Compulsive Smartphone Use: Boring Ourselves to Bits

Using smartphones increases boredom, instead of relieving it.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

Key points

• Studies in the US and China document similar rises in boredom due to problematic social media use.
• While our brains seek novelty, social media algorithms serve up similar content.
• Users report increased levels of boredom after using social media to alleviate boredom.
• Inattention, a defining characteristic of boredom, increases amid distracting social media notifications.

The next time you feel the urge to scroll, click, or even glance at your phone, tamp down the urge even just to stave off boredom. Instead of keeping boredom at bay, your screen time intensifies boredom by increasing inattention, one of the main drivers of boredom.

Self-reported boredom in the US has increased dramatically from a mean in the 50th percentile in 2009 to one in the 94th percentile in 2020. Strikingly, this steep increase in boredom also correlates highly with self-reported problematic social media use. Furthermore, when bored, people typically switch among digital content platforms, fast-forward through content, or skip it entirely, a behavior that ironically further intensifies boredom.

What Drives Boredom?

People typically feel bored when they fail to maintain focus. Meanwhile digital devices, as of 2023, bombard users with a median of 237 notifications daily. These notifications disrupt attention, worsen reaction times, slow progress on tasks, and disrupt activities. And, if you think these disruptions stem from predatory algorithms and app messaging, you’re wrong. Instead, users initiate 89% of interactions with smartphones, checking or using their devices every five minutes.

This behavior also drives a vicious cycle. Digital media algorithms prioritize stimulation and entertainment, influencing users to perceive as boring activities that lack this rapid-fire visual and auditory stimulation. On the other hand, users also rapidly become habituated to these stimuli, leading to long-term decreases in enjoyment and well-being.

Lack of Coherence = Meaningless Interactions

Ironically, smartphones also drive boredom by exposing users repeatedly to torrents of content that lack coherence. Yet boredom directly correlates with users’ perceptions of meaninglessness, which stems directly from this absence of coherence. Boredom thus results from too much content yielding too little information in an environment that challenges even the most focused attempts at making meaning from content. Meanwhile, students who use smartphones to escape boredom report lower enjoyment, interest, and effort in class—coupled with paradoxically higher levels of boredom. Boredom once prodded us to re-evaluate our tasks and lives to seek more meaningful or challenging activities. However, most smartphone users now try to dodge boredom by using smartphones as short-term escapes from boredom.

The Costs of Boredom: Social, Educational, Political, and Personal

While smartphone users struggle with a vicious cycle of increasing and inescapable boredom, chronic boredom itself exacts steep social costs. Chronic, self-reported boredom tracks with rising levels of anxiety and depression. In addition, people who report chronic boredom also display increases in risk-taking behavior and poor self-control. Reports of chronic boredom also correlate with behavior that stigmatizes outgroups. Moreover, social media addiction similarly reduces users’ sense of agency, while the rise of chronic boredom has strong associations with political extremism.

Students who identify themselves as chronically bored also struggle academically. Moreover, these same students, including those enrolled at elite universities, battle a profound lack of reading stamina, stemming from their inability to focus, resulting in students unable to cope with reading a book or even a single poem.

Focus is difficult, as medieval monks noticed even amid lives dedicated to focus and concentration. Yet, as studies attest, students with smartphones who used curiosity to drive their focus, rather than boredom, experience lower levels of boredom, coupled with higher grades.

Smartphone use can prove to be a difficult habit to break—but an equally damaging habit if unchecked.