How To Manage Doom Scrolling

I love yoga. I’ve been doing it for years.

In fact, when I turned thirty, I made a pact with myself that I would try to practise yoga at least three times a week, and more often than not, I’ve actually stuck to it. It’s one of the few promises I’ve managed to keep consistently, which I’m actually really proud of.

I’m not particularly a huge class person, not because I don’t enjoy them, but because I love the freedom that online classes give me. I can choose what I want to focus on, when I want to do it, and I don’t have to factor in travel time or rearrange my entire day around it. That flexibility works for me. My husband, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. He will only ever attend classes, because the idea of doing it online simply doesn’t work for him. And that, I think, is the point. There isn’t one right way.

What I’ve always loved about yoga teachers, beyond the physical practice, are the little nuggets of wisdom they share along the way. One I heard years ago has always stayed with me...

"downtime is not wasted time you guys, it’s fertile ground for new beginnings..." - Jonah Kest, Kest Yoga

You may have noticed that recently I’ve been talking a lot about stress, mindset, and how we speak to ourselves, and how all of that links back to skin health. That’s because none of these things exist in isolation. The way we live, rest, and recover shows up everywhere, including on our skin.

We call it “self-care”, almost as if taking time for ourselves is a luxury. And yes, I know how busy life is. Carving out even an hour a week can feel impossible, especially if you’re juggling work, children, being self-employed, or simply trying to keep everything ticking over. But that time isn’t optional people, it’s necessary.

If you constantly hammer the same soil without ever replenishing it, nothing new can grow. You don’t get clarity, creativity or resilience from exhaustion. That downtime, the bit we’re often tempted to skip, is where things begin to change. It’s where the nervous system finally gets a chance to recalibrate and where we can stop reacting and start responding again how we would like to.

I’ve spoken a lot about how connected we are to the world now, and yet how disconnected many of us feel from ourselves and each other. We need rest, but for some reason many of us carry guilt when we take it, as though stopping means failing or slowing down means letting someone else down. And even when we think we are resting, a lot of the time we aren’t really switching off at all. We’re watching TV with a phone in our hand, scrolling endlessly, absorbing other people’s lives, opinions, faces and bodies without noticing how stimulating it all is. That isn’t downtime, no, it’s numbing. And more often than not, it leaves us judging what we see and comparing it to ourselves.

If you think about it, the sheer amount of information we take in every day would be completely overwhelming if it were happening physically in front of us. But because it’s on a screen, we scroll past it without really clocking the impact. And yet so often, we put our phone down feeling more anxious, more frazzled, or somehow less of a person than we did before we picked it up. I’m not saying I don’t do this, because I absolutely do. But I’ve started giving myself designated ‘scroll time’ during the day, small windows here and there, with the intention of slowly shrinking them each month so they take up less space in my life rather than more.

I heard another quote recently, and I can’t remember where from, but it stuck just as deeply...

"If rest only happens when everything else is done, rest will never happen."

And that feels painfully accurate for a lot of us.

I’m here to say this to you. You are allowed to rest, take this as your permission slip. You don’t need to earn it and if someone judges you for taking time for yourself, that says far more about them than it does about you.

You don’t need to do yoga three times a week, and I’m certainly not suggesting everyone should. What I am saying is that whatever gives you that sense of calm, recovery, and peace, you should try to make space for it. That might be yoga, cooking, lifting weights, walking, reading, swimming, or something entirely different. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, it just needs to be yours.

It’s very easy to define ourselves by our jobs or by whether we have children or not. But if you had to describe yourself without mentioning your work or your family roles, what would you say? And if nothing immediately comes to mind, maybe that’s a sign that it’s time to give a little more time back to yourself, somewhere within that chaotic schedule of yours.

Because when we’re rested and supported, we show up better for everyone else. We’re more patient, more resilient, and far more able to cope and our skin reflects that too.

So if you feel like you’re doing all the “right” things but your skin is telling a different story, it might be worth asking whether you’re actually doing too much. Could your skin be asking for a little downtime as well?

If you’d like some help with that, you can book an online skin consultation with me here. We can talk honestly about your skin, your lifestyle, and how we might carve out a bit of space for both you and your skin to recover and bring that glow back.

Thank you so much for reading,

Emmaline