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Abstract Background Idleness is a common experience that can serve as a source of distress. The present set of three studies provides preliminary evidence of associations between the tendency to worry and idleness distress. Methods Associations were examined across cross-sectional (Study 1, N = 591 U.S. adults recruited through a crowdsourcing website), prospective (Study 2, N = 180 college students who completed an idleness task, on average, 27 days after an assessment of worry), and randomized experimental (Study 3, college students randomized to an idleness task, n = 85, or a monotonous video viewing control task, n = 83) study designs. Results Study 1 found a positive association ( r = .45, p < .001) between worry and a self-report measure of finding inactivity distressing. Study 2 found that worry prospectively predicted self-reported distress in response to a later attended idleness task ( r = .33, p < .001), with worry further predicting regressed changes in distress (β = 0.14, p = .027) from pre-to-post task. Study 3 found that randomized task moderated the relation between worry and self-reported task distress, with worry positively associated with distress in the idleness (β = 0.27, p = .007), but not control (β = − 0.03, p = .729), condition. Exploratory analyses found no relation between depression symptom severity and distress in Study 3. Conclusions Results support the tendency to worry being associated with greater idleness distress. Implications are discussed in terms of how idleness fits within existing conceptual models of worry.
Fergus et al. (Tue,) studied this question.