By Maya Attal, Staff Writer
Come on, we’ve all done it. It’s 11 PM, you finally get into bed and allow yourself five minutes on TikTok. Turns out, two hours later, you’re exactly in the same position, watching AI-generated fruit-drama memes that aren’t even funny but give you the hit of dopamine you’ve been craving all day. Meanwhile, your essay for tomorrow is still blank, your math test is still not studied for and none of your emails have been sent out. This is not procrastination but rather what we like to call “brainrotting.”
“Brain-rot” is a word that appeared in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, where he used it to criticize society’s preference for simple ideas over complex thoughts and reasoning. In 2024, “brain-rot” was named Oxford’s Word of the Year, defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
The worst part about “brain-rotting” isn’t the content itself but rather how none of it stays with you. The vast majority of the time, even after three hours of doomscrolling, we are unable to recall a single video we just watched. On the other hand, after watching a full movie, I can easily explain the entire plot and even name the actors.
From a psychological perspective, TikTok doomscrolling meets the criteria for a behavioral addiction. It is marked by salience (TikTok dominates your thoughts), tolerance (needing more time to feel the same satisfaction), withdrawal (irritability when you can not use it) and relapse (repeatedly trying to cut back and failing). In other words, when you can’t stop scrolling even though you know it’s wrecking your focus and your sleep, it’s because it is a real, measurable addiction. While some people are addicted to alcohol or nicotine, you, unfortunately, might just be a TikTok addict.
The problem is that TikTok is an app that has become central to our social lives today. TikTok allows us to stay in the loop with the most recent trends, the most hyped songs and the latest hilarious jokes. Even more importantly, TikTok allows us to find the best destinations, the best coffee shops, the best restaurants, the best activities. This is exactly what economists call a “collective trap.” So even if we feel worse after hours of scrolling, we always go back, because being offline can feel like social exile. So I keep the app, because my FOMO (fear of missing out) screams louder. After all, the cost of being offline is or at least feels, higher than the cost of staying addicted.
There are reasons I tell myself that I can’t delete TikTok, but the truth is that we’re lying to ourselves. Even though we know all the catastrophic consequences of TikTok, we keep on scrolling. It feels good in the moment. This app is designed to hit our dopamine receptors with fast and unpredictable hits of novelty: 15-second videos with bright colors and engaging sounds. Over time, our brain gets so used to this quick simulation that they prefer it over slower, effortful tasks like reading or sitting with our thoughts. It’s no surprise that we find it hard to focus on a 10-page article when our brains are used to 15-second bursts.
Reading a long text also feels impossible because of cognitive overload. Social media force-feeds us with notifications, news, and micro-decisions that slowly eat away at our working memory. By the time we finally build up the motivation to click on a long article, our cognitive bandwidth is already maxed out. Turns out we aren’t lazy; we are, in a real psychological sense, mentally saturated.
So is it really our fault? Blaming us for getting hooked is like blaming gamblers while ignoring the casino, or blaming teens for obesity while ignoring the fast-food industry. But there are solutions, on smaller scales, that don’t require moving away to a solitary cabin and cutting links with the outside world. It starts with capping scrolling at 30 minutes a day, turning off non-essential notifications, or switching our screen to black-and-white only. In our world filled with stimuli constantly competing for our attention, our ability to focus is more important than ever. Like a muscle, our brains require training: starting with 10-15 minutes of reading a day and slowly extending it.
Luckily for most of us as Yeshiva University students, we have one structural advantage whether we realise it or not: Shabbat. No matter what, for 25 hours a week, we can’t use our phones; we can’t doomscroll. While the rest of the world is drowning in notifications, those of us who keep Shabbat get a built-in, once-a-week reset for our brain. We don’t need a new solution against brain-rot because we already have a 3,000-year-old one.
So if you’ve managed to read through all of this entire article, congratulations! You are not brain-rotted, unlike the two-thirds of young adults who admit they can’t focus on content for more than a minute without distractions.
Photo Credit: Unsplash