Beating boredom? That just makes boredom worse.

In a spare moment, quickly grab your phone and watch a video. If you don’t like it, move on to the next. It’s a tempting pastime, but it doesn’t drive away boredom. In fact, it’ll make it worse, according to new research published in 2019. Journal of Experimental Psychology.

The participants themselves expected that they would become less bored if they could switch as soon as they finished watching a video prematurely. But the experiments, conducted on 1,200 people from the United States and Canada, showed something different: Participants who watched the entire video were the least bored afterward.

In one experiment, participants watched a ten-minute YouTube video without being able to pause or fast-forward. In the second part of the experiment, they spent ten minutes browsing through several short videos. Watching a single video was rated by participants as more satisfying and meaningful.

For an enjoyable online experience you can: digital switch So it’s better to cut back and focus on the content you’re watching, advises lead researcher Katie Tam of the University of Toronto. Engaging in videos is more enjoyable than scrolling through them.

Previous research has already shown that smartphone use in social situations often undermines enjoyment and increases boredom. The researchers believe that going digital may be a related source of boredom, which is not without its risks: According to Tam, chronic boredom is often accompanied by anxiety and depression.

“It’s an interesting and well-constructed study,” says Madeleine van Hoof of the Open University, who was not involved in the study herself. The fact that the same people expected the opposite outcome makes the result even more convincing in her eyes.

Wijnand van Tilburg, a boredom scientist at the University of Essex who won the Egnübel Prize last year for his research on boredom, also thinks it’s an insightful study. “It still seems intuitive that boredom leads to switching,” he says. “The second finding is even more surprising: switching from one thing to another doesn’t help with boredom, but actually makes it worse.”

Van Tilburg stresses that we actually know very little about the impact of social media on boredom. “Boredom is increasing among young people, and we also know there is a link with smartphones. But it’s a link, we don’t know what causes what,” he said.

Both van Hoff and van Tilburg stress that it’s not necessarily the multiplication itself that’s the problem, but the context. “If you’re looking for information about black holes, for example, and you’re looking at different videos, it’s obviously not more boring,” van Hoff says.

Although most people think of boredom as an annoyance, Van Tilburg believes that boredom is neither good nor bad, but rather serves a function. “It often comes with curiosity and research. It can also lead to a new hobby. The problem only arises when you don’t have to switch between videos or tasks. In a boring meeting, for example, or at school. So it depends a lot on the context.”