A new study published in Addictive Behaviors Reports suggests that anxiety about not being able to participate in social events can fuel addictive behavior on TikTok, which can lead to everyday memory loss and reduced attention span. Researchers have found that excessive use of the popular short video app acts as a bridge between underlying social anxiety and a tendency to forget appointments and lose focus during daily tasks. These results highlight how the specific design of modern social media platforms influences the functioning of the human brain.
Yao Wang, a researcher at the Center for Cognitive Brain Science at the University of Macau, led the study with colleagues from Germany and China. The research team set out to understand how certain psychological states drive people to use apps excessively. They wanted to see if these digital habits would eventually spill over into the physical world.
The researchers focused on a psychological concept known as “fear of missing out.” This concept represents the constant fear that others are having a valuable experience without us. This feeling creates a strong desire to stay connected to what others are doing.
Psychologists classify this fear into two different categories. The first category is the trait of fear of missing out. This represents a stable personality trait and means that people are generally worried about being left behind in all areas of life.
The second category is state fear of missing out. It refers to a temporary state associated with a specific situation. This is often experienced as an immediate, situational urge to check online notifications or social feeds.
The researchers also investigated a phenomenon called everyday cognitive impairment. This term refers to everyday mental errors that occur to almost everyone from time to time. Examples include misplacing your keys, forgetting why you entered a room, or having trouble maintaining attention during a conversation.
Finally, the team investigated what they called TikTok’s usage disorder trends. Symptoms include overusing short video apps and losing control of your actions. People often end up prioritizing apps over their real-world responsibilities, which disrupts their normal daily lives.
Previous research has shown that excessive use of social media in general is linked to social anxiety and mental decline. The pervasive habit of constantly checking the Internet clearly drains cognitive resources. However, researchers recognized that different platforms have very different architectures and designs.
The research team wanted to see if TikTok’s unique properties create unique psychological pathways. The platform relies on an endless feed of short videos and highly personalized recommendation algorithms. These features are specifically built to capture and hold your attention in a way that older social networks couldn’t.
To explore these connections, the research team analyzed data from a large research project conducted in Germany. They filtered the original participant pool to focus only on adults who actively use TikTok. We also ensured that all selected participants fully completed the required psychological assessments.
This filtering process ultimately left a group of 720 participants. This group consisted of 249 men and 471 women. The average age of participants was approximately 38 years old.
These participants completed a series of standardized online questionnaires. The survey measured their general personality anxiety and situational urges to check the internet. We also measured the frequency of daily mental blackouts by asking about events such as bumping into people or not noticing road signs.
We used a specific survey to measure the severity of our TikTok habits. This tool asked individuals to rate the frequency with which they experienced addictive behaviors. For example, participants rated how often they felt unable to stop watching videos and how often their use of apps caused problems at work.
The research team then used statistical software to look for patterns among the survey responses. They compared scores for social anxiety, app use, and mental decline. Although small gender differences were noted, they were not statistically significant enough to alter the central relationship between the three main variables.
The researchers observed a clear pattern linking these three psychological variables. Those who reported greater fear of missing out also reported experiencing more routine mental errors. This association holds true for both stable personality traits and temporary situational fears.
Importantly, the team found that excessive use of TikTok is related to these two factors. The urge to constantly check apps served as a bridge between social anxiety and delirium. Psychologists refer to this bridging function as the mediation effect.
In statistical mediation models, the main variables do not only directly influence the outcome; Instead, it triggers an intermediate variable, which causes the final result. Researchers suggest that an underlying fear of missing out may lead people to open apps more often to relieve anxiety.
This near-continuous state of checking causes a person’s attention to become fragmented throughout the day. Over time, this fragmented attention drains your mental energy. Your brain becomes less able to stay focused on real-world activities for long periods of time, and you end up forgetting appointments and tasks more often.
The researchers also uncovered unexpected details about two types of social anxiety. They compared the new TikTok data to older research examining social media addiction in general. This comparison reveals differences in how the underlying anxiety operates.
Common social media overuse is usually more tied to a temporary, online-specific fear of missing out. People check platforms like Facebook and Instagram in response to instant notification triggers. These older platforms rely heavily on real-time social interactions and alerts.
In contrast, addictive behaviors on TikTok showed strong associations with stable personality traits. In general, an underlying constant anxiety about missing out on something in life was a better predictor of problematic TikTok use. The urge to immediately check certain online notifications wasn’t that important for this particular app.
Wang and colleagues attribute this difference to the platform’s unique design. TikTok’s highly personalized algorithms could directly tap into users’ deeper personality vulnerabilities. An endless stream of carefully selected content may be able to alleviate widespread and persistent anxiety, rather than just responding to specific social notifications.
The researchers noted some limitations to the study. The most notable limitation is the cross-sectional design of the study. This means the data represents a single snapshot.
Because the data were collected all at once, researchers cannot definitively prove cause and effect. It is quite possible that this relationship works in the opposite direction. People who naturally struggle with concentration and memory may simply be more reliant on short video platforms.
Another option is that over-involvement in social media creates a constant social comparison loop. Over time, this loop can strengthen a person’s baseline social anxiety. This means that app use causes anxiety, rather than anxiety causing app use.
Additionally, this study relied entirely on self-report questionnaires. Participants may underestimate their app usage to appear more disciplined. We can also misjudge how often we make mental mistakes in our daily lives.
Future research could address these issues by tracking users over time. Scientists could potentially track changes in behavior and memory over months or years. You can also use objective tracking data from your smartphone to accurately measure screen time, rather than relying on human memory.
Despite these limitations, the current results provide a clearer picture of how specific app design influences attention. This highlights the need to focus on individual digital platforms rather than treating all social media as the same. As digital environments evolve, understanding these targeted psychological mechanisms remains a priority for cognitive researchers.
The study, “About TikTok usage disorder trends, fear of missing out, and everyday cognitive dysfunction,” was authored by Yao Wang, Sebastian Markett, Zhiying Zhao, and Christian Montag.
