Doomscrolling much? You open your phone for one small task and surface an hour later, unsure where the time went. The more screen time you spend, the less satisfied you are. Your day disappears in supposedly time-saving apps, features and tools.
You may be engaging in digital overconsumption, and suffering from digital indigestion. And the solution, to borrow a metaphor, may be a digital fast.
Fasting doesn’t mean quitting forever. It means putting limits on when you consume. For millennia, religious and cultural traditions have used fasting to reshape daily rhythms. During Ramadan, Muslims abstain from food and drink from sunrise to sunset. The Black Fast, an early Christian practice, also required abstinence from food and drink during daylight hours, followed by a simple vegetarian or pescatarian meal after sundown.
There’s also a modern, non-religious version: intermittent fasting. Here the motivation is usually physical fitness and the limits are simpler: you eat only within a defined window, say from 12pm to 8pm, and abstain from food for the rest of the day.
Each model sets boundaries around time. None demands total, permanent abstinence.
What if we applied that logic to our screens?
Daytime digital fasting may be impractical for most of us. Work, logistics and social life run through our devices. But flip the model and it becomes far more workable.
If your habit is to scroll whenever you sit on the train, wait in line or idle at a red light (dangerous and illegal, in case you need reminding), vague promises to “use your phone less” rarely stick. Nor does micromanaging – for example, trying to limit yourself to fifteen minutes per app per day.
Fasting offers a more workable structure: time limits.
Try a “digital sundown”. Spend your day on your devices, if work demands it. Then power down when you get home. Or borrow from intermittent fasting: no phone before 9 a.m., no scrolling after 8 p.m. Start later. End earlier. Structured boundaries often succeed where willpower or an intricate list of rules fails.
You can also introduce friction. When our thumbs seem to open apps faster than we can think to stop ourselves, the best solution may be deleting them entirely. Of course, you can still stay connected to these services via desktop. The added effort of logging in may dramatically reduce casual consumption without cutting you off completely.
But fasting often requires replacement. You don’t just remove; you redirect. Which explains the recent TikTok Analog Bag trend. People are assembling kits filled with books, crosswords, sketchpads, letters, knitting – tactile things to reach for instead of reflexively reaching for a phone.
Digital fasting is about reclaiming control of your time – deciding when to consume the feed, instead of letting it consume you.