Boredom, Not Just Bad Habits, Drives Students From Procrastination to Social Media Addiction

Every student knows the ritual: the assignment looms, the deadline creeps closer, and instead of opening the textbook, the thumb drifts toward the phone. A new study published in Current Psychology suggests that this familiar slide from procrastination into endless scrolling is not simply a failure of willpower. It is, according to researchers at Ege University in Turkey, an emotional journey—one that passes through boredom and, in some cases, through a deeper difficulty in recognizing and naming feelings altogether.

The study, led by Seçil Beyece İncazlı together with Ayça Fidan and Sevda Tüzün Özdemir, set out to answer a question that has puzzled educational psychologists for years: why do students who put off academic work so often end up glued to social media? The connection between the two behaviors has been documented repeatedly across countries and cultures, from Lebanon to Peru to Pakistan, but the emotional machinery linking them has remained murky. The Turkish team proposed that two emotional processes—boredom and alexithymia—might act as hidden bridges between the two behaviors.

Alexithymia, a term coined in the 1970s, describes a trait in which people struggle to identify, understand, and describe their own emotions. It is not a psychiatric disorder but a stable personality characteristic, typically measured with the twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the instrument used in this study. People high in alexithymia often feel vague inner states they cannot label, and previous research has linked the trait to problematic use of mobile phones, internet novels, and social networks—platforms that offer constant, low-effort stimulation when one’s own emotional world feels illegible.

Boredom, meanwhile, has undergone something of a scientific rehabilitation in the past decade. Researchers such as James Danckert and John Eastwood have reframed it not as a trivial state but as a signal: the uncomfortable awareness that one’s attention is unengaged and that the current activity holds no meaning. In academic settings, boredom is one of the most thoroughly studied achievement emotions. Reinhard Pekrun’s Control–Value Theory, which guided the new study, holds that emotions like boredom arise when students feel neither in control of their learning nor invested in its value—and that these emotions then shape how they behave, often driving them away from the task at hand.

To test whether these two emotional states connect procrastination to social media addiction, the researchers recruited 174 Turkish university students and asked them to complete an online survey measuring all four constructs: academic procrastination, boredom, alexithymia, and social media addiction, using validated Turkish-language versions of established scales. They then analyzed the data with a serial mediation model, a statistical technique that tests whether the effect of one variable on another travels through a chain of intermediate variables rather than a single shortcut. Specifically, they examined whether procrastination leads to boredom, which leads to alexithymia, which finally feeds social media addiction.

The results were striking in their clarity on one point and their nuance on another. Academic procrastination was positively associated with social media addiction, with a regression coefficient of 0.45, highly significant statistically, and the overall model accounted for 38 percent of the variance in social media addiction—a substantial share for research on human behavior. Boredom emerged as the star of the show: it significantly mediated the link between procrastination and social media addiction on its own, with an indirect effect whose confidence interval excluded zero. In plain terms, students who procrastinated reported more boredom, and that boredom was associated with more addictive social media use.

Alexithymia told a subtler story. On its own, it did not act as an independent mediator between procrastination and social media addiction. But when the researchers tested the full serial pathway—procrastination first breeding boredom, boredom then feeding into difficulty identifying feelings, and that emotional confusion finally spilling into compulsive platform use—the chain was statistically significant, though modest in size, with an indirect effect of 0.01 and a confidence interval of 0.00 to 0.04. The finding suggests that alexithymia is not the main highway between procrastination and scrolling, but it may function as a secondary on-ramp: once boredom has taken hold, students who cannot name what they are feeling may be particularly prone to seeking relief in the endless feed.

The theoretical implications reach back to Pekrun’s framework. Control–Value Theory predicts that when students perceive low control and low value in their studies, negative activating and deactivating emotions follow, and boredom is the classic deactivating emotion—one that drains motivation and encourages escape. The new findings fit this picture neatly: procrastination appears to generate an emotional vacuum, and social media, with its algorithmically optimized novelty, rushes in to fill it. Previous work has shown that boredom proneness predicts internet addiction through attentional bias toward social networks, and that boredom drives people to use social media specifically to pass time and escape unpleasant states. The Turkish study adds a serial dimension, showing that the emotional aftermath of avoidance can cascade into further difficulties with emotional awareness itself.

There are, of course, important caveats. The study is cross-sectional: all data were collected at a single point in time from a self-selected sample of 174 students, which means the direction of causality cannot be firmly established. It is entirely plausible that social media addiction also fuels procrastination and boredom, creating a feedback loop rather than a one-way street. Self-report questionnaires are vulnerable to common method bias, and the sample, drawn from a single country, may not generalize universally. The authors themselves note that no preregistration exists for the study and that data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. These limitations do not erase the findings, but they counsel against reading the mediation model as a proven causal mechanism.

Even so, the practical implications are tantalizing. If boredom is the more robust bridge between procrastination and problematic scrolling, then interventions that make academic tasks more engaging—or that teach students to tolerate and work through boredom rather than flee it—could break the cycle. The authors suggest that addressing academic boredom and supporting emotional awareness may be promising avenues for future research and practice. In an era when the average student’s attention is contested by platforms engineered to exploit every idle moment, understanding that the escape begins with an emotion rather than a decision may be the first step toward helping students reclaim both their time and their inner lives.

Subject of Research: The role of boredom and alexithymia in linking academic procrastination to social media addiction among university students

Article Title: Emotional processes in the association between academic procrastination and social media addiction: a serial mediation model of boredom and alexithymia

Article References: İncazlı, S. B., Fidan, A., & Özdemir, S. T. (2026). Emotional processes in the association between academic procrastination and social media addiction: a serial mediation model of boredom and alexithymia. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1558. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10116-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10116-6

Keywords: academic procrastination, social media addiction, boredom, alexithymia, serial mediation, university students, Control-Value Theory, educational psychology, emotion regulation, cyberpsychology, achievement emotions, Current Psychology