When did we become so afraid of being bored?

I read something this week that made me stop.

Researchers at Ege University studied 174 university students and found that boredom may be the bridge between academic procrastination and problematic social media use.

And I thought, well, of course it is.

Do you know that feeling when there is something you should be doing, but you cannot quite make yourself start? You feel restless. You pick up your phone. You tell yourself you will look for a minute.

Suddenly, 20 minutes are gone.

The phone was right there, offering an escape before you even had to figure out what you were feeling.

So why do we reach for our phones when we are bored?

Because the phone gives us instant novelty. We do not have to wait, wonder or sit with the discomfort. But the research suggests that quick escape can become a loop: boredom sends us scrolling, and all that scrolling and switching may leave us feeling even more bored.

That makes complete sense to me. Not because boredom is bad, but because we have become so uncomfortable with it.

We fill every empty second

Think about how quickly we reach for our phones now.

Waiting in line. Sitting in the car before an appointment. Watching a show during a quiet scene. Standing in the kitchen while the coffee brews.

There is almost no empty space left.

A lot of us grew up with pauses built right into the day.

A commercial break stopped the show in the middle. You could not skip it. You had to wait a full week for the next episode. If you wanted to know how the story ended, you simply had to wait. There was no entire season sitting there, ready to binge before bed.

And remember long car rides before everyone had a screen?

We stared out the window. We played I Spy. We counted train cars. We worked through car-bingo cards. We drove our parents crazy asking, “Are we there yet?”

Sometimes we were bored long enough that our imaginations had to take over.

We did not call that mindfulness. It was just life.

Young people today have grown up with a completely different rhythm. They have not had as many commercial breaks, boring car rides or week-long waits for the next episode. Entertainment, conversation and distraction are available every second of the day. If they want to know the ending, it is usually only one more episode away.

That is not their fault. They did not design this world.

But I do wonder what happens when you grow up without many chances to wait. To sit in silence. To be halfway through a story and not know how it ends. To figure out what to do when nobody hands you the next thing.

I think that matters.

Because boredom is not an emergency.

And then the scrolling makes it worse

Another study really caught my attention.

Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht ran seven experiments with 1,223 people. They had people watch videos, switch between them and fast-forward through them. Basically, the same thing we do when one video is not holding our attention fast enough.

People switched because they were bored. They thought it would help.

It did not.

In the video experiments, the people who kept switching felt more bored. They were less attentive, less satisfied and less connected to what they were watching.

The results were messier when the researchers tried the same idea with online articles and with people outside the university samples. So no, this one study does not mean every scroll makes every person more bored.

But the video results still made me think.

We get bored, so we look for something new. Then something new. Then something new again. And somehow we end up more bored than when we started.

We are trying to escape the feeling while training ourselves to need more stimulation.

Maybe the phone is the escape hatch

The Ege University research was a one-time survey of university students in Turkey. It cannot tell us that boredom causes social media addiction, and I do not want to pretend it can.

What it did find was a connection worth noticing. The students who procrastinated more also reported more boredom, and that boredom was tied to more problematic social media use.

The researchers looked at difficulty identifying and describing emotions too. That part was more complicated. Boredom was the part that came through more clearly.

And honestly, that feels familiar.

Maybe the scroll is not always the original problem. Maybe it is the escape hatch.

Maybe you are bored. Maybe you are overwhelmed. Maybe you do not know where to start. Maybe you are avoiding something that feels hard.

Before you even name the feeling, your hand reaches for your phone. The feed gives you something new without asking anything from you.

For a minute, you do not have to feel uncomfortable.

Then you look up and 20 minutes are gone.

What if it goes both ways?

Then I found a 2026 study that followed 2,163 adolescents in China between 2020 and 2022.

The young people who were more prone to boredom also reported more problematic social media use. That part was not surprising.

This part was: problematic social media use kept predicting more boredom at the next check-in. Boredom predicted more problematic use too, but only during the first stretch of the study.

Does that prove social media causes boredom? No. The researchers were observing adolescents from four schools in Guangzhou, and the study happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a lot going on in those years.

But it does make me wonder if the relationship goes both ways.

We feel bored, so we reach for the phone. The phone gives us something new right now. Then regular life can feel even slower by comparison.

And around we go.

So what do we do with all of this?

This is exactly why I do not believe shame works.

You do not need another lecture about discipline. You do not need someone telling you to try harder. And you should not have to lock your phone in a drawer just to get through your day. I have written before about why your willpower is broken—and how I built a way to walk it off.

The goal is not to remove every distraction or become perfectly productive.

Sometimes a pause before an app opens is exactly what someone needs. Some apps do that well. There is real value in having that little moment to notice what you are about to do.

That is just not what Paced does. Paced gives you time in the app, followed by a cooldown and a choice. More on that in a minute.

If nighttime is when the scroll usually gets you, read How to Stop Doomscrolling Before Bed (Without Deleting Anything). It is about creating an exit before “one more scroll” quietly turns into another hour.

Let boredom be boring

The next time you feel the urge to open the app you always open, try waiting for one minute.

Not forever. Just one minute.

Do not replace it with a podcast. Do not turn on the television. Do not immediately find something “productive” to do.

Just let it be quiet.

Look out the window. Stretch. Walk into another room. Let your mind wander without feeding it something new.

It might feel uncomfortable. That does not mean anything is wrong.

Do you remember where your mind used to go during those long car rides? What you imagined while you waited for the next episode? What you noticed when there was nothing else demanding your attention?

Maybe we need some of that space back.

Boredom can lead to an idea, a conversation, a walk, a task finally started or simply a little rest.

We have become so used to filling every second that doing nothing can feel like failure.

It is not.

Consider this your permission slip to be bored.

Wait or walk: how Paced works

That is why I built Paced.

Not to take your phone away. Not to put you in digital jail. And not to make you feel guilty for wanting an easy escape.

You get a 30-minute session, followed by a 60-minute cooldown. Then you choose: wait it out or walk it off. Every 100 steps takes three minutes off the cooldown.

That is it. You get your time, and when the cooldown starts, you decide what happens next.

No digital jail. No lecture. No shame.

Because sometimes you will still choose the app. That is okay.

The point is that you chose it. The reflex did not choose for you.

Your time, your pace.

Ready to create a little breathing room? Try Paced and protect one app free forever.