You open your phone to check the time or a quick message. The next thing you know, an hour has passed and you’ve scrolled through endless celebrity drama, cat videos, awful news stories, influencer rants, and whatever else the algorithm decided to throw at you.
Even though you probably don’t want to keep wasting your time and energy on this mind-numbing content, you do it again the next day.
Doomscrolling, the habit of spending excessive amounts of time consuming content on social media, has become incredibly widespread. A survey from last year found that 64% of Americans say they doomscroll.
Researchers have warned that doomscrolling can negatively affect several aspects of your well-being, including your mental health and attention span. Spending long periods scrolling can lead to brain fatigue, difficulty focusing, and disrupted sleep. And if a lot of the content you’re consuming is negative or stressful, it can leave you feeling disheartened, anxious, and emotionally drained.
It’s hard to break the cycle of doomscrolling, but there are plenty of apps that provide content that’s engaging and productive.
Of course, you could always read a book or go for a walk (we have a guide on how to stop doomscrolling), but this list is for when you have a few spare minutes and want something to do on your phone that isn’t endless scrolling.
Radio Garden
If you still want to feel connected to the world without scrolling through social media, you can check out Radio Garden. The app lets you listen to over 25,000 live radio stations from across the globe.
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Once you open the app, you’ll see green dots marking cities and towns. Tap any dot to listen to radio stations broadcasting from that location. You can add favorites or search for radio stations, countries, and places.
Radio Garden is free, but it also offers an ad-free premium plan for $2.99 per month. The app is available on both iOS and Android.
Elevate
Elevate is an app designed to help improve focus, memory, reading, math skills, and other cognitive abilities. It includes over 40 games to train different abilities you use in everyday life, from reading faster to comparing prices more efficiently.
You can track training streaks and compare your mind’s performance over time.
The app offers a free version with access to three games per day, or a yearly subscription of $39.99 for unlimited access. It’s available on both iOS and Android.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is an app that helps you learn new words every day. You can pick your difficulty level and choose categories that interest you, like emotions, the human body, business, and more. Each word comes with a definition, example sentences, and a guide on how to pronounce it.
The app also includes mini-games to help you review the words you’ve learned. You can set a goal of how many words you want to learn each week and create a regular learning routine.
Vocabulary offers a free trial, and then costs $4.99 per month or $59.99 per year. It’s available on iOS and Android.
Seterra
If you’re a geography nerd looking to test your knowledge or just want to improve your geography skills, Seterra is perfect for you. The app features over 300 different games to test your map skills. You can test your knowledge of world flags; discover oceans, seas, and rivers; and explore mountain ranges and volcanoes across the globe.
Seterra lets you track your progress across categories and see leaderboards for top scorers for each game.
The app is free and available on both iOS and Android.
NYT Games
The NYT Games app offers several word, logic, and number games that change every day to exercise your mind. You can play the crossword, try the word-guessing game Wordle, group words with a common theme in Connections, see how many words you can make from seven letters in Spelling Bee, and more.
The app costs $5.99 per month for unlimited access and archives, but some games like Wordle, Strands, and the Mini Crossword are available to play for free.
NYT Games is available on both iOS and Android.
Drops
If you want to learn a new language but want to try something other than Duolingo, Drops is a good option. The app uses visually engaging mini‑games to help you build vocabulary and common phrases in more than 45 languages, with bite‑sized lessons designed to be completed in about five minutes a day.
Drops is designed for both beginners and experts who want to grow their foreign language vocabulary.
The free version of the app offers five-minute lessons per day. You can get unlimited access and premium features for $11.99 per month or $79.99 per year. The app is available on both iOS and Android.
