The sleepless glow
It’s 3:07 a.m. and your phone screen is the only thing lighting the room. You promised yourself one quick peek before bed, but the feed keeps coughing up fresh crises: stock-market dips, celebrity betrayals, the latest doomsday weather map. You pull down to refresh again—because maybe the apocalypse posted an update in the last six seconds. The thumb keeps looping; the night keeps slipping. Somewhere beyond the glow is a pillow begging for the side of your face, but the feed is engineered to whisper, “Just one more.”
If any of that feels familiar, you’re human in 2025. On average, we stare at screens six hours and forty minutes a day—before factoring in work emails or Netflix binges. That’s almost 100 full days per year donated to the almighty pixel. (Exploding Topics) Doom-scrolling—marinating in negative headlines and viral outrage—adds an extra layer of psychic acid. Studies now link the habit to elevated anxiety, lower life satisfaction, and a grim loop where bad mood begets more bad news-hunting. (Harvard Health)
We live inside a casino where the slot machines fit in our pockets, except the jackpot is our attention, and the house always wins. The good news: you can rig the game back in your favor. Below are five field-tested rituals—equal parts neuroscience, shamanic practice, and common sense—that will help you reclaim the most precious currency you have: focused awareness.
Ritual 1 · The digital dawn
Every morning gifts us a fragile window before the world’s noise kicks in. Gift it right back to yourself. For the first thirty minutes after waking, exile every glowing rectangle from arm’s length. No notifications, no “urgent” Slack pings, no doom. Instead:
- Water ritual · Drink a full glass—cold if possible—to jolt the vagus nerve awake.
- Body ignition · Three minutes of joint circles or cat-cow stretches unlocks lymph flow and clears cortisol fog faster than espresso.
- Orientation breath · Five deliberate belly breaths while gazing at a horizon (a real one, if you’re lucky, a balcony edge if you’re urban). This grounds circadian rhythms and primes dopamine for doing rather than scrolling.
Why it works: the hippocampus encodes new memory traces best in quiet states. Feeding it chaos on wake-up trains the nervous system to equate “opening eyes” with “incoming threats.” A calm digital dawn rewires that pairing.
Pro tip: If the phone is also your alarm, leave it in “airplane” until you’ve done the above. The world can survive thirty minutes without your digital pulse. You’ll give it a better version of you in return.
Ritual 2 · Curated thresholds
Most of us treat news consumption like breathing—constant and unconscious. Shamanic traditions, however, mark transitions with thresholds: doorways, smudge smoke, river crossings. Apply that wisdom to your media intake by creating news windows: set, intentional blocks (say, 20 minutes at 12 p.m. and again at 6 p.m.) when you’re allowed to check headlines. Outside those portals, news apps stay banished.
Tactically, deploy a site-blocker extension or iOS Screen Time limits. Psychologically, you’re telling the limbic brain, “I decide when to witness the world’s fires, not the algorithm.” It restores agency, which is the antidote to the helplessness doom-scrolling breeds.
Designers admit the attention economy feeds on frictionless access—one pull-to-refresh and we’re hooked. (Muzli – Design inspiration hub) By erecting friction—password walls, timers, even the lazy inconvenience of opening a laptop instead of a phone—you reintroduce conscious choice. Choice begets sovereignty; sovereignty begets focus.
Ritual 3 · The embodied anchor
When the scroll reflex strikes (bored in a queue, trapped in a Zoom lull), give your body the steering wheel. Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman reminds us that vision and posture sculpt attention loops: downward gaze and spine collapse signal “rest and scroll,” while upward gaze and upright posture signal “hunt and engage.”
Embodied anchor drill
- Look up. Lift the eyes to where the wall meets the ceiling.
- Open stance. Roll shoulders back, feet hip-width, weight glued to heels.
- Micro-movement. Sway or march in place for 60 seconds.
This trifecta toggles the sympathetic system (mobilize) and scrambles the habit loop that chains stillness to scrolling. Bonus: doing it in public without caring who stares is a small rebellion—a reminder you’re not a domesticated device zombie.
Spiritual gloss: In many indigenous rites, shaking the body is a doorway to altered perception. You’re not merely breaking tech-addiction; you’re shaking loose stale psychic dust. That’s worth a few odd looks in the grocery line.
Ritual 4 · The sunset cleanse
Blue light past dusk bullies melatonin, but equally toxic is the cognitive residue of late-night feeds. Create an evening boundary ritual that turns the brain’s “inputs” dial from roar to whisper:
- Grayscale mode · Switch your phone to monochrome after 8 p.m. Colors are dopamine candy; removing them makes apps taste like oatmeal without sugar.
- Analog hand-off · Keep a paperback or sketchbook on the nightstand. If the hand twitches for the phone, give it paper instead.
- Question of closure · Ask, “Which story do I want to sleep on?” Not the world’s collapse—maybe the plot twist in a novel, or the gratitude you just inked on real pages.
A 2024 study showed employees who doom-scrolled before bed woke more fatigued and less engaged at work. (Harvard Health) The sunset cleanse isn’t aesthetic; it’s metabolic. Quality sleep is the motherboard of attention. Guard it like the last rainforest.
Ritual 5 · Sabbath of silence
Once a week, schedule a four-hour digital fast. Yes, four. If the very thought triggers a cortisol spike, you’ve found your medicine. In the Amazon, I’ve watched elders sit beneath a samaúma tree in total stillness until the forest itself starts whispering. No Wi-Fi needed. Your version might be a park bench, a kitchen table with a candle, or an aimless city wander. The rules:
- Phone off and out of sight.
- No podcasts, no e-readers, no screens disguised as wellness.
- Optional: a simple anchor task—whittling wood, kneading dough, hand-washing clothes.
During the first hour, boredom claps like thunder. By the third, ideas crawl out of hiding. The prefrontal cortex, starved of micro-dopamine jolts, begins to restore deeper creative pathways. You’ll notice street murals you’ve ignored for months, catch your reflection in a shop window and actually see yourself.
Researchers at UC Davis found that participants who took structured “awe walks” without technology reported higher levels of well-being and sustained attention over eight weeks. (University of California) A sabbath of silence is an awe walk of the mind.
Counter-spell conclusion
The platforms will not grow a conscience. Their business model is a buffet of your fragmented focus served to the highest bidder. Waiting for tech giants to reform is like waiting for mosquitoes to unionize. Rituals, on the other hand, are self-authored algorithms—ancient code written in breath, bone, and intention.
Implement one ritual this week, not all five. Mastery beats overwhelm. Maybe you start with the digital dawn, defending that crucial first half-hour like a wolf with cubs. Track the ripple: mood, productivity, empathy levels. When the nervous system experiences tangible reward, the ritual cements. Then stack the next.
Remember: focus isn’t a grind; it’s a homecoming. Doom-scrolling tricks us into thinking the world is on fire and we must watch every ember. Ritual reminds us the real blaze is inside—the slow-burn genius that thrives when we quit feeding it junk data. Pull your thumb off the endless loop and place your attention where it can actually grow something: a thought, a craft, a relationship, a wiser self.
Close the app. Open the day. Let the world refresh for a change.
Just launched: Laughing in the Face of Chaos by Rudá Iandê
Exhausted from trying to hold it all together?
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In Laughing in the Face of Chaos, Brazilian shaman Rudá Iandê brings over 30 years of deep, one-on-one work helping people untangle from the roles they’ve been stuck in—so they can return to something real. He exposes the quiet pressure to be good, be successful, be spiritual—and shows how freedom often lives on the other side of that pressure.
This isn’t a book about becoming your best self. It’s about becoming your real self.
