Bloomscrolling: What If We Changed Our Scroll?
I was on my phone the other night looking for new places to hike. One trail led to another, then to a beautiful mountain range, and before I knew it, I had spent ten minutes exploring places around the world I had never been. When I put my phone down, I noticed something: I felt better. Calmer. More content. Maybe even a little more optimistic. We hear so much about doomscrolling, distraction, and what our phones are doing to us, but it made me wonder: What if it isn't only how much we scroll that matters, but what we scroll through?
Psychologist Ludmila Praslova calls this bloomscrolling, intentionally seeking digital content involving nature, beauty, awe, kindness, humor, and other experiences that can positively influence how we feel. There is interesting science behind the idea. Our brains are especially sensitive to threat and negative information, which helps explain why bad news can be so difficult to stop consuming. But research also suggests that changing the input matters. Brief digital exposure to nature has been shown to reduce repetitive negative thinking and increase subjective happiness, while experiences of awe have been associated with lower stress and greater well being. Bloomscrolling itself is a newer concept, but the underlying research gives us good reason to pay attention to what we feed our attention.
This matters at work because the real cost of scrolling may not simply be the ten minutes we lose. It may be the state we carry into the next ten minutes. What are you consuming immediately before an important meeting, difficult conversation, or complex decision? I think of this as Attention Architecture, intentionally designing the digital inputs that compete for one of our brain's most valuable resources. Instead of only asking, “How do I spend less time on my phone?” perhaps we should also ask, “What do I want my attention to encounter when I pick it up?”
Try it this week. Add more nature, awe, humor, curiosity, learning, and human goodness to your digital environment, and then pay attention to what happens afterward. Do you feel more energized or depleted? More hopeful or helpless? More focused or fragmented? This isn't about ignoring difficult news or pretending everything is wonderful. It's about remembering that difficult things aren't the entirety of reality.
Maybe bloomscrolling isn't really about scrolling at all. It's about becoming more intentional about what we're training our attention to notice. The brain will always notice movement in the bushes. That's part of what helped us survive. But the bushes aren't the entire landscape. Sometimes there's a mountain behind them, and it might be worth looking up.
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