Why Even Rest Feels Exhausting: The Rise of Scroll Fatigue Among Gen Z

Rest isn’t what it used to be. You can spend a whole day in bed, phone in hand, watching reels and still feel like you haven’t taken a single breath. You haven’t gone anywhere. You haven’t done anything. But somehow, you’re tired. Not just a little drained, wired, scattered and heavy all at once.

This isn’t laziness; it’s not even “too much screen time,” What’s happening is rooted deeper than that. For a lot of Gen Z, it’s become a constant occurrence. Scroll fatigue is that strange mental exhaustion that builds when your main form of unwinding is also a steady drip of stimulation.

We’ve confused stillness with rest. They’re not the same. You can lie still and be flooded with content ,fast cuts, loud opinions, beautiful people doing better than you, strangers fighting in the comments, algorithms guessing what will hook you next. And they’re not bad, exactly. Most of it is harmless on the surface. But the pace, the noise, the constant flicker,it adds up.

It’s like your brain is always half-on. Never quite present, never fully off-duty. And because so much of this scrolling happens during our “free time,” it wears a mask of leisure. You tell yourself you’re relaxing, but your nervous system isn’t buying it.

Here’s what makes it worse- scrolling feels passive. You’re not running errands. You’re just there. But behind the screen, everything is moving. Every second, a new idea, image, or microdose of drama. And your brain, trying to keep up, doesn’t get a break. It switches context a hundred times in an hour I.e from envy to amusement, from politics to a cat, from a horror show to fashion inspo. That constant flip, even when it feels mild, is taxing.

And the fatigue isn’t just mental. There’s a weird bodily tension too. The forward hunch,The subtle anxiety. The way your eyes blur after hours of motion that isn’t your own. Gen Z, more than any generation before, has grown up with this as the default. Phones aren’t a break from life now,they are the place where life seems to be  the most happening.

So when it’s time to rest, what’s the alternative? Silence feels boring. Reading takes effort. Meditation is hard. Even going for a walk without a podcast feels like wasted time.We are afraid of being with our own thoughts,And it’s not because Gen Z is incapable of slowing down. It’s because the systems we’ve built around ‘rest’ don’t allow for slowness. The pause button is missing. Everything wants to fill the gap.

The result? We end up chasing rest by overconsuming the very thing that’s making us tired. We scroll to relax and end up overstimulated. We wake up tired from sleep, because we spent the last hour before bed buried in blue light and extreme dopamine loops.

It’s easy to brush this off as a tech problem. But it’s also a cultural one. We’ve collapsed the boundary between work and rest, effort and ease, focus and distraction. And we haven’t taught ourselves how to rest in a world that doesn’t reward slowing down.

So no, you’re not broken for feeling tired all the time,even when you “haven’t done anything.” Your mind is doing more than you realize. Constant low-grade activity. Constant tiny hits of attention that are pulled in a hundred directions.

Rest, real rest, might look very boring now. But boredom is underrated. So is solitude. So is stepping away from the constant dopamine shots. Distancing ourselves from this is probably the best thing to do ,not because I'm saying it but because your body’s telling you it’s had enough. And maybe it’s time we listen.

By Aditi Sawarkar