When was the last time you were truly bored? Not the restless kind of boredom where you scroll through your phone looking for something to capture your attention. Real boredom. The kind where there’s nothing to do and you just sit with that feeling.
If you can’t remember, you’re not alone. We’ve engineered boredom out of modern life. Every spare moment, from waiting in line to sitting on the toilet to lying in bed before sleep, gets filled with digital stimulation. Our phones have become boredom extinguishers, always ready to provide something, anything, to occupy our attention.
But new research suggests we’ve made a trade we didn’t fully understand. A study from researcher Kostadin Kushlev found that when participants cut off internet access for extended periods, something unexpected happened. They didn’t just report fewer negative emotions. They experienced significantly more positive ones. Anxiety symptoms dropped. Depression symptoms decreased. And perhaps most surprisingly, their ability to sustain attention improved measurably.
The case for digital detox isn’t about moralistic hand-wringing over screen time. It’s about what your brain actually needs to function well. And according to the research, part of what it needs is the very thing we’ve worked so hard to eliminate: boredom.
What the Research Actually Shows
Kushlev’s research, highlighted by Georgetown University as one of their evidence-based “life hacks” for 2026, involved participants who agreed to cut off their internet access for a sustained period. The results weren’t subtle.
Participants reported experiencing more positive emotions during the detox period, not just fewer negative ones. This distinction matters because reducing bad feelings isn’t the same as creating good ones. The detox seemed to do both. People felt less anxious and more genuinely content.
The anxiety and depression improvements were significant enough to be clinically meaningful, not just statistically significant. For participants who started with elevated anxiety symptoms, the reduction was substantial. This aligns with other research showing correlations between heavy social media use and mental health challenges, but goes further by demonstrating that removal of the stimulus produces measurable improvement.
Perhaps most interesting was the attention finding. After the detox period, participants showed improvements in their ability to sustain focus on tasks. Their attention spans had literally recovered some of their depleted capacity. This suggests that constant digital stimulation doesn’t just fill our time. It actively degrades our cognitive infrastructure.
Why Boredom Matters for Your Brain
The standard explanation for digital addiction focuses on dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation. Our phones provide intermittent variable rewards, the same pattern that makes slot machines so compelling. Every check might reveal something interesting, keeping us pulling the lever.
But there’s another layer to what’s happening, one that helps explain why digital detox produces such positive effects. It has to do with what psychologists call “default mode network” activity, the brain state that occurs when we’re not focused on external tasks.
When you’re bored, your brain doesn’t actually shut down. It shifts into a different mode of operation, one characterized by mind-wandering, self-reflection, and creative association. This is when insights bubble up seemingly from nowhere, when you process emotional experiences, when you integrate new information with existing knowledge. Default mode activity is essential for creativity, self-understanding, and emotional regulation.
Here’s the problem: every time you reach for your phone to escape boredom, you interrupt this process. The default mode network gets hijacked back into task-focused attention. You never get the mental downtime your brain needs to do its maintenance work.
This helps explain why constant connectivity correlates with anxiety. When you’re always consuming external input, you never have time to process what you’ve already taken in. Emotions remain unintegrated. Experiences stay unexamined. Your inner life becomes cluttered with unfinished psychological business, which manifests as vague unease and chronic low-level anxiety.
The Attention Restoration Effect
The attention improvement Kushlev found makes sense when you understand attention as a depletable resource. Psychologists distinguish between “directed attention,” which requires effort and can be exhausted, and “involuntary attention,” which is automatically captured by interesting stimuli.
Digital devices hijack involuntary attention constantly. Every notification, every scroll, every new piece of content captures attention without your conscious decision to give it. This feels effortless, which is why it’s so seductive. But it comes at a cost. While your involuntary attention is being endlessly stimulated, your directed attention has no chance to recover.
Attention Restoration Theory, developed by environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, suggests that certain environments allow directed attention to recover. Nature is the classic example, but the key ingredient isn’t trees specifically. It’s an environment that engages involuntary attention gently while making few demands on directed attention.
Boredom, in this framework, is actually restorative. When there’s nothing demanding your attention, your cognitive resources can replenish. The anxiety reduction participants experienced may partly reflect this restoration. They weren’t just avoiding negative stimuli. They were allowing depleted psychological resources to recover.
What Digital Detox Isn’t
Before you throw your phone into the ocean, it’s worth being clear about what the research does and doesn’t support.
Digital detox doesn’t mean technology is inherently bad. The research shows that sustained periods without internet access produce benefits, not that any internet use is harmful. The dose matters. Checking your email isn’t the same as compulsive social media scrolling. Video calling your long-distance friend isn’t the same as mindlessly watching TikToks for hours.
It also doesn’t mean willpower is the solution. If you’ve tried to use your phone less and failed, you’ve discovered what behavioral science consistently shows: willpower is unreliable, especially against stimuli specifically designed to capture attention. Sustainable digital detox requires changing your environment, not just your intentions.
And it doesn’t mean boredom is always good. There’s a difference between chosen boredom, where you deliberately create space for unstructured time, and imposed boredom, like being stuck somewhere with nothing to do. The research supports intentional digital breaks, not arbitrary deprivation.
Making It Work
If you want to experiment with digital detox, the research suggests some principles for success.
Start with defined periods rather than vague reduction. “Use my phone less” is too fuzzy to be actionable. “No internet from 8 PM to 8 AM” is concrete enough to actually follow. The participants in Kushlev’s study had clear boundaries, not just good intentions.
Create environmental barriers. Put your phone in another room. Use apps that block access during certain hours. Make the behavior you want to change genuinely harder. Remember that you’re fighting against design teams whose entire job is capturing your attention.
Fill the time with something, at least initially. Pure boredom is an advanced practice. When you first remove digital stimulation, have analog alternatives ready. Books, walks, crafts, conversations, anything that occupies your hands and mind without the constant novelty-seeking of digital content.
Expect discomfort. The first few hours of a digital detox often feel genuinely unpleasant. This is normal. You’ve been avoiding boredom for so long that it’s become unfamiliar. The discomfort usually peaks early and then subsides as you adjust.
Notice what emerges. The point isn’t just absence of screens but presence of something else. Pay attention to what happens in your mind when it’s not constantly being fed. You might be surprised by what surfaces when you stop distracting yourself from your own inner life.
Your Invitation
We’ve come to treat boredom as a problem to be solved rather than a state to be experienced. Our devices have become so good at eliminating idle moments that we’ve forgotten what our minds do when left alone with themselves.
The research suggests this has costs we’re only beginning to understand. Anxiety, depression, attention problems, difficulty with emotional regulation, all of these may be partially rooted in our inability to simply be bored sometimes.
You don’t need to go full digital hermit to benefit from this insight. Even modest experiments with intentional disconnection can reveal how dependent you’ve become on constant stimulation and hint at what might be possible with more sustained practice.
The case for boredom isn’t about nostalgia for a pre-smartphone world. It’s about recognizing that your brain has needs that constant connectivity prevents you from meeting. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing at all.
Sources
- Georgetown University: Life Hacks Backed by Research to Start Your 2026
- Kostadin Kushlev’s digital detox research
- Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory
