New App ‘Touch Grass’ Encourages Outdoor Breaks To Combat Doomscrolling And Boost Mental Health

This just in! A new App will literally make us "Go Touch Grass" before we start Doomscrolling. There's a new app coming out called "Touch Grass," and it will FORCE you to literally go outside and touch grass before going on social media.  It'll be available but only for iOS.

What is Doomscrolling you ask. Well according to Wikipedia it is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly the negative news, on the world wide web as well as social media. The concept was coined around 2020, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is defined as the excessive consumption of short-form videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without hitting the breaks.

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If you spend enough time doomscrolling on social media and arguing with all those bots, you may have heard the slang phrase, "Go touch grass!"  It's basically means, to get offline, and spend some time in the real world with real people doing real things.

There's a brand-new app called "Touch Grass," and it encourages you to literally go out into the great outdoors and touch the grass before going on social media.

Here's how this silly app works:  Touch Grass asks you to choose TWO apps that are your biggest time sucks . . . that you would like to limit and then blocks those apps for you!

Here is the kicker. The only way to unlock them is to take a picture of yourself going outside ...and actually touching grass . . . and then submitting it.  Then, you get to pick just how much time you can have on each restricted app.

Touch Grass is only available BUT it's only for iOS in the Apple app store. Just another perk of being an Apple kid, I guess. Don't worry other phone users. The developer plans to release an Android app in the future.  And he also wants to add ways to let users touch snow . . . sand . . . and all the other kinds of environmental things.

The app is free but upgrading it will cost $6 a month or $50 annually.  The premium version will let you block an unlimited number of apps, give you periodic "skips," and provide detailed screen time reports.

Before the App launched it supposedly had around 30,000 pre-orders. Strikes me a little funny with a side of sad we need an App to tell us to go outside and be a part of the world. There truly is an app for everything.