ADHD and short form videos: why stopping is the hard part

If you have ADHD and a quick look at Reels or TikTok keeps turning into an hour, a new study on ADHD and short form videos suggests you're not imagining it. In a survey of 302 adults, people with ADHD said they found these feeds harder to stop than people without ADHD did. They also lost more track of time and felt worse afterwards.

The surprising part is what didn't differ. Both groups said the feed showed them what they came for equally well. The trouble showed up at the stopping point, which means the most useful fixes put that point somewhere outside your own head instead of asking for more willpower.

What the Graz study on ADHD and short form videos measured

Vedad Misirlic, Gregor Mayr and Elisabeth Lex at Graz University of Technology posted the paper on arXiv on 7 September 2026. It was accepted at ASSETS 2026, an accessibility conference in Porto, and StudyFinds reports it was nominated for Best Paper. It's the first study to measure this gap in adults.

The researchers recruited 302 adults aged 18 to 73 (median age 33) through Prolific, a paid survey platform. 150 had ADHD (65 diagnosed, 85 self-identified) and 152 didn't. Everyone rated 15 statements on a 1 to 7 scale, written by the authors and checked by two psychologists. The survey took a median of about 4.6 minutes, and each person was paid £0.90.

Nobody's phone was tracked. This is a survey of how people describe their own habits. Most participants used YouTube Shorts (75.9%), followed by Instagram Reels (67.9%) and TikTok (59.2%), and many used more than one.

Everyone said the feed matched what they came for

One statement asked whether the recommendations matched people's intentions. The groups gave it essentially identical ratings (p=.999 across the three groups). In survey terms, that is about as close to no difference as you get.

The authors call this the "Engagement Trap": a feed of relevant videos that never ends, where the only thing that stops you is your own self-control. The algorithm is doing its job well. For people whose impulse control and sense of time are already under strain, that design simply asks more of them. If you want the general version of this, there's a longer piece on why it's so hard to stop scrolling.

The authors go a step further. They argue that accessibility laws like the European Accessibility Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act don't cover engagement-driven design, and should be extended so they do. That connects to the wider debate about whether the EU will ban infinite scroll.

Adults with ADHD rated stopping a 5 out of 7, everyone else a 3

Difficulty stopping was the headline, but it came with company. The ADHD groups rated these statements significantly higher too:

• Watching for longer than they meant to
• Losing track of time (p<.001) and time blindness (p=.008)
• Regret, feeling the time wasn't valuable, and pushing other tasks aside
• Lower mood after long sessions
• Guilt, and feeling overwhelmed

The next biggest gap was for scrolling displacing tasks people intended to do (r=0.306). Across all the statements, effects ranged from small to medium (r = 0.19 to 0.39). That leaves plenty of overlap: lots of people without ADHD struggle with this too, and some people with ADHD don't.

People who were diagnosed and people who self-identified didn't differ significantly overall. They gave different answers on 4 of the 15 statements.

Why ADHD might make an endless feed harder to leave

The authors link the gap to three well-known ADHD challenges: time perception, impulse control and hyperfocus. A feed with no natural end leans on all of them at once. If you've looked up from your phone after what felt like ten minutes and found the evening gone, that is the pattern they describe.

Keep in mind this is their explanation. The survey didn't test the mechanism, it only recorded how people rated their experience.

What this survey can't tell you

• ADHD status was self-reported. No medical records were collected.
• Nobody's real viewing time was measured. People were asked their daily hours, but the paper doesn't report the answers.
• Nobody was asked about medication, so it can't say whether treatment changes anything.
• Answers look back on past habits, and the authors note that people prone to guilt might overstate lost time.
• It shows associations, not causes, and the effects are small to medium.
• A small bookkeeping slip: as StudyFinds points out, the gender numbers in the paper add up to 301, not 302.

The authors list most of these limits themselves and call for studies using real usage logs and longer follow-up. Treat the paper as a careful first look, not a final answer.

It also can't say whether TikTok gave anyone ADHD

This survey compared people who already had ADHD, or believed they did, with people who didn't. It says nothing about where ADHD comes from. The wider research on short videos and attention mostly comes from one-off surveys that show links without settling cause and effect, which I covered in an earlier post on attention span.

If you're wondering whether you have ADHD, a clip about symptoms is a reason to book an assessment, and a poor substitute for one.

Stopping points that come from outside you

The researchers described seven features to participants: feed removal (a "focus mode"), usage reminders, enforced breaks, a fixed number of videos, tapping to advance, an on-screen clock and a "rabbit hole breaker". All groups rated them positively, with a median of 5 out of 7. Enforced breaks and a fixed number of videos scored highest.

None of these was built or tested. Liking an idea in a survey is different from it working. Still, they share one logic you can borrow today, which is to move the decision to stop out of the moment and out of your head.

1. 01
   Pick a number before you open the app

   Decide on something like three videos, then close, since a fixed number was one of the two most wanted features.

2. 02
   Make breaks hard to skip

   Use your phone's or the app's time limit settings and set them up so dismissing the limit takes real effort, because enforced breaks scored above gentle reminders.

3. 03
   Put the time where you can see it

   Keep a clock on screen or set a watch to buzz every 15 minutes, which works directly against time blindness.

4. 04
   Move the apps off your home screen

   One statement was about opening an app briefly and ending up watching for ages, so use search or a direct link when you want something specific.

5. 05
   Remove the feed where you can

   Feed removal was one of the proposed features, and on a computer you can often hide the feed while keeping search and subscriptions.

When scrolling is worth raising with a clinician

If scrolling regularly eats into sleep, work or things you meant to get done, that's worth mentioning to a GP or ADHD clinician. It's also a good question to ask if you take medication, since this study couldn't look at that at all.