The Real Reason "One Second" on Your Phone Becomes Your Entire Evening
Why ADHD turns one unanswered message into three lost hours
It’s 4PM. You need to respond to that message about weekend plans. It’s been 5 days. Every time you think about it, your chest tightens a little. You grab your phone to finally handle it, but first you “just check” your feed for “one second.”
You look up and it’s 7PM.
Dinner isn’t started. People are asking what’s for dinner. The message still isn’t sent. And now you feel like an even worse friend AND you’ve created a dinner crisis.
Where did 2.5 hours GO?
This isn’t a one-time thing. It’s your Tuesday. Your Thursday. Your Sunday afternoon. Time vanishes, tasks pile up, and you’re left holding the guilt of both: wondering why you can’t just DO THE THING and stop losing entire evenings to your phone.
We’ve put together a worksheet for this week that helps you identify your personal open loops and create your own “decision-free zones” for the things that drain you most. You’ll find it at the end of this newsletter.
Why One Unanswered Text Becomes Two Lost Hours
Let’s start with that text you can’t send.
Your brain knows it’s unfinished. And ADHD brains are particularly affected by something called the Zeigarnik Effect, a psychological effect where your mind fixates on incomplete tasks way more than completed ones.
Every unfinished task lives in your head rent-free. That text. The appointment you need to schedule. The decision about what’s for dinner. The work email waiting for a response. The permission slip your kid needs signed. Your mom’s doctor appointment you said you’d coordinate.
They’re not stored neatly in a list somewhere. They’re all screaming for attention at once.
So when you finally pick up your phone to handle that text, you’re already overloaded. Making decisions, even small ones like “what should I say about Saturday?” requires mental resources you simply don’t have.
This is called decision paralysis, and it happens when you’re facing too many open loops at once. Your executive function, already compromised by ADHD, basically short-circuits. You can’t decide what to say, how to say it, or even where to start.
The Escape Hatch (That Makes Everything Worse)
So your brain does what it’s wired to do when faced with discomfort: it seeks relief.
Instagram is RIGHT THERE. TikTok is one tap away. And your ADHD brain? It’s desperate for dopamine.
Where things get especially tricky for ADHD brains: social media is literally designed to exploit your neurochemistry. Every scroll, every like, every new post delivers a tiny hit of dopamine.
You’re not weak for scrolling. You’re experiencing time blindness, a core ADHD trait where you genuinely cannot track how much time is passing.
You planned to scroll for “one second.” Your brain legitimately believed that. But ADHD creates “nearsightedness about the future.” You can only deal with what’s right in front of you, right now. The future, even five minutes from now, doesn’t exist yet.
So that “one second” becomes 30 minutes. Then 90 minutes. Then somehow it’s three hours later and you have no idea how you got here.
How You End Up With More Problems Than You Started With
The unfortunate part is you didn’t solve anything by scrolling.
The original text is still not sent but now you’ve added NEW open loops.
That thing you saw that you need to research. The article you started reading but didn’t finish. The three comments you need to respond to. The video you bookmarked to watch later. The product you’re now considering buying. The message that reminded you of ANOTHER person you haven’t texted back.