Teens are increasingly bored, data shows. Social media is just one reason.
For 16-year-old Santiago Gonzalez-Winthrop, there’s more than one kind of boredom.
Sometimes, like on his family’s digital “detox days,” boredom feels like a claustrophobic craving for his smartphone. On other days, during his least favorite class, time slows to a crawl while “watching the clock count by,” Santiago tells Yahoo Life. When he’s faced with homework that doesn’t interest him, Santiago says a pall of boredom and dread sweeps over him. He knows he has to do the homework and keep up his grades. But what Santiago’s stepdad calls his “popcorn brain” is drawn to his smartphone and social media.
The 11th grader says the last time he didn’t feel bored was in fifth grade — which was also his last full school year before COVID-19 hit. In middle school, "I was excited to go home and do my math homework," he says. Back then, he was only allowed to use a smartphone for 30 minutes at a time. Now, his social media time is limited to 45 minutes a day, but in the intervening years, he was either given free rein or found a way around the parental controls. Having more access to a smartphone isn’t the only thing that’s changed since boredom became commonplace for Santiago, he says, but it’s among the factors that play a role.
Santiago is one of a growing number of teens who say they feel more bored, more often. And while screens aren’t solely to blame for the U.S. boredom epidemic, they’re certainly contributing to it. Here's what to know about the rise of teen boredom in the U.S., and ways to combat it.
What's happening
After lingering around the same level between 2000 and 2010, U.S. teenagers started reporting more frequent boredom in 2010, with rates climbing by 1.17% per year through 2017, according to a 2019 study.
Teen boredom levels across the U.S. had already shot up by the time Santiago was in fifth grade, but it reached new heights during the pandemic, Yahoo Life analysis of the University of Michigan's annual Monitoring the Future survey suggests.
The annual questionnaire asks thousands of eighth grade, 10th and 12th grade students about everything from their beliefs to substance use. The share of teenagers who said they "agreed" or 'mostly agreed" with the statement "I am often bored" peaked in 2021, amid pandemic lockdowns, Yahoo Life's data analysis suggests. More than 21% of eighth and 10th graders said they were often bored that year, as did nearly more than 45% of 12th graders. That's up from 13.2% of eighth and 10th graders and 37% of 12th graders in 2014. Boredom ebbed in 2022, as the world reopened, but rose again in 2023 (data for 2024 has not yet been published).
Why teens are so bored
There seems to be a vicious cycle at play: School and life in general can be boring at times, so teens look to smartphones and social media for entertainment, but what they find there can quickly become dull too.
When Santiago is bored, the first thing he wants to do is reach for his phone. Once he has it in hand, Santiago starts making the rounds on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. “My friends always come first,” he says, so he’ll start by checking their reels. But eventually, he'll find himself in a mindless doom scroll. "I don't even remember what I'm seeing, honestly," Santiago says. And then suddenly it will be 2 a.m., “and then I feel melted and drained during the day, and my sleep schedule is all messed up," he says. “As soon as I'm off my phone, I feel horrible, like ashamed."
Boredom may be the result of a separate, larger issue for teens, suggests Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Disengaged Teen. She's also Santiago's mom. "A crisis of boredom is really a crisis of agency," Winthrop tells Yahoo Life. "It’s not that there isn’t stuff to do. It’s that kids don’t feel they can pursue their curiosity, their interests."
Social media is one of several venues where teens' agency is limited. Scrolling through TikTok may feel like doing exactly what they want to do, but teens (and adults, for that matter) don't really have agency there, "because they're being fed things by an algorithm that it feels like they would be interested in," says Winthrop. That may be why many kids reach what she refers to as a "tipping point," where scrolling goes from relaxing or entertaining to being numbing, boring or as Santiago hinted, just kind of icky.
Boredom may also be the result of less freedom in the real world. Winthrop notes that there’s been a move away from “free-range parenting” amid concerns about safety. Kids face “more restrictions in the real world … and then have total freedom in the online world, where there are plenty of unsafe ‘neighborhoods,’” says Winthrop. She also cites increasing competitiveness to get into colleges, where acceptance rates are plummeting. As a result, many parents, understandably, urge their kids to perform their best in school and pack their schedules with extracurricular activities. “We know that parental pressure and learning intensity has gone up,” Winthrop says. “It’s hard for kids, because they don’t feel like they have a lot of choice.”
For her son, the pressure-to-boredom pipeline means that, even when he’s trying to find enjoyment in other, less boring activities, he’s often preoccupied by the homework that needs to be done or the looming advanced placement (AP) exam that he could be preparing for. “It’s a little bell in the back of your mind,” he says.
Winthrop believes that “curiosity is the cure to boredom.” But in interviews with teenagers for her book, she discovered that most don’t feel they get an opportunity to “explore” and engage that curiosity much in school. So after a packed day, it’s no wonder that teens fall for the illusion of easy agency on social media, where they just become a “passenger” for the algorithm.
Santiago says that many of his friends feel that the point of school is just to get good grades. But, like his mother, Santiago thinks the goal should be “learning to learn,” he says. “That’s something that I really want, because I feel like that would be a lot more helpful in life.”
Is boredom bad?
Yes and no. Boredom, by definition, is not a pleasant feeling, the authors of a recent Nature paper point out. But it's a temporary state that can work to our benefit by motivating us to do something less boring, or acting as an opportunity for our minds to wander and get creative.
Especially for young people, the real problem is not boredom itself, but "intolerance" of being bored, Kent Toussaint, a licensed marriage and family therapist and founder and clinical director at Teen Therapy Center, tells Yahoo Life. "A lot of that is due to the constant screen use and having that ability to avoid boredom with the screen," he says. "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."
We all want to be entertained. But experts say that social media and smartphones are like junk food for our dopamine-hungry brains: a quick fix that isn’t very nourishing. Using boredom as an opportunity for mind-wandering or motivation to take a walk or learn guitar is akin to choosing nutrient-dense snacks. Learning how to better tolerate boredom — rather than avoid it altogether — helps build a sense of self and resilience, Toussaint says.
Santiago does think of his family's periodic digital "detox days" — no phones or screens — as "boring," he says. But he eventually finds ways to entertain himself by improvising tunes on the piano, calling up a friend to go for a walk or heading to the mall. Santiago says he really enjoys those things. He doesn't even spend all his time with a friend just looking at their phones.
How to make boredom more bearable
Practice “radical downtime.” Winthrop coined the term to refer to very intentional, offline time, with no homework and no obligations, like her family’s detox days. It provides an opportunity for “mind wandering or daydreaming, which is this open space that happens when kids are bored without inputs, and that’s actually a source for creativity” — and a solution to boredom, she says. Santiago still finds detox days a little “annoying,” but they’ve helped him stop doomscrolling until 2 a.m., he says.
Go for a walk. Moving your body is a mood-booster that can help improve impulse control, notes Toussaint. Plus, it still leaves room for your mind to wander and make novel connections, adds Winthrop.
Hang out with someone. Santiago is far less tempted by his phone when he’s with friends. Healthy relationships are not only entertaining, but help to build self-assurance. Confidence, connection and activities all make boredom easier to tolerate, says Toussaint.
Be a model. Winthrop suggests giving your kids — and yourself — some downtime. They’re less likely to know what that looks like if they haven’t seen it from a parent. In your unscheduled time, be curious. “Curiosity is contagious and … modeling the thrill of learning and curiosity is really helpful, because parents have a very large influence over children’s approach to learning and how engaged and motivated they are.” Simply telling them to do it themselves doesn’t work as well, she adds.
