Why Moms Reach for Their Phone, the Freezer, and Amazon (It’s Not What You Think)
It Starts as a Normal Morning
It’s mid-morning. The kids are coloring. Nobody is fighting. Everyone has eaten. You have, by your best estimation, about 20 minutes before the whole thing unravels — and you are going to use them.
You sneak away to get something done.
Mom!!
Your youngest needs the toilet.
Mom! Water, spilled, everywhere.
Mom! The dog needs out. Someone’s at the door. And now somebody’s hungry.
An hour later, the storm passes. Lunch needs to happen. But first — you find yourself standing at the open freezer, spoon in hand, eating ice cream in quick, furtive bites like a little squirrel who knows she’s about to get caught. You might not even be tasting it. You just need… something. A moment. A sensation that is entirely, unapologetically yours before you start the whole machine back up again.
And then, right on cue — the shame.
Why do I do this? Why can’t I just push through? These aren’t even hard problems.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Not to fix it, exactly — but because understanding something is the first step to stopping the war with yourself over it.
Why You Can’t Put the Phone Down (Even When You Know It Won’t Help)
Your brain is not broken. It is doing something almost ingeniously adaptive under genuinely difficult conditions.
We already know scrolling is addictive. We’ve been told this a thousand times — that the people who built these apps engineered them specifically to hijack our attention. We know this. And we still pick up the phone.
The reason is almost annoyingly simple: dopamine doesn’t fire when you get the reward. It fires in the anticipation of one. The brain lights up during the looking, not the finding. Which is why you can spend 20 minutes on your phone and put it down feeling worse than before, and somehow still pick it up again 4 minutes later. You weren’t looking for anything real. You were chasing the feeling right before finding something.
Has this happened to you? You’re scrolling — you know there’s nothing in your feed that’s going to change your life — and then someone calls your name and you’re actually annoyed at the interruption. Not because you were doing anything important. Just because they cut the loop. And then you feel guilty about being annoyed. Which makes you want to pick up the phone again.
It’s exhausting just describing it.
“I Just Want to Do One Simple Thing”
There’s something else happening underneath all of it.
Motherhood — especially in the little years — runs almost entirely on repetition. Dishes. Laundry. Sweeping. Snacks. Dishes again. None of it is hard in the way that hard things are hard. But the obstacles between you and the completion of any single one of these tasks are relentless. You never just do the dishes. You do three minutes of dishes, then you referee something, then you wipe something, then you start the dishes again.
The phrase in my house is: “I just want to do one simple thing.”
That frustration isn’t really about the dishes. It’s about the fact that your brain has a whole creative, curious, wandering interior life — and it is getting almost zero room to exist. (Read: When Your World Gets Smaller — and Your Mind Gets Louder)
Neuroscientists call it the default mode network, the brain’s daydreaming state, and for mothers of small children, it is essentially on permanent furlough. Novelty-seeking is what happens when the brain tries to claw back even a sliver of that space. It finds the quickest, cheapest, lowest-effort door out — and it takes it.
Scrolling: infinite novelty, zero effort, zero judgment. Amazon: the thrill is entirely in the browsing, not the box that arrives four days later. The ice cream, the Diet Coke, the handful of chocolate chips from the baking drawer — a fast, reliable hit of something that costs nothing and requires no one’s permission.
Not weakness. Navigation.
You Are Not the Only Mom Standing at the Open Fridge
There’s something quietly lonely about this habit when you’re in it alone. Standing at the fridge, cheeks full, eating fast before someone needs you again — it can feel like a small private embarrassment. Like evidence of some personal failing. I should be more present. I should be able to handle this. Other moms seem fine.
I had a morning recently that had been rough before 8:30 am even arrived. Esme didn’t want to get on the bus — tears streaming down her face as I gave her a gentle nudge up the stairs. Aura had a tummy ache, which meant endless trips to the bathroom. And Ivy had an owie that absolutely required a bandaid, immediately, repeatedly. By the time the bus pulled away and the house finally went quiet, I was already running on fumes.
I grabbed a spoon, stuck my head in the freezer, and started eating chocolate ice cream. By the third bite, I stopped. I wasn’t even hungry. I wasn’t even craving ice cream at 8:30 in the morning. I was just looking for a dopamine hit to get me to 9am.
I put the spoon in the sink, stepped outside into the cold, took a breath, and started again.
It doesn’t always happen like that. But sometimes — when the ice cream isn’t even doing the trick — that’s the signal. Just stop. Step out. Come back.
I was at mommy and me library time recently, talking with some of the other moms about this — the scrolling, mostly. Someone laughed and said she’d caught herself researching throw pillows for 25 minutes and didn’t even want new throw pillows. We all knew exactly what she meant.
The tasks aren’t hard. It’s the whole thing that’s hard. The tasks are easy — it’s being fully available to small humans every single waking hour that is genuinely, relentlessly demanding. And if you’re grabbing for micro-moments of relief in the in-between? That’s not a sign you’re failing. That’s a sign you’re in it — all the way in it, every single day. If any of this is hitting close to home, you might also find yourself in this one. (Read: When You Feel Like You’ve Lost Yourself in Motherhood)
These little dopamine grabs aren’t escapes from your kids. They’re what makes it possible to keep showing up for them.
The Revenge Bedtime Scroll (Yes, There’s a Name For It)
Eventually, you get everyone to bed. The house goes quiet. You finally have time that is yours.
And you spend it scrolling.
Or you’re so tired your eyes ache, but you stay up watching something on Netflix anyway — not because it’s good, just because it’s yours. Just because nobody needs anything from you while it’s on. There’s even a name for this: revenge bedtime procrastination. Staying up too late just to steal back a few hours of personhood.
These seasons are long and short simultaneously. That sounds like a cliché until you’re standing in the middle of one.
Start Again. That’s It. That’s the Whole Thing.
The point isn’t to delete the apps or cut the sugar or go to bed at 9:30. The point is just — when you notice yourself standing at the freezer, or 15 minutes deep into a cart you’ll never buy — just notice it. Oh. There it is. No shame spiral required. Just: my brain needed something, and it found the closest door.
And when you have a little more bandwidth, sometimes it helps to find a door that leaves you feeling better on the other side. A walk around the block — movement, even small and imperfect, is one of the most restorative resets I’ve found. (Read: Movement as Mindfulness (Especially in Motherhood)) A song turned up loud. Five minutes of drawing something stupid. A real conversation with a friend, not a scroll through their highlight reel. Not because you should. Just because it tends to feel different afterward.
But mostly — the grace. The kind you’d give a friend without even thinking about it.
That’s available to you too.
If you’re looking for a gentle place to start noticing — without pressure or perfection — the Ease Journal was made for exactly this kind of moment.