phone.
Looking for more stimulation while watching something I genuinely loved.
And I remember sitting there thinking:
“Something is not right.”
Because the issue was not the show.
The issue was what constant stimulation had quietly done to my attention span and nervous system.
And once I noticed it, I couldn’t unsee it anymore.
Now here’s the interesting part. I was never someone who carried my phone everywhere.
In fact, this still annoys my friends.
They’ll call me and later ask:
“Why didn’t you pick up?”
And my answer is usually:
“My phone was in the bedroom and I was in the living room.”
So externally, nothing looked extreme. But internally, something had changed.
I had started feeling incomplete without stimulation.
No matter what I was doing, there was this constant urge to:
check my phone,
refresh something,
open another app,
consume another piece of content.
Even during things I genuinely used to enjoy. And slowly I started noticing what this was doing to the rest of my life. I had become impatient.
Watching movies without skipping parts felt difficult.
Even sitting quietly for a few minutes without reaching for entertainment started feeling like I am missing out on something.
And the scariest part is…
all of this had become normal. For a little while let's say for a few days or few incidents. Thanks to my meditation practice I wasn't in an automatic loop. I was awared to observe the pattern that was building.
That realisation became a turning point for me.
Because compulsive scrolling is not just about “wasting time.”
It changes the quality of your attention. And attention affects almost everything.
Your patience.
Your emotional regulation.
Your focus.
Your relationships.
Your ability to enjoy slow moments.
Your nervous system.
Even the way you experience your own life.
And another thing I noticed was how much comparison quietly enters your mind through repeated exposure.
You see people vacationing with friends.
Couples on beaches.
Relationship advice from strangers online.
And suddenly you start questioning things you were completely okay with five minutes ago.
“Does this person really care about me?”
“Am I missing out?”
“Is my life emotionally behind?”
Most of these thoughts were never originally yours. They were planted gradually through repetition.
And alongside comparison came another huge issue:
constant stimulation.
When your brain gets rewarded every few minutes through short-form content, ordinary life starts feeling slower in comparison. Not because ordinary life became boring. But because your nervous system became conditioned to intensity.
And this is where things started changing for me.
Not through extreme detoxes.
Not through disappearing from the internet.
But through awareness.
One simple practice especially helped me a lot.
Every single time I picked up my phone, I started asking myself:
“Why did I pick it up right now?”
Do I want to message someone?
Check the time?
Call someone?
Search for something specific?
And once the task was done, I would put the phone down again.
That tiny pause changed a lot.
Because awareness interrupts automatic behavior.
You begin noticing how many times your hand reaches for the phone without any actual reason. And once something becomes visible, it becomes changeable.
When I look back to see what helped me the most, one thing that helped me to understand and resolve the entire time it was my meditation practice. It didn't let me slide into the loop and kept me awared of my desicions.
And honestly?
The quality of life most people want —
calmness,
clarity,
presence,
emotional steadiness,
deeper relationships —
all of it stands on the foundation of attention and awareness.
That's what started my 1:1 meditation and clarity sessions. (If this is something you would like to explore.)
Once you start rebuilding that foundation, even slowly, life begins feeling different again.
Quieter. Clearer. More yours.
The sunset was always beautiful.
Sometimes we just became too overstimulated to sit long enough and notice it.
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