This hidden iPhone trick is the reason I can doomscroll in peace

• How does Vehicle Motion Cues help cure carsickness?
• How to enable Vehicle Motion Cues in iOS

Arguably one of the worst feelings in the world is nausea. Once you feel it start to creep up on you, one of two things will happen: the slim chance that it actually recedes on its own, or an unpleasant upchuck session that may even make anyone around you join in. Nausea itself isn’t contagious, but the result of it can definitely induce it in others.

Nausea itself isn’t new, but since traveling by car is, motion sickness is an unfortunately common dilemma. Some people can’t even be a passenger on a windy back road without tossing their cookies, but other times, you might get carsick from reading or staring at a screen. Like your iPhone. It isn’t TikTok making you sick, it’s your eyes seeing one thing and your body feeling another that creates anatomical confusion, and the victim is your tummy.

Modern problems require modern solutions. As someone who regularly roadtrips from the Midwest to the Southeast multiple times a year with her family, not using my phone for entertainment isn’t an option. Luckily, I found a hidden setting buried deep in my iPhone’s Control Center that tricks my eyes and spares my stomach from seeing the Arby’s I had for lunch again.

How does Vehicle Motion Cues help cure carsickness?

I’m talkin’ ’bout equilibrium, baby

Why does carsickness even happen? It has to do with a miscommunication between what your eyes think is happening and your balance system — which, funny enough, takes place in your inner ear. Deep inside your ears, there are tiny canals with fluid that sense motion, direction, changes in speed, and generally keep you calibrated in your physical body.

When you’re in a moving vehicle, the fluid in your ears feels each turn, bump, acceleration, and stop. But when you’re looking at your phone or reading a book, your eyes are fixed on a subject that doesn’t look like it’s moving at all. Your ears report movement, but your eyes say, “No, we’re sitting at a peaceful standstill” — hence the mismatch. The sensory conflict raises an alarm in your brain for disorientation, which it instinctively interprets as a side effect of a threat from, say, poison. If your body is tricked into thinking you’ve consumed some kind of dangerous toxin, its response is going to be to get it out by any means necessary. So, here comes that McDonald’s. You aren’t going to enjoy it as much as the first time.

So, how does a visual accessibility setting help cure motion sickness? Turning on Vehicle Motion Cues introduces small, animated dots that appear all over your phone screen that move in sync with the motion of the vehicle you’re in. You can even walk around with it on to get an impression of what the movement will be. The idea is that the moving dots, mimicking the car’s movement, serve as an unobtrusive substitute for the motion that your inner ear is experiencing. If the driver makes a right turn, the dots will follow suit, and you can continue to scroll TikTok in peace without hurling your guts up.

The dots are subtle, adapt to their surroundings, and work regardless of what you’re doing on your phone. I don’t find them distracting whatsoever, and they’re definitely less goofy than the blue fluid-filled goggles my parents used to keep in the car growing up.

These dots came to my rescue, but they may not work for everyone — especially those who experience severe carsickness. They definitely don’t fix everything, but anyone who deals with motion sickness regularly could benefit from trying this setting.

How to enable Vehicle Motion Cues in iOS

It’s hiding under dozens of Control Center layers

You can add Vehicle Motion Cues to your Control Center for quick access as soon as you buckle your seatbelt. Here’s how:

1. Swipe from the top-right corner to open Control Center.
2. Tap and hold in any blank space.
3. Tap + Add a Control at the bottom of your screen.
4. Scroll until you find Vision Accessiblity or use the search bar at the top to find Vehicle Motion Cues.
5. Tap Vehicle Motion Cues to add it to your Control Center.

Now that it’s available right in your Control Center, when you tap it, it will give you several options: On, Off, or Automatically in Vehicle. I choose to turn it on or off manually, since I don’t want to see the dots on a very short car ride to the grocery store — especially if I’m the one driving.

You can also tap Settings to customize the appearance of the dots, making them smaller or larger, changing the colors, adding more dots, or even adjusting the size and pattern.