Doomscrolling: Can TikTok help youth take a break from screens?

How do you stop doomscrolling? By setting a time limit? Putting your phone in a different room? Deleting the app altogether?

On Thursday, TikTok announced a new option: a nightly in-app guided meditation exercise that is turned on by default for users younger than 18.

At 10 p.m., their For You Page is overtaken by a blue screen and relaxing music, and the user is guided to “inhale,” “hold” and “exhale.”

“The idea being that after that meditation is over, you put down your phone,” said Dr Willough Jenkins, a child psychiatrist who shares mental-health-related content on the app. TikTok enlisted Jenkins as a paid partner to help promote the initiative.

Users who opt in to the function can dismiss the guided meditation and return to scrolling, but if they are still on the app after an hour, they are shown a second, full-screen prompt that requires them to select an option: Keep using the app for 15 more minutes, opt out of any additional notifications for the day, or go to their settings to make changes.

Users 18 or older can turn on the feature, called “Meditation in Sleep Hours,” at any time from their settings page.

The new feature, which TikTok says is meant to encourage young people to practice healthier digital habits, is being rolled out as the platform faces widespread allegations that it has knowingly harmed users’ mental health. This includes a raft of lawsuits filed in October by 13 states and the District of Columbia, accusing TikTok of creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teenagers while making false claims to the public about its commitment to safety.

Many of the states’ claims centre on features that they say keep children using the app deep into the night, when they would otherwise be asleep. “Meditation in Sleep Hours” seems purpose-built to counter those allegations.

“We know that meditation has so many benefits for youth, and for adults, too, especially around sleep initiation,” said Jenkins, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. “Being able to access a guided meditation, to learn some of these skills to transition your brain into sleep mode, is such a key skill.”

Sabina Gilyazova, a 15-year-old student from the Rego Park neighbourhood of New York City’s Queens borough, said she found the feature “annoying because it just interrupts my precious phone time.”

Dr Yann Poncin, a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, probably wouldn’t be surprised by Gilyazova’s reaction.

“Teenagers are a lot about control and autonomy,” Poncin said. “They’re thinking, ‘I want to be on TikTok when I want to be on TikTok. I don’t need this stupid thing interrupting what I’m doing.’”

In March, TikTok announced that it had tested a similar feature for users younger than 16 who were on the app after 10 p.m. According to the app, 98% of users did not manually turn off the feature in their settings.

Even then, it can be difficult to stop using the app. “These algorithms are incredibly powerful,” Poncin said. “They’re incredibly gamified. It’s an asymmetric battle.”

Users who have different limits set on apps, including Instagram and TikTok, said they are easy to ignore.

Last year, Chioma Chioma-Ozukwe, a college student in San Diego, tried using a feature on TikTok that would interrupt her after scrolling for an hour. She would then type in a passcode to continue using the app.

“It just infuriated me if I was in the middle of a scroll,” said Chioma-Ozukwe, 19.

She said she felt “Meditation in Sleep Hours” was a “performative” initiative from TikTok. Siriveena Nandam, a 26-year-old user-experience designer in Washington, D.C., agreed. “The only thing that I found worked was physically distancing myself from the phone,” Nandam said.

©The New York Times Company