I Replaced My Nightly Doom Scroll With Reading for 30 Days, Here’s What Happened

Day 1, 10:12 PM. I finally get into bed. The house is quiet. I should be sleeping. Instead, I do what I always do: I grab my phone and start scrolling.

For years, that was my default. A little “wind down” time that somehow turned into twenty minutes of celebrity gossip, political arguments, ads for things I do not need, and an endless parade of other people’s curated highlight reels. I told myself I was decompressing. In reality, I was doom scrolling. And I knew it was not helping my brain settle.

A few months ago, after one particularly exhausting bout of scrolling, I had a moment of clarity. I knew exactly what my New Year's resolution needed to be. Less social media.

The funny thing is, I am not someone who has ever been a “big reader.” I am dyslexic, and for most of my life reading has taken more effort than it seems to take other people. I respect reading deeply, but if I am honest, outside of things like The Economist and Harvard Business Review, I have not been consistent about long-form reading in years.

I also have a practical reality: I cannot reliably commit to a calm morning routine, because my daughter often wakes me up and mornings can start in chaos. So instead of trying to fight that, I changed the experiment. I moved it to the one place I actually have control: the end of the day.

So I decided to run a simple 30-day test.

For 30 nights, I would replace my last 20 minutes of doom scrolling with reading.

But I had a practical question. What did I actually want to read when I was tired and my attention was worn down?

That is when I remembered something from childhood. I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were the rare kind of reading that did not feel like “work.” They felt like participation. The problem is, there is not a lot of modern content in that exact format, and what exists is scattered.

Then the idea clicked. With AI, I could make the kind of interactive stories I wished existed. I started experimenting with public domain classics and building choose-your-own-adventure–style experiences around them. I made a few Sherlock Holmes stories and realized pretty quickly that I was not the only person who would enjoy this. The format made reading feel approachable and, weirdly, hard to put down.

Around the same time, I kept hearing people talk about the wonders of “vibe coding,” so I decided to try it. With the help of AI, I was able to code a web app and a phone app. That is how StoryBytes.io was born.

Now back to the experiment.

The Rule

I kept it simple, and I kept it realistic.

For the last 20 minutes before bed, I read an interactive story instead of opening social media. Same phone. Same time window. I was not trying to quit social media entirely, because I do have to use it for business. I just wanted to see what happened if I changed the final input of my day.

Week 1: Breaking the Autopilot

The first week was mostly about muscle memory. I would get into bed, open my phone, and my thumb would automatically go to the same apps. I had to catch myself and deliberately open a story instead.

I also learned quickly that bedtime reading needs to be easy. Not “dense world building with twenty made-up names” easy. More like “pull you in immediately and let your brain settle” easy. The best stories for me at night were the ones with a quick hook and clean pacing, where I could read a complete segment and feel like I reached a natural stopping point.

That was the first big difference from scrolling. After 20 minutes on social media, I would usually feel stimulated and mentally noisy, like my brain was still in reaction mode. After 20 minutes of interactive reading, I felt calmer. Not knocked out cold, but more settled.

Week 2: The Wind Down Started Working Again

This surprised me. Somewhere around the second week, I started looking forward to the story.

With social media, there is no sense of completion. You stop because you should, not because you feel done. Stories end, or at least they give you a natural pause. Instead of going to sleep with a head full of random inputs, I went to sleep with a coherent narrative in my mind.

It is hard to describe, but it felt cleaner. Like putting your thoughts in a single drawer instead of dumping everything on the floor.

Week 3: The Unexpected “I Missed This” Effect

By week three, I had a realization I did not expect. I had missed stories.

Not just the concept of reading, but the feeling of being in a world that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I had been trying to relax with social media, but social media is not designed to relax you. It is designed to keep you engaged.

Interactive fiction gave me the engagement without the emotional spikes. It scratched the “one more minute” itch, but it did it with narrative instead of noise.

Week 4: The Spillover

By the last week, something subtle happened. I did not just replace the bedtime scroll. I started reaching for stories in other small pockets of my day too, because I remembered how much better it felt than the feed.

I still use social media. I have to, for work. But the relationship changed. It stopped being the automatic default at the exact moment I was trying to shut my brain down.

So What Changed After 30 Days?

I did not become a different person. I did not delete social media. But I stopped ending my day on an algorithm.

I felt calmer at night. I fell asleep easier on many nights. I remembered what I did with my screen time, which sounds small but is not. And most importantly, I rediscovered that I actually enjoy reading when the format fits my life, even with dyslexia.

If you want to try this, I would recommend a smaller version first. Do it for seven days. Replace the last 20 minutes before bed with a story. Keep it low pressure. If a story does not hook you quickly, switch genres. The goal is not to force yourself to read. The goal is to find a story that makes you want to.

And if you are curious, this whole experiment is part of why I built StoryBytes.io in the first place. I wanted reading that could compete with scrolling, not by guilt-tripping anyone, but by making stories feel compelling again.