If you've ever had difficulty being alone with your thoughts – preferring to grab a book/Kindle/television remote/newspaper/iPad/anything with a homepage set to The Debrief – but worry that this is a sign you've got ADHD or have been so conditioned by technology that you can't live without it, then calm yourself. You're not alone.
It turns out that one quarter of women (and one third of men) would prefer to give themselves an electric shock than spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts.
A Virginia and Harvard universities study took over a hundred of people, aged from 18 to 77, and hooked them up to loads of sensors that can deliver an electric shock. The guinea pigs were then left alone with no books, phones, writing pads, whatever, and told, either really specifically or vaguely, that they would be there for six to 15 minutes.
Everyone had a terrible time of it, according to research presented to Science. So the researchers wondered if their subjects would prefer to do something bad to themselves during that time – to distract themselves if you will – so they introduced an electric shock when they did the test on students. Though many of the students, after first experiencing the shock, said they would pay to avoid getting it again, 12 out of 18 men shocked themselves, as did six out of 24 women.
Maybe it's that we're programmed to get distracted, owing to the ubiquity of mobile phones with all their social media? Nope, says Timothy Wilson, who led the work. He found that it was more to do with the fact that we want to do stuff all the time. Plus, more men looking for electric shocks means that they tend to be more sensation-seeking, apparently. Or maybe it's just that women have periods and so can't be bothered with an additional pain in their lives? Not that we're scientists or anything.
As for the guy who shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes? He's being treated as the odd one out.
Jessica Andrews-Hanna, at the University of Colorado, pointed out that it might just be that people shocked themselves out of curiosity, saying: 'As they sit there, strapped to this machine, their mind starts to wander, and it naturally goes to that shock – was it really that bad? What are the experimenters really interested in? Perhaps this is a case where curiosity killed the cat.'
Either way, don't feel so bad for distracting yourself from your thoughts with The Debrief, please. And thanks.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.