The low-stimulation trend: rawdogging, boredom, and staring at walls

Flights with no screen, walks with no podcast, timers spent doing nothing at all. A strange new trend is really an old instinct resurfacing — with a few genuine risks attached.

In 2024, a peculiar boast started spreading online: people — mostly young men — filming themselves enduring long flights with no entertainment whatsoever. No movie, no music, no book, sometimes no water. They called it “rawdogging” a flight, and the internet couldn’t look away.¹ Around the same time, a parallel version appeared: “rawdogging boredom,” where people set a timer and sit in total stillness, doing nothing, on purpose.² What’s going on?

An old instinct with a new name

Strip away the provocative label and these trends express something familiar: a hunger for stillness in a world engineered against it. Commentators have framed rawdogging as “a collective yearning for balance as people seek to reclaim their mental space.”¹ The practitioners of the boredom version say it plainly — they’re trying to rebuild attention spans they feel have been wrecked by constant scrolling.²

This isn’t new. Deliberately seeking silence and monotony is ancient — meditation traditions, religious rest days, long walks. What’s new is that it now feels radical, even transgressive, because the default state of modern life is saturation. When doing nothing becomes a viral challenge, it tells you how far the baseline has shifted.

The genuine upside: boredom has value

The instinct is backed by real research. Studies have found that people who first do something boring become more creative afterward — in one experiment, participants who sorted beans by colour then generated more and better ideas than those given an engaging craft task first.³ Boredom, psychologist Sandi Mann argues, is “a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied” — and when the mind can’t find it outside, it turns inward and wanders, which is where daydreaming, planning, and creative insight happen.³

That mechanism is precisely why the low-stimulation trend resonates: the phone that saves us from every dull moment is also the thing quietly lowering our capacity to sit with one.³

The real risks: don’t confuse restraint with self-harm

Now the necessary warning, because the extreme versions genuinely are dangerous. The most hardcore rawdoggers skip not just entertainment but water, food, movement, and sleep on long-haul flights — and doctors are clear this is a bad idea. Depriving yourself of hydration and staying immobile for hours raises the risk of dehydration and even deep-vein thrombosis.⁴ As one physician put it bluntly, a digital detox might do you good, but the rest is against medical advice.⁴

There’s a psychological caveat too. For people prone to anxiety, enforced stillness with no anchor can amplify distress rather than calm it; experts advise starting small and stopping if silence tips into spiralling.⁴ The goal is rest, not endurance for its own sake.

Doing it well — the DOPAM. take

Here’s the distinction that matters: the value lies in removing stimulation, not in punishing yourself. Skip the screen; keep the water. Sit with boredom; don’t turn it into a macho survival contest for the camera. The healthy core of this trend is simply giving your mind permission to be under-stimulated long enough to settle and wander.

That’s the entire idea behind a DOPAM. session, minus the risk and the theatre: a bounded, deliberate stretch of low stimulation — a calm screen, a quiet task, no feed to escape into — that lets you practise the thing this whole cultural moment is groping toward. You don’t need to dehydrate yourself at 38,000 feet to reclaim your attention. You just need to let yourself be still, on purpose, for a while.

This article is for general education and is not medical advice. Extreme forms of these trends — depriving yourself of water, food, or movement — can be harmful; consult a professional if unsure, and never ignore your body’s basic needs.