Written by By Amelia Rodriguez
Photographed by Juliana Garcia, Lizeth Medina
Designed by Camron Hinkle, Averie Kiesewetter
Modeled by Coral Rubio
Khalyah Thompson, a freshman acting major at Columbia College Chicago, found herself in a state of depression, unable to get out of bed to shower or even prepare food. Instead, she hid under the covers in the safety of her
bedroom, scrolling TikTok for hours.
Thompson found justification for staying in bed, glued to her device, in a label that's gained traction among our generation on TikTok: bed rotting. It's generally defined as disconnecting from life, responsibilities and relationships by staying in bed, hypothetically rotting away into one's made-up online world.
“I remember staying in my room all day in my bed. I never wanted to do anything. I just felt like I was never good enough for anything,” Thompson says. “I was so stuck in overthinking and my thoughts that I didn't want to do anything. I didn't want to escape my comfort zone."
When you look under the hashtag #bedrotting on TikTok, you will find a mix of motivations and rules to the trend. Some people posting with the hashtag ensure they are still getting up to shower, take a walk, or make themself a meal. Others flaunt that they’ve taken less than 100 steps per day.
The trend is big enough that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has done a
survey about it, finding that 24% of Gen Zers reported dabbling in it.
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It made me feel guilty.
I felt like I was not getting anything done, and it was getting in the way of my social life, friends, family, and so on.
Thompson says TikTok was the real culprit in her addiction to downtime. It had substantial negative impact on her mental health, she says, and the self-care “trend” and practices worked against her. “I do want to get up and do something, but I just feel like I can't or shouldn't," she says. "It hindered me from talking to my friends, and I went dark with everything. I just didn't want to socialize. I didn't want to see anyone. I didn't want to talk.” Even necessities like getting up to use the bathroom and helping her mom make dinner felt like real-life roadblocks.
“It made me feel guilty. I felt like I was not getting anything done, and it was getting in the way of my social life, friends, family, and so on," she says. "So my daily activities, which impact more than myself, were also affected.”
Efforts at self-care can be overdone, particularly when they involve relying on technology and media to take your mind off things. Bed rotting, in particular, can disrupt sleeping habits, cause social isolation, worsen anxiety, and damage self-esteem.
Slippery slope
So what is going on with young adults who are adopting this TikTok trend? If it ends up causing us more stress due to procrastination, rejection and depression, why do we still find ourselves racking up hours in bed with our eyes glued to our screens?
In part, this is due to the problems with excessive use of social media. “Social media should help us make connections, but somehow people seem to be lonelier after they use it, especially in a non-instrumental, maladaptive way,” says Chia-chen Yang, a professor of educational psychology at Oklahoma State University, whose research focuses on young people's use of communication technologies and how it relates to their social relationships, sense of self, and social-emotional well-being. “That becomes a vicious cycle because the lonelier you are, the more you want to approach social media with the assumption that there are so many connections you can make.”
Just as connecting on social media doesn't yield the satisfaction of connecting in real life, the images of ourselves we create on social media can lead to dissatisfaction with the lives we are actually leading. Creating a false world that lives inside the screen--whether it be our appearance on apps like Instagram and TikTok, or the boards we build on Pintrest that promise a better future for ourselves--don't improve our real lives.
The problem isn't the apps, but how we engage with them. “It depends on how young people use these technologies," Yang says. "For people who are more aware of how these could be a useful tool, they approach these tools very mindful way. They're going to benefit tremendously from that. In contrast, if you allow technology to take over your life and technologies dictate what you do. That becomes a problem, right?”
It can also create strains in relationships with others. “I have worked with people who just spend hours in bed, looking at their phone. And it's kind of like a way of recharging; nothing ever happens," says Diane (Dove) Wilson, a psychologist with a certificate in neurofeedback based in Chicago. "It can come with a lot of self-recrimination, guilt, and feedback from people who rely on us or want us to do something different.”
Building healthier habits
To have a better relationship with our devices, we need to understand why they are so attractive. “Technology is designed to give us these little squirts of dopamine and results in these very addictive patterns," Wilson says. "Whether we know it or not, we're just hooked into that momentary [virtual] connection with others” because of that addictive quality. "The brain often seeks novelty and connection,” she says.
Bed rotting is so easy because let technology take over our brains right when we wake up. “We [should] put off starting on the internet until we had some action, some sunlight in your eye, your brain, stimulate your brain,” Wilson says. “We should exist before we check our phone, grounding ourselves, who we are, and our goals before we start letting the internet influence us.”
The same is true at the end of the day. "Once we're tired, it's very difficult to make good decisions," Wilson says. "I've worked with substance abusers of different types, and at night it is not the same. We just don't have the same emotional regulation of our behaviors.”
Breaking habits is hard. But after Thompson determined to stop bed-rotting, she was rewarded for her efforts. “It just took a really strong mindset to tell myself, ‘Hey, you're not going to sit here, and you're not going to be on your phone. You need to get up and you need to go,'" she recalls. "Slowly, but suddenly, there was progress."
Thompsons advice: “Force yourself out of that. Become uncomfortable. Find comfort in being uncomfortable; it all starts with you. As soon as you get on board, no one else can help you but yourself.”
