It's like candy - so tasty that you can't stop eating it until you're diabetic and obese. People will absolutely structure their diets to make them "worse" (less tasty) because they want, at a higher level than their taste buds want sugar, to stay healthy.

A trillion dollar industry exists to profit off of gluing eyeballs to screens. Making the device other than what this industry designed it to be is not self-sabotage, it's self-interested!

Read "Supernormal Stimuli" by Barrett for some other examples of this phenomenon.

Yep, exactly this. If I have anything with sugar in the house, it'll get consumed in 24-48h. The solution is to just not have anything with sugar in the house.

If I want to splurge with a chocolate or ice cream bar, I take a walk to my corner store and buy just one, and eat it right away. It's extremely cost inefficient compared to if I bought a gallon of ice cream from the store, but that's not what I'm optimizing for here.

I've been using an nfc card based thing called brick to add friction and halt doomscrolling.

Essentially I use my normal phone, but lock specific apps. To unlock those apps I must scan the nfc card I keep in my car. That means getting up and going outside.

That tiny bit of added friction has cut my screentime in half and made me more productive, and less stressed.

There are other devices like it now, for example Bloom.