SCIENCE & TECH: Teens are overwhelmed by boredom — for one big reason

The teens are not all right.

Young people are more bored than ever before — and social media, apps meant for entertainment and engagement, is one of the culprits.

Santiago Gonzalez-Winthrop, 16, told Yahoo News that he used to be “excited” to go home after school and do homework. Now, he’s chronically bored, “watching the clock count by” in class or dreading his family’s digital “detox days,” on which he craves his cell phone.

Screen time, he said, is his crutch for boredom, scrolling through Instagram, TikTok or other social media apps to see what his friends are up to.

But that leads to late-night doomscrolling that affects his sleep.

“I don’t even remember what I’m seeing, honestly,” he admitted.

“As soon as I’m off my phone, I feel horrible, like, ashamed.”

Citing survey data from the organization Monitoring the Future, Yahoo News reported that boredom is on the rise among tweens and teens.

According to the stats, 45% of high school seniors responded that they “agreed” or “mostly agreed” with the statement “I am often bored” in 2021, while 21% of eighth and 10th graders agreed. From 2014 data, those figures are up 37% for 12th graders and more than 13% for eighth graders and high school sophomores.

While those numbers were reported amid the COVID-19 pandemic, they spiked again in 2023, according to Yahoo News.

Kent Toussaint, a marriage and family therapist and Teen Therapy Center‘s founder and clinical director, told Yahoo News that the reported “boredom” is just the “intolerance” of it.

“A lot of that is due to the constant screen use and having that ability to avoid boredom with the screen,” he explained.

“Boredom is the seed of creativity, but when people are avoiding boredom all the time, they never need to create, learn a skill, do art or go out and make friends.”

That’s why experts recommend letting kids be bored.

Dr. Carl Marci, a psychiatrist and author, told HuffPost that, after being bored for a while, his children will “start to creatively solve their problems or distract themselves with social interaction or play,” which allows them to be curious and imaginative.

Constant access to personal devices and screens — which feature “content designed primarily to capture a child’s attention and engage them as long as possible” — teach kids that “they don’t have to ever be bored,” he added.

Smartphones, it seems, have killed curiosity — a phenomenon that expands well beyond high school classrooms.

NYU Stern School of Business professor Jonathan Haidt, the author of “The Anxious Generation,” recently told Business Insider that Gen Z’s scrolling habits have affected their ability to work

They “never have a moment to reflect, they don’t have time to mull things over, they don’t have time to be creative,” he said, adding that the young generation has also altered their attention spans.

“The decimation of human attention around the world might even be a bigger cost to humanity than the mental health and mental illness epidemic,” he said.