The clearest theoretical anchor is Daniel Kardefelt-Winther’s 2014 paper in Computers in Human Behavior. Kardefelt-Winther argued that much of the internet addiction literature at the time had the causal arrow backward: it treated heavy use as a primary disorder resembling substance dependence, when in many cases the use looked more like a coping response to pre-existing psychosocial problems, stress, or negative mood. Under his compensatory internet use model, people go online (or now, open an app) to escape or regulate an unpleasant emotional state, and the use becomes habitual not because the platform is uniquely addictive but because it reliably, if temporarily, works.
That framework has since been picked up and tested, not just cited, by researchers studying smartphones specifically. Jon Elhai, a psychologist at the University of Toledo, and colleagues have published a series of studies examining what actually predicts “problematic smartphone use,” a term that in this literature usually means a validated self-report measure of compulsive-feeling, functionally impairing phone use rather than a clinical diagnosis. Their 2017 systematic review in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that depression and anxiety severity were consistently associated with problematic use across the studies they examined, and argued that people with more severe anxiety and depressive symptoms may be using their phones to avoid or dampen those states, echoing Kardefelt-Winther’s compensatory model. Later work has extended that same logic to difficulties with emotion regulation more broadly, including a 2022 network analysis in Frontiers in Psychology that found alexithymia, a reduced capacity to identify and describe one’s own emotions, connected to internet addiction largely through catastrophizing and other maladaptive emotion regulation strategies rather than through alexithymia alone.
Where the premise overreaches
The specific framing in the premise, that heavy scrollers are demonstrably not the most bored, does not hold up against the same body of research it is drawing from. Boredom proneness is not a discarded rival hypothesis in this literature. It is one of its most frequently replicated findings. In a 2018 study in Social Science Computer Review, Elhai and coauthors found that boredom proneness statistically mediated the relationship between depression, anxiety, and problematic smartphone use in a sample of adults, meaning people higher in trait boredom proneness were more likely to translate their anxiety or depression into compulsive phone checking. A 2020 follow-up in Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, led by Stephen Wolniewicz, found boredom proneness and fear of missing out both operating as mediators in a separate sample, again alongside depression and anxiety rather than instead of them. Other researchers have reported similar mediating or moderating roles for boredom proneness across different populations, including adolescents and college students in China and Lebanon.
So the honest picture is not “heavy users aren’t bored, they’re avoidant.” It is closer to: boredom proneness, in the trait sense researchers measure it, and difficulty tolerating or regulating negative emotion are overlapping constructs studied by overlapping sets of researchers using overlapping statistical models, and several studies treat the two as working together rather than as competing explanations. Being “boredom prone” as psychologists define it is itself partly a marker of low tolerance for unstructured, low-stimulation mental states, which is close kin to the emotion-avoidance story rather than its opposite. Presenting the research as though it has cleanly ruled out boredom, in favor of a more sophisticated-sounding claim about “nowhere else for a feeling to go,” flattens a body of mixed, evolving, and sometimes contradictory correlational findings into a single tidy discovery. That is not what a systematic review of this literature shows.
What “doomscrolling” research adds, and where it’s thinner
The colloquial idea of doomscrolling, compulsively consuming distressing news content, has drawn newer academic attention, but this corner of the field is younger and less settled than the smartphone-addiction literature built up since the early 2010s. Several recent papers have proposed and validated doomscrolling-specific scales, including a validation of one such scale published in Current Psychology, which found associations between doomscrolling tendencies and both problematic social media use and psychological distress.
These studies are largely cross-sectional, meaning they capture a snapshot correlation rather than tracking cause and effect over time, and the doomscrolling construct itself is still being refined and is not yet as extensively replicated as boredom proneness or the anxiety-depression findings in the broader problematic-use literature.
Why the distinction matters
This research does not support treating heavy scrolling as evidence of an underlying disorder in any individual, and it should not be read as therapeutic advice. These are correlational, largely self-report, cross-sectional studies; they show statistical associations between measured traits and measured behavior, not proof that one causes the other, and they cannot diagnose anyone. What they support, cautiously, is a working theoretical account, most explicitly stated by Kardefelt-Winther, that for some heavy users the phone is functioning as an emotion-regulation tool rather than as an object of the compulsion itself.
That is a meaningfully different claim than asserting boredom has been ruled out, and it is the kind of distinction that gets lost when a research pattern is compressed into a single confident sentence for a headline or a caption.