Losing Track of Time on TikTok: How Short Videos Distort Hours and Derail Study

It begins innocently enough: a student opens a short-form video app for what feels like a brief break between lectures. The algorithm serves up one fifteen-second clip after another, each one engineered to be slightly more engaging than the last. When the student finally looks up, an hour has vanished. That familiar sensation of lost time, known to psychologists as temporal dissociation, is now the focus of new research suggesting it may be a critical mechanism linking problematic short-form video use to real academic harm. A study published in SN Social Sciences by Aisha Ghori and Mumtaz Aini Alivi of Universiti Malaya offers some of the clearest evidence yet that the time-distorting pull of platforms like TikTok is not merely an anecdote but a measurable pathway between compulsive viewing and interference with studying.

The research team surveyed 368 university students in Malaysia, a country where higher education enrollment has expanded rapidly and smartphone penetration is among the highest in Southeast Asia. Participants completed validated questionnaires measuring three constructs: problematic short-form video application use, temporal dissociation, and short-form video interference with study, a composite outcome capturing self-reported consequences such as energy loss, difficulty completing coursework, and general disruption of academic routines. The researchers then analyzed the data using partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique well suited to testing theoretically derived pathways among latent psychological variables in a single model.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on two influential frameworks. The first is deficient self-regulation, articulated by media scholars Robert LaRose and colleagues, which reframes what is colloquially called internet addiction not as a clinical pathology but as a failure of the cognitive monitoring systems that normally govern media consumption. Under this view, habitual, unregulated use emerges when automatic processes override deliberate intentions, a dynamic that the endless-scroll architecture of short-form video platforms is almost purpose-built to exploit. The second framework is time displacement, a classic media-effects hypothesis dating back to television research in the 1970s and 1990s, which holds that time devoted to a new medium necessarily comes at the expense of other activities, including sleep, socializing, and study.

Temporal dissociation bridges these two traditions. Rooted in the concept of cognitive absorption developed by Ritu Agarwal and Elena Karahanna, it describes a state in which an immersed user loses awareness of the passage of time, effectively becoming disconnected from the temporal anchors of everyday life. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow experiences anticipated this phenomenon decades ago: deep absorption in an activity compresses subjective time, and highly immersive digital environments can induce that absorption involuntarily. Short-form video platforms compound the effect through their design. Because each clip is brief and requires no commitment, the perceived cost of watching one more video is negligible, while the algorithmic feed removes natural stopping points. The result is a consumption pattern in which minutes of intended use routinely expand into hours of actual use.

The statistical results confirmed the researchers’ central hypotheses. Problematic short-form video use was positively and significantly associated with study interference, meaning students who reported more compulsive, unregulated engagement with these applications also reported greater disruption to their academic work. More importantly, this relationship was partially mediated by temporal dissociation. In structural equation modeling terms, mediation means that part of the effect of problematic use on study interference operates through the intermediate variable of lost time awareness. Students who used these platforms problematically were more likely to experience situational time distortion, and that distortion, in turn, corresponded to higher levels of self-reported academic interference. The word partial is significant: temporal dissociation explains a substantial share of the pathway but not all of it, suggesting that other mechanisms, such as attentional residue, sleep displacement, or emotional exhaustion, likely operate in parallel.

The findings align with a growing international literature on short-form video and time perception. An experimental study published in Behavioral Sciences in 2025 directly tested whether short-video users lose track of time on TikTok and documented measurable time distortion effects. Other recent work has found that social media addicts show impaired sensitivity in suprasecond timing tasks, overestimating durations in ways consistent with the subjective reports of heavy users. Survey-based studies across China, Malaysia, and beyond have linked short-video addiction to academic procrastination, learning burnout, and reduced academic engagement, often through mediating variables such as mindfulness, anxiety, and fatigue. The Malaysian study adds temporal dissociation to this roster of mechanisms, positioning it as a key correlate that policymakers and educators can target.

Why does the mediating role of temporal dissociation matter practically? Because it changes where interventions should aim. If problematic use harmed academic outcomes only through the sheer volume of time consumed, then screen-time limits and usage caps would be sufficient remedies. But if the harm flows substantially through a distorted sense of time, then interventions must also restore temporal awareness. The study’s authors suggest that their insights offer guidance for policymakers, educators, and researchers aiming to mitigate digital distractions and enhance students’ academic self-regulation in digital learning environments. Concretely, this could mean designing platforms with more salient time cues, such as prominent session-length notifications, or teaching students metacognitive strategies for monitoring their own engagement, an approach consistent with research showing that mindfulness training weakens the link between self-control failure and social media use.

The study also carries methodological weight for a survey of its kind. The authors employed established measurement traditions, building on scales developed for problematic internet use and social media addiction, including the widely used Bergen social media addiction framework. Their analytic pipeline followed recommended two-step procedures for structural equation modeling, assessing the measurement model before testing structural paths, and applying contemporary criteria for discriminant validity and predictive model assessment. The authors acknowledge that generative AI tools were used for language polishing during drafting, with full human review and responsibility retained, and they report no competing interests or external funding. Ethical approval procedures were followed, with voluntary participation and informed consent obtained from all participants.

As with any cross-sectional survey, the design cannot establish causality. It remains possible that students who struggle academically retreat into short-form video, rather than the reverse, or that a third factor such as low conscientiousness drives both problematic use and study interference. Self-reported measures of time distortion are also imperfect proxies for objective usage data, which researchers in psychoinformatics have increasingly captured through logged smartphone behavior. Longitudinal and experimental designs, including the time-distortion experiments now emerging in the literature, will be needed to confirm the direction of the pathway. Still, the convergence of survey evidence, experimental timing studies, and design analyses of algorithmic feeds paints a coherent picture: the platforms are engineered for absorption, absorption erodes time awareness, and eroded time awareness exacts an academic price.

For the millions of students worldwide who study with a phone within arm’s reach, the message of this research is both sobering and actionable. The feeling that hours have slipped away during a scrolling session is not a failure of character but a predictable consequence of interacting with systems optimized to dissolve temporal boundaries. Recognizing temporal dissociation as a distinct, measurable phenomenon gives students, educators, and app designers a concrete target. Whether through regulatory pressure for time-awareness features, campus programs that build self-regulation skills, or individual practices as simple as setting external timers before opening a feed, the goal is the same: to keep minutes from quietly becoming hours, and to protect the finite, irreplaceable time that studying requires.

Subject of Research: Temporal dissociation as a mediator between problematic short-form video use and study interference among university students

Article Title: When minutes become hours: temporal dissociation and study interference among problematic short-form video users

Article References: Ghori, A., & Alivi, M. A. (2026). When minutes become hours: temporal dissociation and study interference among problematic short-form video users. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 417. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01712-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01712-1

Keywords: short-form video, TikTok, temporal dissociation, time displacement, deficient self-regulation, study interference, academic performance, PLS-SEM, Malaysia, university students, problematic media use, cognitive absorption