Americans Spend 93% of Their Time Indoors. A Doctor Explained What That’s Doing to Us.

Most people don’t describe their problem as being indoors too much. They say they’re exhausted. Anxious. Wired at night and foggy during the day. Sleep doesn’t fix it. Rest doesn’t feel possible. According to Dr. John La Puma, that cluster of symptoms has a common root we’ve gotten very good at ignoring.

He calls it digital obesity. Not a productivity problem or a motivation failure, but a biological state.

“What’s getting overfed is the brain’s alerting system,” La Puma explained to VICE in an email, and details in his upcoming book Indoor Epidemic. Screens, artificial light, constant novelty, and cognitive demand keep the nervous system switched on for most of the day. The inputs that normally allow it to recover, daylight, darkness at night, distance vision, and time outside, barely show up anymore.

Doomscrolling is the most concentrated version of this pattern. You stay alert without resolution. Clinically, La Puma sees it show up as lower heart rate variability, elevated evening cortisol, delayed melatonin, shallow sleep, impaired glucose control, and weight gain. People feel tired but wired. Anxious but unfocused. Rest stops restoring them.