Filtering the Noise

What TikTok Might Be Teaching Us About ADHD and Attentional Control

If you're in the ADHD world long enough, you’ll hear the warnings on repeat: social media is destroying attention spans, TikTok is digital crack, and doomscrolling is the enemy of executive function.

Now, to be clear - none of those claims are without merit. ADHDers are often painfully aware of how quickly a five-minute break turns into a two-hour swipe session.

But what if…just for a moment…we stepped back and asked a different question?

What if, instead of assuming harm, we asked: what are the cognitive conditions under which attention actually thrives?

And could it be that certain digital spaces—yes, even TikTok—might be giving us clues?

A recent study out of Curtin University in Western Australia attempted to do something different. Instead of relying on self-report measures of social media use (which are notoriously unreliable), the researchers tracked real-time mobile phone use and paired it with a validated attention task: the antisaccade* test. This task measures inhibitory control—our ability to suppress distraction and shift focus deliberately, something that's often impaired in ADHD.

An antisaccade is a type of eye movement task where a person must inhibit a reflexive gaze shift (prosaccade) towards a visual stimulus and instead look in the opposite direction. It's a measure of inhibitory control and voluntary eye movement.

Here’s the twist - higher TikTok use was weakly correlated with BETTER performance on the antisaccade task.

Yes, you read that right. Not worse. Better.

The effect was small—statistically modest, not earth-shattering—but notable. And in a landscape flooded with moral panic over screen time, even a small deviation matters. It challenges the foundational assumption that more time on social media, particularly TikTok, always correlates with worse cognitive control.

So what might be going on here?

The ADHD Brain, Externalized

Let’s reframe this through an ADHD lens.

One of the core deficits in ADHD isn’t the inability to pay attention, it’s the inability to regulate attention. Inattentive types, in particular, struggle with internal cueing. They need novelty, structure, or external triggers to activate task engagement. This is why the ADHD brain often feels chaotic in quiet settings and laser-focused in high-stimulation environments.

Enter TikTok.

It’s fast. It’s visual. It’s loud. And it presents one stimulus at a time, with immediate control over whether to stay or swipe.

For ADHDers, this may act like an external executive function system. Swipe left becomes a proxy for inhibitory control:

Irrelevant video? Gone.

Boring? Next.

Engaging? Stay.

The app is doing what the prefrontal cortex often fails to do—rapid filtering.

This isn’t just anecdotal. For many ADHDers (myself included), TikTok doesn’t feel like a loss of attention. It feels like control.

Doomscrolling may be a misnomer - it’s more like "decision scrolling." You’re choosing what to engage with based on instinct, not obligation.

That doesn’t mean it’s ideal, but it’s something, especially when compared to the paralysis often felt in unstructured, low-stimulation tasks.

Lessons, Not Endorsements

None of this is to say TikTok is good for you.

This is NOT an ad for social media. The study didn’t show that TikTok improves attention, or that more time online leads to better outcomes.

What it did show is that the relationship between social media use and attention is more complex than we've been led to believe - especially when you look at objective data, not self-perception.

That matters.

Because too often, research on digital media begins with a foregone conclusion:

Tech = Bad.

But for neurodivergent brains, the question isn’t whether tech mimics ideal cognitive development. It’s whether it offers scaffolding that the brain itself struggles to provide.

Maybe the lesson here isn’t to hand out TikTok as therapy, but to observe why some people find it easier to engage, decide, and shift attention on a platform designed for fast feedback and immediate choice.

What if we borrowed that interface logic for work tasks, therapy modules, or executive function training?

Re-evaluating the Narrative

We need to stop painting all social media use with a single brush. What we engage with, how we engage, and what cognitive profile we bring to the table all shape the impact. ADHD brains, especially those left undiagnosed or unsupported, are often seeking stimulation not for entertainment, but for regulation.

So no—this is NOT an argument for unlimited screen time. But it is a challenge to the reflexive scolding that surrounds social media discourse.

Instead of asking how social media breaks attention, maybe we should be asking what it reveals about how attention works.

And for ADHDers, that question might be far more useful than another warning label.