Just five more minutes (said at midnight, 1am, 2am)

It's 11:47pm. You have to be up in six hours. You know this. Your body knows this. And yet here we are, watching a video about the history of escalators, having somehow arrived here from a post about someone's tiny house kitchen renovation.

We call it doom-scrolling. But sometimes it isn't really about the scroll at all. It's about the moment right before the scrolling starts. That brief, uncomfortable stillness when you put the phone down, put your head on your pillow…and your thoughts get loud.

Sleep asks something of you. It asks you to pause and get still. To lie in the dark with the reality of whatever you didn't finish, whoever you haven't called back. And sometimes the phone is just a way of saying not yet.

It might just be habit. Or boredom. Or the video really was interesting. But if you find yourself doing this night after night, it might be worth getting curious about it. Not to fix it tonight. Just to notice, what happens right before I pick up my doom-scrolling machine?

-LZ