Conscious Creation Week 4: The lies your memory tells you
Your memory lies and your willpower fails. Build systems instead.
Conscious Creation is a guided behavior tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.
The story behind the program, and how it works:
If you’re just joining us —
The program is self-paced. The weeks build on each other, but you can start anytime and move through at your own speed. Start with Week 1 where you’ll build your tracker and figure out what to track.
Over the past few weeks, about eight different people in the Conscious Creation program have told me the same thing: they want to stop doomscrolling. They know it’s eating their time, they know it’s making them feel worse, and they genuinely want to quit, but they’re finding it almost impossible.
What struck me most about these conversations wasn’t the struggle itself, which is apparently pretty universal, but how consistently wrong people were about how much time they were actually losing to doomscrolling. Someone would say they scrolled “maybe sixty or ninety minutes” and then check their screen time data and discover it was closer to four hours. Not because they were lying to me, but because they genuinely believed it was ninety minutes. Their memory had edited the experience down to almost nothing.
This is the thing about doomscrolling that makes it uniquely difficult to quit, it doesn’t register as time spent. You’re not doing anything that feels like a decision. You’re not starting a task or committing to an activity. You’re just... there, thumb moving, until suddenly you’re not, and the entire experience collapses in your memory to a brief moment of “I was on my phone for a bit.”
But this isn’t just about scrolling. This is about how your memory systematically lies to you about where your time actually goes, and why you can’t trust your own perception of what you’re doing with your days.
This week is about why awareness alone doesn't change behavior, and how to build constraints that do the work your willpower can't.
In this post:
Why your memory lies about how you spend your time
The effort bias (and why scrolling is the worst offender)
What actually works: tracking vs. constraints
Why awareness alone isn’t enough
Four constraint options for scrollers (with implementation steps)
How to design a constraint for any stubborn behavior
The three features of constraints that actually hold
What to track this week + end of week reflection
The effort bias.
Memory doesn’t record your day like a security camera, rather it reconstructs your day based on what felt significant, and significance is heavily biased toward effort and emotion.
When you sit down to do something hard, whether that’s writing, building, creating, or any work that requires actual focus, your brain registers it as a big deal because it required something from you. So when you look back on your day, that hour of difficult work looms large. You remember it. It feels like a substantial chunk of your day.
When you do something effortless, whether that’s scrolling, browsing, watching videos, or any consumption that requires nothing but the ability to absorb what’s in front of you, your brain barely registers it. Each individual session feels like nothing. Ten minutes here, fifteen there, twenty while waiting for something. None of it registers as significant because none of it required effort.
The result is a systematic distortion where effort gets overweighted and passivity gets underweighted in your memory of your day. You remember the forty-five minutes you spent working on your project, but you don’t remember the three and a half hours you spent consuming content in scattered sessions throughout the day. So when someone asks what you did, or when you ask yourself, you genuinely believe you spent most of your time being productive.
This is why people can go months or years believing they’re working toward their goals while making almost no progress. They’re not necessarily lazy or undisciplined, they just genuinely believe they’re putting in the time because their memory keeps telling them they are. But they’ve never tracked it, so they’ve never seen the gap between perception and reality.
The scrolling problem, specifically.
Doomscrolling is the worst offender because it’s designed to be invisible to your memory.
There’s no natural stopping point. You don’t finish a scroll session the way you finish a chapter or an episode or a task. You just eventually stop, which means there’s no clear endpoint for your brain to anchor the memory to.
There’s no effort involved. Nothing about scrolling requires focus or energy, so nothing about it registers as significant time expenditure.
There’s no single session either. You don’t sit down to scroll for two hours. You scroll for ten minutes, six separate times, scattered across your day. Your brain remembers six small moments, not one large time investment, even though the math is exactly the same.
And the content itself is designed to be forgettable. You’re not processing information or building toward anything, you’re just experiencing a stream of stimuli that disappears from your consciousness the moment you look away. There’s nothing for your memory to hold onto, so it doesn’t.
This is why screen time data is so consistently shocking to people who check it for the first time. They’re not in denial about their scrolling, they genuinely don’t know. Their memory has been systematically underreporting the time cost because the activity is designed to be invisible.
What actually works.
There are really only two approaches that work for changing behaviors your memory keeps lying about.
The first is tracking. Not trusting your perception, but actually recording the data. If you want to know how much you scroll, you check screen time. If you want to know how much you create versus consume, you log it. If you want to know where your time goes, you write it down. The tracker doesn’t have the same biases your memory has. It just shows you what happened.
The second is constraints that don’t require awareness (this is my personal method). Instead of trying to monitor your behavior in real-time, which requires you to notice what you’re doing, which you’ve already established you’re bad at, you build systems that make the behavior harder or impossible by default.
I track what I consume, but I don’t count hours. I track which show I watched, and I keep it limited to one episode per day. I track what I created, so I can see at a glance whether a day had output or just input. The constraint is built into the system so I’m not trying to monitor myself in real-time and make good decisions. I’m making the decision once, in advance, and then the system enforces it.
For scrolling specifically, this might mean app limits that actually lock you out, deleting apps from your phone entirely, or keeping your phone in another room during certain hours. The point is that you can’t rely on noticing you’re scrolling too much because you’ve already established that your perception of how much you’re scrolling is unreliable. You need a system that doesn’t depend on your awareness.
The broader pattern.
This isn’t really about scrolling though. It’s more about the gap between what you think you’re doing and what you’re actually doing, which exists in almost every domain of your life.
You think you eat pretty healthy, but you’ve never tracked your actual food intake. You think you exercise regularly, but you’ve never looked at the data on how many days you actually moved your body. You think you’re working on your goals, but you’ve never counted the hours you actually spent on them versus the hours you spent doing everything else.
Your memory is a storyteller, not a recorder. It’s trying to construct a coherent narrative about who you are and what you do, and that narrative is always going to be more flattering than the raw data. You remember the salad, not the snacks. You remember the workout, not the week you skipped. You remember the hour of focused work, not the three hours of distracted browsing.
The only way to see what’s actually happening is to stop trusting your memory and start tracking reality. Not because tracking is magic (though I do think data is a kind of magic), but because tracking is the only tool that doesn’t share your brain’s bias toward a comfortable story.
If you’ve never tracked something you think you’re doing well at, there’s a good chance you’re not doing as well as you think. And if you’ve never tracked something you think isn’t that bad, there’s a good chance it’s worse than you believe.
Your memory will keep lying to you because your memory works for your ego. But your data won’t lie. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
