Short-form video

TikTok, Reels and Shorts are recent enough that the research is young. Most of it is surveys, many of them of Chinese students, that ask about compulsive “short video addiction” and find it goes along with poorer attention, more procrastination, worse sleep and more anxiety and low mood. A handful of lab experiments show small, short-lived dips in memory or focus right after a session of rapid video switching. What the literature cannot yet say is direction: people who are already distracted, anxious or sleeping badly may simply scroll more. “Brainrot” is a cultural word, not a finding; no study has shown lasting harm to the brain.

Reviewed 2026-10-02

Official sources

How this list was built

We searched Europe PMC for English-language papers published since 2018 whose title contains “short video addiction” or “short-form video” or “short video use” or “short video application” or “TikTok use” or “Douyin” or “doomscrolling”, kept meta-analyses, systematic reviews, trials and observational studies, because a diet or exposure like this cannot be randomised for long and its outcome evidence lives in cohorts, then ranked them by study design first, then recency and citations. Retracted papers are removed.

Open a paper to read its abstract and ask for an AI brief of what it found.