TikTok's new features are designed to stop doomscrolling in its tracks

Will it make us finally put our phones down?

Sarah Mitchell

2 min read

June 3, 2025 - 8:00PM

Lifestyle

Don't miss out on the headlines from Lifestyle. Followed categories will be added to My News.

TikTok is trying to help us put our phones down with new features to improve our sleep and mental health.

Our addiction to the doomscroll has got so bad, even TikTok wants us to stop.

Doomscrolling makes us 12 times more likely to suffer serious mental health issues, and according to the Lighthouse Consumer Tracker: March 2025 Update, 42 per cent of Australians engage in doomscrolling on social media.

We’re all guilty of lying in bed on our phones, only to realise we haven't watched a single video we’ve been interested in in several minutes, sometimes hours. But even when our algorithms aren’t showing us anything we care to watch, we keep on watching.

Australians aren’t great at getting a good night’s rest either. 48 per cent of all Australian adults have reported at least 2 sleep-related problems, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

Whether we’re aware of how counterintuitive a scroll to get to sleep is, it’s regrettably a part of many of our nighttime routines.

Although social media is a big contributor to many of our poor sleep and mental health, TikTok is now rolling out new features to help us improve both.

They will be guided through mindful meditation with calming music and grounding guides, plus breathing exercises to help them ‘relax and be mindful of the time’. Image: iStock

Sleep meditations

After testing on teenagers last year, the platform now offers users guided meditations to help them log off and fall asleep.

Just head to the screen time settings page to turn the meditation feature on during your elected sleep hours.

Designed with young people in mind, users aged under 18 will have their doomscrolls automatically interrupted by full-screen meditation prompts once it hits 10 pm.

They will be guided through mindful meditation with calming music and grounding guides, plus breathing exercises to help them ‘relax and be mindful of the time’.

TikTok says teens who opt to keep scrolling will get a second, ‘harder to ignore’ full-screen prompt interrupting their scroll time.

Adults can scroll all night long uninterrupted if they wish, but we do have the option to enable the feature if we want to (we probably should).

Just head to the screen time settings page to turn the meditation feature on during your elected sleep hours.

Meditation is proven to improve sleep quality. Image: iStock

The company said ‘We designed these features to reflect best practices in behavioral change theory by providing positive nudges that can help teens develop balanced long-term habits.’

Meditation and sleep

Meditation is proven to improve sleep quality.

According to the NHS, the practice ‘can enable us to relax, unwind and let go of thoughts or worries from the day. Practising meditation has many calming effects on the body. It helps encourage slower breathing and lowers our heart rates, all of which can help with drifting off to sleep.’

Hopefully this feature will do more for our rest than our routinely ignored screen time limits. Image: Unsplash

Once you get the hang of it, meditating can cut the amount of time it takes you to fall asleep, help you get into a deeper sleep and sleep for longer.

TikTok’s new feature focuses on mindful meditation, which can reduce symptoms of insomnia and help us relax while bringing our thoughts back to the present.

Hopefully these changes will do more for our rest than our routinely ignored screen time limits.