This app takes the ‘doom’ out of ‘doomscrolling’ to help you fall asleep

Are you tired of sitting up at night, unable to sleep because your smartphone continues to glow with endless feeds of mostly depressing news you can’t help but aimlessly scroll through?

“Doomscrolling” has become a very real threat to mind and body fatigue. Mental health professionals advise against it, believing it to be detrimental to health and well-being, especially when it comes to getting in enough sleep, since many people keep their smartphones right by their bed. It doesn’t help that insomnia rates have peaked around the world due to fears around the pandemic.

Enter Scrollaby, an app that lets your fingers do their thing while also quieting the mind. Users can spool through hypnotic designs, meditations, white noise, relaxing sounds like owls and leaves in wind and short “sleep stories” narrated by unhurried and mellow voices.

Each time a person  opens the app, their feed is randomized with new content, and they can choose to save the items they like the best. The app can also send sleep reminders and can be integrated into Apple’s Healthkit program so users can track how long they stay in bed.

Scrollaby comes from Rockwell Ventures, a company also behind similar apps meant to help soothe the mind and body like Doze, Soundly and Sound Machine. Rockwell Ventures worked with independent health creative agency The Bloc to develop Scrollaby based off sleep science.

“We asked ourselves how we could hack bedtime scrolling habits and use social media against itself,” says Bernardo Romero, chief creative officer at The Bloc. “The team came up with the simple idea that scrolling could actually help you fall asleep. It’s about tapping into an existing behavior, and turning it for your benefit.”

It seems aiding consumers' troubled sleep is shaping up to be a trend these days. Coors just debuted a Super Bowl stunt designed to implant images of refreshment, snow and mountain streams into their dreams, building off the rising cultural interest in dreams during the pandemic.