Why Umer OS
Why we built Umer OS.
Because a lot of what happens on your phone is not your idea. This page sets out what the research says about it, in plain words, and how sure we can be.
How to read this page. We keep our claims small. Every study is named, with how many people were in it. Where a study only shows a link and not a cause, we say so. Where the science is contested, we say that too.
Brain rot
What “brain rot” can and cannot mean.
“Brain rot” is slang for the foggy, scattered feeling after hours of low-effort content. Oxford University Press chose it as its 2024 Word of the Year. Science cannot measure a feeling called brain rot, but it can measure attention, self-control and mood.
71
studies pooled
98,299
people in total
r = −.34
link between more short-video use and poorer thinking
A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled studies of short-form video use (the short clips on apps such as TikTok and Instagram Reels). It found:
- Thinking. More use went with poorer cognition overall (r = −.34), most strongly for attention (−.38) and for inhibitory control, the ability to stop yourself (−.41).
- Mood. A weaker link with poorer mental health overall (r = −.21), strongest for stress (−.34) and anxiety (−.33).
- Not found. No link with body image or self-esteem.
- Wide. The pattern held for young people and adults, and across platforms.
r is a number from −1 to 1. Zero means no link at all. A negative number means that as one thing goes up, the other tends to go down. −.34 is a moderate link, not a tiny one and not a huge one.
A link, not proof of cause. Many studies in this area measure people at one moment in time, which cannot show which came first. People who already find it hard to concentrate may watch more short video, or something else may be behind both. The review cannot settle that.
What we take from it. We do not claim short videos damage your brain. We claim something smaller: if your attention feels scattered, taking the endless feed out of reach is a cheap experiment, and you can judge the result yourself.
Source: Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use. Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125–1146 (2025). doi:10.1037/bul0000498
Mindless scrolling
The phone is the easy way out of every empty minute.
A feed has no bottom, no last page and no “that is enough”. The only thing that ends a session is you. That is a design choice, not a law of nature, and it works best on a mind that has just felt a gap.
Science, 2014
Wilson et al.: “Just think”
In a series of experiments, people sat alone with their thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes. Most did not enjoy it. In one version they could give themselves a mild electric shock, which they had already said they would pay to avoid. In the 15-minute session, 67% of the men and 25% of the women shocked themselves at least once.
The catch: These were small lab experiments, and the shock was mild. They show how much many of us dislike an empty mind. They do not show that phones cause harm.
A second finding points the same way. People who get bored easily report more problematic phone use (Elhai et al., 2018). That is a correlation, and it could run in either direction.
What Umer OS does. It blocks the apps you reach for, and the Exhausted button gives you a short routine for how you feel instead of a feed. It does not fill the empty minute for you. That is on purpose.
Steered without noticing
A small cue can move what you do next.
Priming is the idea that something you see or read can change what you think or do a moment later, without your noticing. It is a famous idea, and its history is a useful lesson in how careful to be.
The famous study
In 1996, Bargh, Chen and Burrows reported that people who had unscrambled sentences containing words linked to old age then walked more slowly down a corridor. It was cited for decades as proof that hidden cues steer behaviour.
The problem
In 2012, Doyen and colleagues tried to repeat it, timing the walk with infrared sensors instead of a person with a stopwatch. They did not find the effect, except when the experimenters had been told to expect slow walking. Many other priming results have also been hard to repeat. Social priming became a well-known example of the replication crisis.
What is left
Psychological Bulletin, 2016
Weingarten et al.: a meta-analysis of incidental priming
The authors pooled 133 studies in which a cue was shown and later behaviour was measured. The average effect was small (d ≈ 0.35). In plain terms, a typical person who saw the cue scored higher than roughly 64 out of 100 people who did not.
The catch: The effect is small, and this is a difficult field where many individual results have not held up. Treat any single priming claim with suspicion.
Why it still matters on a phone. We do not claim your phone primes you the way a lab does. We claim something safer: cues move behaviour a little, and a phone produces a great many of them. Red badges, previews, “someone is typing” and autoplay are all cues built to pull you toward an action. A small nudge repeated all day is not small.
What Umer OS does. A blocked app never opens, so its cues never reach you, and the home screen is a calm list instead of a wall of badges.
Buying on autopilot
Shops are designed to make clicking easier than thinking.
ACM CSCW, 2019
Mathur et al.: “Dark patterns at scale”
The researchers crawled about 53,000 product pages on about 11,000 shopping websites and found 1,818 instances of dark patterns: design tricks that push you toward a choice you might not make on your own. They sorted them into 15 types in 7 groups, including false urgency (countdown timers), scarcity (“only 2 left”) and social proof (“12 people are looking at this”).
The catch: It is a study of website design, not of what shoppers then did. The authors also found signs that some of these messages were not real, for example some that appeared to be generated at random.
Our reading. A tired, bored or hurried mind is easier to hurry. A timer on a product page borrows the same trick as a feed that never ends: it removes the pause in which you would decide.
What Umer OS does. You can block shopping apps and websites the same way as social ones, and Hard mode makes switching that block off need a password or a one-time code.
Three habits that cost nothing (common-sense advice, not a study):
- Put it in the basket, then close the app. Decide tomorrow.
- Treat timers and low-stock warnings as a reason to slow down, not speed up.
- Remove saved card details from shopping apps, so buying takes a few more seconds.
Boredom
Why you should let yourself be bored.
Blocking the feed is only half of what Umer OS is for. The other half is what happens in the quiet that follows. We think that quiet is worth protecting, and here is the research behind that.
Boredom is a signal
Psychologists describe boredom as the unpleasant feeling of wanting to do something satisfying and not finding it. One account, the MAC model (Westgate & Wilson, 2018), says it arises when what you are doing does not fit your attention or does not feel meaningful. Another (Bench & Lench, 2013) argues that its function is to move you on: to make you drop what is not working and look for a better goal. It is unpleasant on purpose. Silencing it with a screen is like turning off a smoke alarm because it is loud.
Dull time can feed ideas
Creativity Research Journal, 2014
Mann & Cadman: “Does being bored make us more creative?”
In their experiments, people who spent a few minutes on a dull task, reading names and numbers from a phone book, went on to think of more uses for a pair of plastic cups than people who had not.
The catch: Creativity is hard to measure, and this is one small experiment. Do not read it as a promise.
Psychological Science, 2012
Baird et al.: “Inspired by distraction”
After working on a creativity problem, people took a short break. Those given an undemanding task that let their mind wander did better when they returned to the same problem than those given a demanding task, a quiet rest or no break.
The catch: Again a lab study with a narrow task. It suggests that mind-wandering helps ideas along. It does not say every idle moment will.
Could boredom help humanity?
Here is a reasonable idea, and we want to be clear that it is an idea and not a finding. If nobody ever felt restless with what already exists, what would push anyone to explore, to build, or to ask the question that nobody asked? If boredom is the feeling that moves people toward better goals (Bench & Lench, 2013), then a world that never lets anyone feel it may be a world with fewer new ideas. Nobody has tested that, and we cannot test it. We offer it as a question worth sitting with, ideally without your phone.
The caution. Boredom is not a virtue, and more is not better. Bored people can also reach for worse ways out, and people who feel bored often report lower mood and heavier phone use (Elhai et al., 2018; a link, not a proven cause). If constant boredom or flatness is a big part of your life, please talk to a doctor. This is not medical advice.
A small way to try it
- Pick one regular dead moment: the queue, the kettle, the first five minutes of a journey. Leave the phone in your pocket.
- When you feel the pull, notice it. You do not have to obey it.
- Keep a small notebook for whatever shows up.
- Start with five minutes. Add time only if you like it.
Honest limits
What we do not know.
- We do not know that short videos cause poorer attention. The best review shows a link.
- We do not know how large real-life priming effects are. The average lab effect is small and the field has had trouble repeating results.
- We do not know that boredom made human progress. It is an interesting hypothesis.
- We do not know whether the boredom studies hold in everyday life, because most were short lab experiments.
- We have not run a study on Umer OS itself. The research above is why we built it, not proof that it will work for you.
If you find a mistake on this page, please tell us through the contact page. We would rather correct it than leave it.
References
References.
Listed alphabetically. Search the title to read the original.
- Baird, B., et al. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122.
- Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244.
- Bench, S. W., & Lench, H. C. (2013). On the function of boredom. Behavioral Sciences, 3(3), 459–472.
- Doyen, S., et al. (2012). Behavioral priming: It’s all in the mind, but whose mind? PLoS ONE, 7(1), e29081.
- Elhai, J. D., et al. (2018). Proneness to boredom mediates relationships between problematic smartphone use with depression and anxiety severity. Social Science Computer Review, 36(6), 707–720.
- Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use. Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125–1146 (2025). doi:10.1037/bul0000498
- Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2014). Does being bored make us more creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165–173.
- Mathur, A., et al. (2019). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), Article 81.
- Weingarten, E., et al. (2016). From primed concepts to action: A meta-analysis of the behavioral effects of incidental priming. Psychological Bulletin, 142(5), 472–497.
- Westgate, E. C., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Boring thoughts and bored minds: The MAC model of boredom and cognitive engagement. Psychological Review, 125(5), 689–713.
- Wilson, T. D., et al. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77.
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