As the golden rays of the summer sun peak over the horizon, beaches beckon with the promise of sandy shores and crashing waves. The air is infused with saltwater and the sunbeams dance vivaciously across the water.

Days become longer as you spend them riding bicycles with your friends to ice cream shops or to eagerly awaited fairs. Students’ anxieties from the school year are melted away, replaced by the joys of the season of warmth and adventure.

But this isn’t the summer reality for everyone.

Due to the rise in bedrotting, a new self-care TikTok trend, many students are planning on recovering from a tenuous school year by spending excessive time online, called doom scrolling. With over 130 million views total on TikTok, videos depicting the allure of staying wrapped in your bed sheets while indulging in endless scrolling on the phone encourage people to use bedrotting as a means of relieving mental health issues.

This raises concerns about students wasting their summer, indoors and on their phones.

Although bedrotting is considered a method of relieving one’s mental health, it can actually do quite the opposite. Courtney DeAngelis, a psychologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, links bedrotting with depression, suggesting that it could accentuate symptoms such as low energy and lack of interest in activities. This makes bedrotting an incredibly ineffective mental health treatment.

The trend of bedrotting can also disrupt sleep, causing symptoms of insomnia, according to Dr. Dianne Augelli, a sleep medicine specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine of Cornell University. This makes people who partake in the trend of bedrotting all the more irritable and depressed.

Plummeting mental health is only one of the aspects of bedrotting. It can also make you feel socially isolated.

Participants of bedrotting witness other kids enjoying their summers outdoors and with friends, while they are all alone, stuck in bed, further contributing to the disconnect and despair they can feel.

Despite the glamorization of bedrotting on social media, the reality is far from appealing– it’s rather unhygienic.

Yes, in the short term, taking a quick break once in a while is fine. However, spending upwards of a day doom scrolling in bed can be detrimental to one’s health.

As high schoolers, we only have so many summers. One day, you’ll reflect on these days, either reminiscing or regretting.

So please, this summer, put your phone down and get out of bed. Go outside and make memories of a summer that will last forever.