At Franklin High School in Portland, Oregon, students are required to seal their phones in special pouches at the beginning of the school day. But headphones and earbuds don’t fit in the pouches.
“Technically, AirPods and stuff aren’t allowed, but people use them a lot anyway, especially because they can hide them with their hair,” says junior Easton Atlansky, 17, who has noticed many students using AirPods or headphones between classes.
“I think part of it is, we grew up on technology all the time. Especially because of covid, we’re really used to having constant stimulation from TikTok and YouTube,” Atlansky says. “I think we like to think that we’re totally in control of ourselves and can stop whenever we want, but we are human, and it’s altering our brain chemistry to a certain degree.”
Much has been made of the addictive nature of screens and of screen time as a metric of technology overuse. But audio use, too, captures many people’s waking hours, yet it hasn’t been studied nearly as much.
Americans listen to nearly four hours of audio a day, according to Edison Research and Nielsen, and that doesn’t include audiobooks, YouTube rants or ambient noise from the television while you cut up vegetables for dinner. A 2025 Edison report showed that the number of American adults listening to podcasts is at an all-time high, though radio still dominates. For some people, that routine is constant, taking up much of the day.
“It’s a habitual behavior, and many, many people are doing it,” says psychologist Gloria Mark, a professor in the department of informatics at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of the 2023 book “Attention Span.” “It’s a tough problem we’re in. We look around us and everybody’s got their AirPods in.”
Clifford Sussman, a psychiatrist and therapist who specializes in children’s screen use, says that although there is little clinical research on excessive audio use, his patients and their parents ask about it frequently. And audio consumption, he says, is theoretically just as habit-forming as screen use.
“The number one thing that causes dopamine release, as many studies have shown, is not what you’re getting, but how fast you’re getting it,” Sussman says.
A smartphone provides instant gratification, conjuring any song, audiobook, podcast or video clip within seconds. “If we’re stimulated for too long, we get desensitized to that stimulation, and you develop tolerance,” he adds.
Some research does suggest that people may be able to concentrate better while listening to music. “It creates a kind of white noise where it’s ironically easier for them to focus on what they’re doing because it’s drowning out other distractions,” Sussman says. But a problem arises if you listen to so much on-demand audio that you don’t want to stop.
“If it stops,” he says, “you go into a kind of withdrawal state,” called reward deficiency syndrome. “You can get cranky and irritable when you’re not listening to your music or audio, you can feel anxious or depressed. The most common one is boredom.”
Julia Knox, a 26-year-old living and working in New York City, listens to news podcasts on her morning and evening commutes. Then it’s entertainment podcasts while washing dishes, running errands or walking around the city, creating a nearly constant daily soundtrack.
“The thing I keep thinking about is: Is it bad that I can’t do things without listening to something?” she says. It’s not that Knox truly can’t stop tuning in — she doesn’t listen at work — but oftentimes, she adds, silent contemplation can’t compete with “the option to consume something that makes it more fun.”
Trey Shilts, 28, who lives in Los Angeles and keeps an AirPod in while driving, sees his audio use this way: “I try to think of it as ‘This is my AM radio, this is my home shopping network that my grandma would keep on in the background,’” he says. “The difference is that they didn’t have to confront the option of taking that with you, for free, 24/7.”
“I’ve sort of always just got a voice in my head,” says Vicki Lesley, 49, of Brighton, England, who listens to podcasts while cooking, hanging laundry in the yard and trying to fall asleep.
For Lesley, a documentarian, radio and podcasts make domestic chores more enjoyable, but they limit the time she spends simply thinking. She recalls that years ago, she would bike to work, a 40-minute ride in which she didn’t listen to audio. “I used to have ideas for programs I was working on, or even just stuff in my personal life,” she says. “That mental processing time — I don’t really have that now, because I have always got a podcast on.”
Is excessive audio use harmful?
“All of humanity’s problems,” wrote 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
But is excessive audio use always harmful? Audio content can feel wholesome in a way that screen time typically does not — Lesley was glued to radio reports on the recent moon mission, Knox keeps up with morning news reports, and Shilts likes comedy podcasts.
“The definition of addiction is that you keep doing something, despite the fact that it’s causing problems for you,” Sussman says. If constant listening helps you function, even if you feel dependent on it, it’s not necessarily an addiction, he adds. But if you notice that it disrupts your mood or harms your relationships, and if you are unable to stop despite observing these changes, it could be an addiction.
It’s worth thinking of technology addiction as “a continuum rather than a black-and-white thing,” he says. “I can’t think of too many people who could say they’ve never had a problem because of screen use.”
“In times when there is more on my plate,” Shilts says, “when executive dysfunction is more of a daily reality, podcasts help to provide that bit of stimulation to get things done.” But constantly listening to podcasts, he says, “makes it a little less tolerable, I think, to be around actual people. The on-demand, no-expectations social engagement with these parasocial personalities — I think it’s just a little addicting.”
When we fill all our spare moments with audio content, Mark says, especially if it’s lyric heavy or distracting, “we’re not giving our minds a chance to rest. Stress builds up when you don’t give your mind a chance to relax.”
Mental quiet has a crucial function, she adds: “When we’re not involved in some kind of cognitive task, the part of the brain called the default mode network takes over, [which] helps us regulate our emotions, helps us make sense. It’s how we form internal narratives about ourselves.”
Mark and Sussman both say that dialing back listening time is doable.
“It might help to start with three days of nothing,” Sussman says. “Stay away from the audio, the screens, drugs and alcohol, anything that gives you instant gratification, and just do activities that require a lot of patience. By the end of the third day, a lot of people feel like all of that withdrawal is gone, all of that boredom and all of that dopamine-seeking.”
Then, as you add audio back in, listen for an hour at a time, with breaks in between. “It’s interrupting dopamine flow,” he says. “You’re less likely to get hooked again.”
Mark recommends replacing an audio or screen habit with “something that provides deeper stimulation, some kind of behavior that’s more rewarding.”
“Be with people more,” she says. “If you’re having a conversation with another person, give them your full attention.”
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