To be honest I don’t remember how I came up with this, but one day I found myself walking into my closet and looking at my phone, wanting to continue scrolling for a few minutes but also not wanting to get hooked into it and losing a bunch of time.
So, I laid down, right there, on the floor of our closet. A couple minutes later my spouse walked into the bathroom, saw me, and said, “uh….you ok?”
”I’m fine” I said, “I just don’t want to be on my phone too long and I think if I lie here, I won’t scroll very long.”
This is probably a sign we’ve been married a long time because my spouse said “OK” and left me to scroll.
Last night, I did the exact same thing, for probably the 10th time, and my spouse walked in to the closet and didn’t say a word. A minute later, I got up.
I know that some will see this and say, “or you could just NOT go on your phone! Problem solved”. But here’s the thing- that’s a very binary take, and around this page, we aim for non-binary takes (see what I did there?)
There is nothing wrong with needing a dopamine hit. The media have turned dopamine into a 4-letter word, but dopamine is a good thing, it is literally how our brain decides we like things. ADHD brains are often dopamine deficient, so if an ADHD brain is craving dopamine, trying to get it from “low hanging fruit” like screens is not pathological behavior, it’s just…adaptive.
Does that mean we want to be reaching for screens or easy dopamine all the time? Absolutely not! But we are going to have those urges, and so will our kids. What is more sustainable: telling kids “just DON’T go on your phone/eat sugar/fidget/etc” or finding ways to engage in those behaviors in ways that can bridge to other, more sustainable behaviors? If I scroll my phone on the floor of my closet for 3 minutes and then get up, put on a podcast and put my laundry away, isn’t that better than feeling dysregulated and trying to power through a list of tasks without any sort of stimulus?
What little tricks help you get through the day while managing your brain?
