You have nothing to do for ten minutes. Within a minute there is a tightness in your chest, a low hum of unease, and a sense that you should be doing something. It is hard to tell whether you are bored or anxious.
That confusion is common, and it is worth untangling. Boredom and anxiety are not the same thing, but they overlap, and the way most of us respond to one may feed the other.
Does boredom cause anxiety?
Not in any way the research here can show. No study I can cite demonstrates that boredom, by itself, produces anxiety.
What the research does show is that unstimulated time is unpleasant for many people. Whether that unpleasantness is the same as anxiety is not something the studies here measured.
So the honest answer is "not directly, as far as this research can show, though empty time is uncomfortable."
Why can boredom make you feel anxious?
Plain observation: when the mind has no task, it can drift to whatever is bothering you.
In a well-known 2014 paper in Science, Wilson and colleagues asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes. Many chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than keep sitting there: 67% of the men and 25% of the women.
That is a striking result. It suggests that being left with nothing but your own thoughts is, for many people, something they actively want to escape.
Source: Wilson et al., Science, 2014.
A related finding comes from experience sampling. Killingsworth and Gilbert found that minds wandered about 47% of the time, and that people were less happy when they did.
Source: Killingsworth & Gilbert, Science, 2010.
Neither study measured anxiety. But together they point the same way: a mind with no task does not reliably rest, and the drift is not always kind.
Why do unfinished worries get louder in empty time?
Plain observation here: when nothing is competing for attention, whatever is unresolved moves to the front.
Masicampo and Baumeister found that unfinished goals kept intruding on people's thoughts until they made a specific plan for completing them. That is a study about goals rather than anxiety, but the pattern will be familiar. The email you have not answered and the conversation you are dreading are not louder in a quiet moment. They are just the only thing in the room.
Source: Masicampo & Baumeister, JPSP, 2011.
This is part of why the discomfort of boredom is not always about boredom. Sometimes the quiet is simply where the worry was always waiting.
Does scrolling to escape boredom make anxiety worse?
It may, though the evidence is about association, not proof.
A 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 71 studies and about 98,299 people. Heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer attention and, most strongly, poorer inhibitory control. It was also linked to more stress and anxiety.
This is correlational. It does not show that scrolling causes anxiety. Anxious people may scroll more to soothe themselves, and the data cannot separate those two stories.
Source: Nguyen et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2025.
A smaller 2026 survey of 439 people in Psychological Reports found that "brain rot" (cognitive fatigue) was linked to depression indirectly, through burnout, then stress and anxiety. Again, an association.
Source: Batmaz, Özsağır & Arslan Şekkeli, Psychological Reports, 2026.
Plain observation, not a finding: reaching for the feed ends the discomfort quickly, and it is worth noticing whether that becomes your automatic response to quiet.
Is boredom ever actually good for you?
Sometimes, yes, which is part of why it is worth sitting with.
Mann and Cadman found that after a boring task, people came up with more creative uses for plastic cups. Baird and colleagues found that an undemanding task that allowed the mind to wander improved creative solutions to problems people had already started.
Sources: Mann & Cadman, Creativity Research Journal, 2014; Baird et al., Psychological Science, 2012.
These are creativity findings, not anxiety findings. But they show that boredom is not simply a problem to be eliminated. It can be a state your mind does something useful with, if you let it.
What helps when boredom starts to feel like anxiety?
Nothing here is a treatment, and if anxiety is constant or is getting in the way of your life, that deserves a conversation with a doctor or therapist, not a tip list. For the ordinary, in-the-moment version, a few things are worth trying:
- Name it. Lieberman and colleagues found that putting feelings into words reduced amygdala response. "This is restlessness, and it is probably boredom" is a small, free move. Source: Lieberman et al., Psychological Science, 2007.
- Check what is underneath. Ask whether you are bored or avoiding something. If it is a worry, writing down a specific next step is a simple thing to try.
- Pick something low-demand. A walk, dishes, looking out of a window. Something that occupies your hands without grabbing your attention.
- Let the first few minutes be bad. Reaching early means you never find out whether it would have passed.
If you want a nudge in that gap, Boredom's Daily Reset is a few guided minutes for exactly this moment. It is optional, and everything above works without it.
The short version
Boredom does not cause anxiety in any way that can be shown here. It does leave you alone with your thoughts, which many people find uncomfortable, and the feeling can be hard to tell apart from anxiety.
The part to watch is the escape. Scrolling ends the discomfort at once, and heavy short-form use is linked to more stress and anxiety, though the research cannot say which drives which. Noticing which feeling you actually have is a good place to start, and it is not a failing to find the quiet hard.