Reduce (doom)scrolling with NextDNS

One thing which can make you happier and sleep better is doing less (doom)scrolling in the late evening.

Convincing myself to stop (doom)scrolling late in the evening is hard, I’m tired and the dopamine rushes from seeing something slightly entertaining or interesting has kept me up too late many times.

I’ve tried or investigated quite a few different tools and solutions¹ to help me break this bad habit.

Now I finally found something which works for me (at the time of writing this). DNS based “parental control” using nextdns.io. This works for me because it’s kind of annoying to change the DNS, and I anyways use NextDNS so it’s not yet another software. Also it also works on the phone, which is the main location of doom scrolling.

If you are not familiar with nextdns.io, it is, in essence it’s a DNS service, with lots of extras. You could call it a cloud version of Pi-Hole. If you don’t know what DNS or Pi-Hole is, this solution is probably not for you. It’s quite technical and might cause some confusing and hard to debug issues.

How-To

First sign up on https://nextdns.io and follow their instructions to enable it. It’s free².

Then go to Parental Control and set up the recreation time to for example 7:00-22:00 every day and add whatever websites or apps to the list of restricted apps. Then click the small click icon to enable the time limit for that app/site.

And then enjoy twitter stopping working roughly at 22:00.

Beware though, DNS based blocking might cause things to misbehave in unexpected ways. And it might not work right away or it might not work at all because of how DNS is cached.

But it works fine for my purpose, generally twitter and reddit both stop working around 22.