Don't Break The Seal

The most important thing you can do to stop scrolling is: Don't Break The Seal!

What is Breaking the Seal? Breaking the Seal is going from zero to one. One instance of scrolling. If you can count to one, you can follow the system of Don't Break The Seal. You can watch yourself throughout the day, and count your very first scroll of the day. When that first scroll happens, you have broken the seal.

If your phone is right beside your bed when you wake up (bad idea btw), you will likely feel an impulse to check your phone as soon as you wake up. If you do check it... bad news, you have broken the seal!

What counts as "Breaking The Seal"?

-Checking your text messages in the morning (SMS text messages/DM's are the root of phone addiction)

-Impulsively doing a Google Search to check the news

-Impulsively opening Facebook/TikTok/Reddit/

-Impulsively turning the radio on when you get into your car

-Impulsively looking at a newspaper headline when you walk past a newstand

What does NOT count as "Breaking The Seal"?

-Doing a Google Search to find an answer to specific question you thought of before going on Google

-Going on Reddit to find an answer to specific question you thought of before going on Reddit

If you are serious about achieving Scrollbriety, the most important thing you can do is follow Don't Break The Seal. It is more important than scheduling phone usage, blocking apps, and having alternate activities.

For 3 days, try to check your messages only at the end of the day (about 1 to 1.5 hours before bed). The idea is, if you are going to break the seal (and most people have to since they are not going to stop texting or emailing altogether), do it at the end of the day so that you are protecting the lion's share of the day's productive hours. If you break the seal as soon as you wake up, it is highly likely you will not be able to close it again. For an alcoholic, this would be like having just 1 drink and then stopping. The idea sounds reasonable, but their self control is destroyed after the first sip of that first drink. They must not break the seal.

Maybe you think it is not realistic to avoid texting and emailing until the end of the day? This could be the case. We must remember however, that this decision is our decision to make. We may be worried about ruffling feathers, we may be worried about having to change jobs. These are decisions that should be made, and not defaults that should be assumed. An individual does not have a gun to their head forcing them to work in a job where they need to be available for text messages or email throughout the day. If scrollbriety is important enough to you, then it may mean finding a new job, letting contacts know you will only be available for phone calls throughout the day, or not being in contact with them.

I have let the people in my life know that, I am typically available for a phone call if they need to get a hold of me during the day, and that SMS text messages or other DM's will be looked at near the end of the day. This is my system, which my life can accommodate at the moment. The "No Texting" until end of day is the most challenging part of the Scrollbriety system.

2 Phone System: Use 2 phones, both of them managed with an MDM software.

Phone 1 (The Call Phone): This phone will be used for placing and receiving phone calls, and it can stay on as much as you want. It could also have banking, camera, ebooks, digital wallet, clock, and other utility applications. In any case, the applications on this phone are NOT scrollable. This means there NO messaging apps, and there are NO browsing apps.

Phone 2 (The Messaging Phone): This phone could be just like Phone 1, except that it will be used for messaging. Also, note that this phone is Call Forwarded to the Call Phone, so that your contacts only need to remember 1 phone number (if they want to call you, they will call the Phone 2 phone number, and this call is forwarded to Phone 1). The phone number they remember is the same one that they might want to text (even though ideally you have let them know that you only text at the end of the day). Recommendation is to remove all browsing apps from this phone as well.

Alterations:

1. If you have kids or others who you would like to be able to receive texts from: Configure your incoming text message notifications so that you are only receiving notifications from those particular contacts

2. If you are wanting to check text messages from someone in particular, go to their contact and access their text messages from the individual contact instead of checking for all new text messages (from any contact)

If you have any questions about this system, would like help with custom system, or how to setup the MDM software, please email info@scrollbriety.com or call (780) 914-1992

Good luck to everyone.