Before our thumbs learned the reflex of swiping up and our eyes adjusted to a feed with no end, there was just a small design experiment—and a young designer named Aza Raskin.
In 2006, Raskin was working at a small software company called Humanized. Back then, the internet felt slower, more deliberate. Every time you reached the bottom of a page, you had to stop, move your mouse and click ‘Next’. It was a small interruption, but it broke the spell. Raskin wondered: what if the page didn’t stop? What if it just kept going?
He wasn’t thinking about addiction or attention spans, just a smoother, more seamless web. But that one tweak would cause a ripple across the internet, quietly reshaping how billions of us now spend our days and nights. We call it the infinite scroll.
For many people, scrolling is no longer a conscious decision. It is a reflex—something your hand does without waiting for your mind to catch up. And once you start, you rarely notice how deep you have gone.
Every night, Delhiite Shreya Arora, 27, tells herself the same lie: just five minutes. Ninety minutes later, she is still lying in the dark, the pale blue glow of her phone casting across her face, her thumb moving like it has a mind of its own. “It is like my brain checks out,” she says quietly. “But my hand keeps going.”
Across town, HR manager Rohit Sharma, 43, calls it “time theft”. “I didn’t choose to waste that time,” he says. “It is like the app chose it for me.”
From students delaying assignments to parents grabbing a rare moment of quiet, millions of us are caught in the same loop. What starts as a quick peek turns into an hour. Or two. Or more.
One evening, Tarun Katyal, 38, a finance analyst in Gurugram, came home tired. He dropped on to the sofa, phone in hand, and opened a short video “just to unwind”. One reel turned into five. Five turned into 30. When he finally looked up, two hours had slipped by. His dinner sat cold on the table, his head was pounding, and he felt empty. “I didn’t even like what I was watching,” he says. “I just couldn’t stop. It was like I had been hypnotised.”
Vartika Mehra, 25, who lives in Lucknow, knows the feeling all too well. After a breakup, she felt hollow—no energy for friends, no words for therapy. So she turned to her feed. One ‘glow-up’ reel became another. Sad songs. Healing quotes. Strangers crying into their cameras.
At first, it felt like comfort, as if someone out there was hurting alongside her. “It felt like therapy,” she says. “But then it just felt like nothing. I wasn’t crying anymore. I wasn’t feeling anything. I was just gone.”
Akshay Jain, 17, from Noida doesn’t even pretend anymore. Most nights, he watches ‘study with me’ videos instead of studying—strangers working in cafés with soft background music. It looks and feels productive, but it isn’t.
It might feel like you are making those choices—opening the app, swiping, tapping—but much of it was decided for you long before your thumb moved. The truth is, the scroll isn’t just a habit. It is design.
The design that never lets you stop
“This isn’t happening by chance,” says Prof Mohit Bhardwaj, head of user interface (UI)/user experience (UX) at the Indian School of Design and Innovation in Mumbai. He explains that infinite scroll is a powerful mechanism that turns scrolling into a low-effort, almost mindless activity while algorithms quietly curate what you see. “The feed never ends, so your brain never gets the message that it is time to stop,” he says.
He points to a UX principle called progressive disclosure—revealing information gradually in small, easy-to-digest chunks so your brain doesn’t have to work too hard. Because there is no natural break in the feed, there is nothing to slow you down. “No friction means no pause,” he says.
Bhardwaj also talks about completion bias—our urge to finish things to get closure. “Unfortunately, here there is no finish line,” he says. It is like a story with no last page, keeping your brain waiting for an end that never comes.
In his classes, Bhardwaj starts with what not to do—dark patterns, manipulative prompts and design tricks that trap people. Only after that does he move to accessibility, inclusion and ethical design. “Users are people, not just numbers on a dashboard,” he tells his students.
If Bhardwaj focuses on the “how” of infinite scroll, Manish Goyal, UX Designer-1 at Onething Design Studio, zeroes in on the feeling it creates.
“Vertical scrolling feels natural to the brain,” he says. “It takes less mental effort, it feels smooth, and it keeps the content coming. But that sense of control you think you have? It is an illusion—the system is choosing what you see next, not you.”
Personalisation, he explains, is another powerful hook. Algorithms learn what makes you pause and feed you more of it, creating the impression that the app truly knows you.
“Wellness tools exist—time-limit pop-ups, usage dashboards—but they are buried deep in the settings menu,” says Goyal. “The tools that keep you engaged? Those are the defaults.”
For him, ethical design isn’t a fantasy. He points to examples already in play: LinkedIn lets you mute updates and even reach the bottom of your feed. Brave Browser blocks trackers without fuss. Notion sends you summaries without dangling endless notifications. Even Instagram offers time-limit reminders—though, as Goyal notes, most people never turn them on.
And it is not just designers who notice. Developers see it happening in real-time. For Bhumik Virmani, a full stack developer team lead at EchoWave Media, it comes down to friction, or rather the lack of it. “The fewer clicks or taps you need, the longer you will stay,” he says. “Auto-play starts the next video before you have even decided if you want to watch it. Pull-to-refresh works like a slot machine—a skeuomorphic design that mimics the motion of pulling a lever. That unpredictability keeps the brain curious.”
And the loop is only getting tighter. Instagram is now testing an auto-scroll toggle for both reels and regular posts, so the feed keeps moving without you even swiping—the design does the scrolling for you.
Virmani is quick to point out that ethical alternatives exist. Snapchat, for example, now offers in-app mental health resources when certain topics are searched. “It is proof,” he says, “that you can design for engagement without trapping people.”
Those design choices work because they tap into something deeper—the brain’s own built-in reward system, where psychology takes over from design.
The mind’s own slot machine
“Scrolling and tapping on social media have a similar effect on the nervous system as slot machines or spin wheels,” says Dr Jyoti Kapoor, senior psychiatrist and founder of Manasthali. “As you scroll, anticipation builds for what might come next. Each tap triggers a release of dopamine—a short burst of pleasure—and you repeat the process to feel it again. It is not what you see, but what you might see that keeps you hooked.”
Most people, she says, don’t realise they are in this loop until someone points it out and, by then, the habit is well-worn. “Like any addiction, compulsive social media use replaces activities that truly build you up—reading, creative work, conversations with family, exercise, even quiet moments alone. Social media doesn’t relax you; it overstimulates you. That leads to burnout and a lower tolerance for stress.”
The toll isn’t just mental. Hours hunched over a phone strain the neck, shoulders, thumbs and fingers. Blue light throws sleep cycles off balance, which in turn makes you more likely to pick up your phone late at night, restarting the loop. She points to research showing a rise in anxiety, mood disorders and even suicide among teens and young adults over the past two decades. “The correlation,” she says, “is hard to ignore.”
Kapoor’s prescription is simple but firm: start with awareness, track your usage, set alarms, replace scrolling with screen-free hobbies, prioritise face-to-face interactions, create a phone-free bedtime routine and switch off the internet for a few hours each day.
There is also an emotional side to the scroll—one that psychologist Dr Shweta Sharma, founder of Mansa Global Foundation, calls “intermittent reinforcement”, the same pattern that makes gambling addictive. But it is not just about dopamine. “Scrolling often works as a buffer against discomfort: boredom, loneliness, anxiety, fatigue. It feels like movement, but it is really avoidance.”
Over time, explains Sharma, that avoidance dulls emotional rhythms, scatters attention and weakens impulse control. For younger users, it can even replace the ability to sit still and process emotions. “If you have never learned to just be with your feelings, scrolling becomes your go-to escape.”
That kind of emotional avoidance, says Prachi Saxena, clinical psychologist and cofounder of The Emotional Wellness Initiatives, can also show up as a “flight” response—the brain’s way of dodging difficult emotions. “Instead of sitting with them, we grab the phone and flood ourselves with something that hooks us instantly,” she says.
She explains that platforms know this and use “primitive cues” to exploit it—red notification dots, bright animations and sounds that mimic alerts from the natural world. The human brain, she warns, “is not designed to be constantly bombarded with irrelevant information”. Processing it all “drains your mental energy, making you less able to solve problems or adapt.” Blue light from screens, she adds, disrupts the brain’s natural rhythms, leaving people physically tired but mentally wired.
Her advice is simple: get comfortable with a little discomfort. “Set a short timer before you start scrolling, and stop when it goes off,” says Saxena. When boredom creeps in, call a friend. When you crave something new, step outside and let your senses wake up—notice the air, the sounds, the colours around you. And when anxiety is what’s driving you to reach for your phone, put pen to paper. Writing it down activates the same parts of the brain that help regulate emotion. Little by little, you take back control from the scroll—one pause, one choice, one word at a time.
Some people only notice this pattern when it is broken, often by accident. That’s what happened to Shreya Arora. The turning point came one night when her phone died mid-scroll. She stared at the black screen in her hands and realised she couldn’t remember the last time she had just sat with her thoughts. Since then, she has been taking pauses—walking without headphones, switching her phone off before bedtime. She still scrolls, but now she notices when she is doing it. “Sometimes,” she says, “that’s enough.”
Bhardwaj calls these moments “breaks in the loop”—brief interruptions that allow people to see the system for what it is. “The design is built so you never reach the end,” he says. “When you stop, even for a minute, you notice yourself again.”
And one last thing: It’s okay to still scroll
You’re not weak for scrolling—these platforms were built to keep you here. Remember it is by design, and it hasn’t changed much since that tweak in 2006. But you have—now you know how it works. And sometimes, that’s all it takes to choose when to stop.
Healthy scroll habits to break the loop
• Set a 20-minute scroll timer—pause before continuing
• Move social apps off your home screen to reduce temptation
• Log out after use to add a moment of reflection
• Replace scroll breaks with grounding activities—walk, stretch, journal
• Use built-in tools: ‘You’re All Caught Up’ nudges, screen time limits
• Let boredom breathe—don’t fill every quiet moment with a swipe
94.2% of internet users (ages 16–64) access the web via smartphones
11.3% of social media users globally meet clinical criteria for addiction
Users spending 3+ hours/day are 4.7x more likely to face relationship issues
Children under 5 years spend 2.2 hours/day on screens, twice the recommended safe limit: ICAN study