Featured Image Credit: productive.rowan / Instagram
If you don't know, rawdogging is the act of doing an activity without any aids or distractions to make it easier.
Much like enduring a long journey without Netflix, your phone or any other comforts, which almost feels impossible.
The practice became a defining trend of summer 2024, with celebrities and social media personalities trying it out for themselves. High-profile figures like Manchester City footballer Erling Haaland posted on Instagram about rawdogging a 7-hour flight, calling it '#easy'.
As the trend swept across social media, some experts warned against it last year, calling participants 'idiots,' as per the BBC.
Yet despite sounding tedious and frustrating, some specialists have suggested that rawdogging actually offers genuine benefits.
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One man took to Instagram to document his experience of 'rawdogging boredom' for 30 days, journaling the entire process.
Instagram user productive.rowan shared a video outlining the advantages he experienced, captioning it: "I think this is a successful challenge and it brought me so many benefits that I’m actually doing this off camera now but only for 15-20min."
He highlighted three main gains of his rawdogging experiment.
"The short answer is yes, it did work. There are so many little benefits that I can't really put it in one video. So I'll summarise it to three main points," he explained. "The first one is kinda obvious. It was the main focus of this challenge and it was to fix my attention span. And it actually fixed it."
He added: "Because of this challenge, I was basically forced to stay away from my phone for at least an hour."
Rowan said the practice 'naturally eliminated his phone anxiety' and reduced his screen time significantly.
He then displayed statistics showing his average weekly screen time, which dropped by about four hours.
"The second benefit is reflection," he said. "These days I never had time to reflect, but this hour gave me plenty of time to reflect," he added, saying that he revisited past memories and what he did for the day.
"I just had new insights about myself and a bit of clear direction of where I want to be, where I want to go, all because I have plenty of time to myself."
The third advantage Rowan pointed out was having 'more energy through the day' which he said he 'didn't expect at all.'
He described: "From my experience, I was more social, more talkative and my mental state was so much clearer."
The content creator also shed some light for those curious about rawdogging boredom themselves.
"For those who want to try this challenge, I would recommend about 15 to 20 minutes because one hour was honestly way too long for me as well," he concluded in the video.
