Compulsive smartphone use: We are bored to death

Next time you feel the urge to scroll, click, or even just glance at your phone, curb the urge, if only to avoid boredom. Instead of keeping boredom at bay, your screen time increases boredom by increasing inattention, a leading cause of boredom.

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Self-reported boredom has increased dramatically in the United States, from a mean in the 50th percentile in 2009 to a value in the 94th percentile in 2020. Notably, this sharp increase in boredom is also highly correlated with self-reported problematic social media use. Additionally, when bored, people typically switch between digital content platforms, fast-forward through content, or skip content altogether, behavior that ironically increases boredom.

What drives boredom?

People usually feel bored when they fail to maintain focus. Meanwhile, digital devices will bombard users with an average of 237 notifications daily in 2023. These notifications disrupt attention, slow response times, slow task progress, and interrupt activities. And if you think these glitches are due to predatory algorithms and app messaging, you’re wrong. Instead, users initiate 89% of smartphone interactions by checking or using their devices every five minutes.

This behavior also triggers a vicious circle. Digital media algorithms prioritize stimulation and entertainment, influencing users to find activities that lack this rapid visual and auditory stimulation boring. On the other hand, users also quickly get used to these stimuli, which in the long term leads to a decline in enjoyment and well-being.

Lack of coherence = meaningless interactions

Ironically, smartphones also promote boredom by subjecting users to a constant barrage of content that lacks coherence. Yet boredom directly correlates with users’ perception of meaninglessness, which results directly from this lack of coherence. So boredom arises from too much content providing too little information, in an environment that challenges even the most deliberate attempts to make sense of content. Meanwhile, students who use smartphones to escape boredom report lower levels of enjoyment, interest, and effort in class—along with, paradoxically, higher levels of boredom. Boredom once caused us to reevaluate our tasks and our lives and look for more meaningful or challenging activities. However, most smartphone users now try to escape boredom by using smartphones as a short-term escape from boredom.

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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 has high social costs. Chronic, self-reported boredom leads to increasing levels of anxiety and depression. Additionally, people who report chronic boredom also exhibit increased risk-taking behavior and poor self-control. Reports of chronic boredom also correlate with behavior that stigmatizes out-groups. Furthermore, social media addiction similarly reduces users’ sense of agency, while increases in chronic boredom are strongly linked to political extremism.

Students who describe themselves as chronically bored also experience academic difficulties. Furthermore, these same students, including those enrolled in elite universities, suffer from a significant lack of perseverance in reading, which stems from their inability to concentrate and results in students being unable to read a book or even read to read a single poem.

Concentration is difficult, as medieval monks noted, even in a life dedicated to concentration and focus. But as studies show, students with smartphones who direct their concentration through curiosity rather than boredom experience lower levels of boredom and better grades.

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