So, I can't stand clickbait article titles, and I promise this isn't one of them, but I'll admit right off the bat that I'm not at all confused by these findings. I am, in fact, the “boomers” in this equation. I spend less than 20 hours on YouTube every year, and I have never installed TikTok, nor seen a single Instagram Reels video in my life. This is not to judge those who engage in this stuff. There is much to learn from them, my friends remind me regularly. That's fine. It's not just for me.
And that's probably for the best, because I've found so many other ways to experience what kids label as “brainrot” and they're doing it with such reckless abandon that people with games with brainrot in their titles are suing other people who went for the same game. But consider this a friendly word of warning from the non-status: Nearly 100,000 people recently participated in a widespread scientific survey, and the researchers determined that watching a bunch of short-form videos is, in fact, bad for your health.
71 papers can't possibly be wrong…right?
The American Psychological Association's verdict is clear: short-form video is bad for mental health. As seen by Dexerto, the full report does the job of raking the material over the coals like no psychological study ever could, such as “…the immersive and endless-scrolling nature of SFVs, replacing real-world interactions with passive digital engagement, is linked to increased isolation.
“Such reliance on online interaction is associated with lower life satisfaction (Chung, 2022; Zuo et al., 2024). These associations between SFV use and mental health have been reported in youth, young adults, and middle-aged adults…” -American Psychological Association
To be clear, “some studies have reported no association between SFV use and mental health indices,” and it's important to note that the paper calls for more “quantitative synthesis of existing research.” However, on a larger scale, there is cause for concern. Some studies “report negative associations” for self-esteem and body image. Poor sleep quality has also been found.
Of course, most damning of all, there is ample evidence that people's attention spans decrease with greater consumption of short-form videos. The high arousal induced by SFVs can “desensitize” the brain, as a 1970 study on general cognitive processing (cited in this report) indicates, and lead to poor reading performance and a decline in the ability to solve all kinds of problems.
How many people participated in the APA's research? 98,299. 71 separate papers were correlated and combined into a final copy, as is customary in the scientific field (though not always with such large numbers!), and it really doesn't look good. Then again, some of my friends who are glued to their phones even when we sit down for lunch together will be the first to admit that their attention spans are bad, which… well, the evidence on this one speaks for itself.
