Bored and Scrolling Instagram Again? Try This Instead

You know how this goes. You open Instagram for two minutes while the kettle boils. The tea is cold by the time you look up, and you couldn't name three things you just watched.

Nobody needs a lecture about this. Reels are fun, some of them are really good, and deleting the app usually lasts about four days. The more useful question is why you can spend an hour being entertained and still feel bored at the end of it.

What the feed does to you

Part of the answer has less to do with the videos and more to do with how you're using them. In a 2015 study led by Philippe Verduyn, people who used Facebook passively, just looking without posting or talking to anyone, felt worse over time. Envy explained much of the drop. It was a small study about Facebook, not Instagram, and later research on social media has been more mixed, so I wouldn't treat it as the final word. But I bet it sounds familiar. Someone's Goa trip, someone's new car, somebody your age with a startup and a podcast. Nobody set out to make you feel behind. You just feel it by the fifteenth post.

So if you want to cut down, don't start by fighting your own willpower at 11 pm. Start by deciding what the next ten minutes are for.

Six things that actually fit into ten minutes

Call someone instead of watching someone. Your mother, your school friend, the cousin you keep meaning to reply to. It feels like effort for about thirty seconds.

Go for a walk without your earphones. Round the block is fine. Boredom is uncomfortable mostly because we've forgotten how to sit in it for a bit, and this is the easy way to practise.

Do the small job you've been avoiding. That form. That email. The drawer. You'll feel better for having finished one thing than you would after any video.

Learn something embarrassingly small. Ten words of a language, one Excel shortcut, one chord. Tiny, but tomorrow you'll still have it.

Make something badly. A sketch, a recipe, a voice note of a song you half remember. Shivangi Sah started with art and DIY videos using whatever materials were around. Most of us will never post what we make, and that's fine too.

Read one real story. This one's our bias, so take it with some salt.

If you're going to watch anyway

Some evenings you're tired and you just want a screen. Fair. Then at least choose what's on it.

That's why we built Success Shorts. It's the same format you already like, short vertical videos, only every one of them is about a real Indian who started from somewhere ordinary. A few I'd start with:

• Nisha Madhulika, who felt lonely in Noida after the kids moved out, and began filming recipes in her kitchen at 52.
• Mustafa of iD Fresh Food, a coolie's son who failed Class 6 and started selling batter out of a 50 sq ft room.
• Manoj Dey, who filmed phone repair tutorials on a broken staircase with a budget phone, while living in a mud house in Jharkhand.

They're short enough that you can stop after one. There's no follower count to compare yourself against, and nobody on the site wants you to buy anything from them. You might still end up watching six. But you'll probably remember the woman who started at 52, which is more than I can say for most of what I scrolled past last week.

If you want to give it a go, open the feed next time the kettle's on.