Phone checking habits and burnout are more closely linked than the raw hours spent on a device, according to two new studies that challenge how most people measure their digital wellbeing.
One study, from Aalto University in Finland, tracked 277 people across desktop and mobile devices over seven months, logging 13,801,079 individual events, according to the ACM Digital Library. Total time online barely predicted how overloaded participants felt.
What did predict it was a pattern the researchers call “session sparseness”: short, repeated check-ins throughout the day rather than a single longer stretch of use.
Phone checking habits and burnout: what the Aalto data shows
“Screen time does matter, but the heaviest users aren’t the most overloaded,” said Henrik Lassila, the study’s lead author. “Those who feel most overwhelmed are the ones who return to their phone again and again for brief moments and then put it down shortly after.”
The effect was concentrated in the morning. Mobile use before noon predicted information overload; use in the afternoon or evening largely did not. Desktop use showed no such effect.
The researchers also tested whether specific content, including news, shopping or social media, drove the finding. It did not. Only messaging sessions stood out, and only because they tend to be more fragmented, not because messaging itself is harmful.
“We feel overloaded when we can’t process all the incoming information and our minds feel ‘full’ or stressed,” Lassila said. “Information overload is linked with negative emotions, which can, in turn, drive more checking, a vicious cycle.”
Brain rot and the content-to-depression pathway
A second study, from Karabük University in Turkey, focused not on how often people check their phones but on what they watch. Researchers surveyed 439 adults about “brain rot,” the term Oxford named its 2024 word of the year, defined here as cognitive overload and fatigue driven by passive, algorithm-fed consumption of low-quality, fast-paced content.
The type of content mattered considerably. Brain rot significantly predicted burnout on its own, and burnout then became a chain reaction: it fed into stress and anxiety, and that combination ultimately predicted depression.
The researchers drew a clear line between brain rot and behavioural addictions such as gaming disorder. Gaming addiction involves high arousal and active, goal-directed engagement. Brain rot is closer to what researchers elsewhere have called “zombie scrolling”: a lethargic state in which people neither feel stimulated nor actively try to stop, surrendering passively to whatever an algorithm serves next.
The Karabük team framed the fog and numbness that follow not simply as damage, but as the mind’s own defence mechanism: an energy-conserving shutdown that kicks in once sensory input outpaces what a person can process.
Burnout, the authors wrote, “emerged as a pivotal transitional factor” in that chain. Once the full pathway was accounted for, the model explained 65% of the variance in depression.
Taken together, the two studies point in different directions. The Aalto data says the pattern of phone checking habits predicts information overload regardless of what a person is viewing. The Karabük data says content type predicts burnout regardless of how often someone checks. Neither pattern of use nor content type alone explains the full picture, the researchers suggest.
The Aalto study’s full dataset and methodology are available via the ACM Digital Library, with the paper presented at the ACM conference on human factors in computing systems.
