Are Fidgets BS?

Written by: Marie Chesaniuk, PhD

The marketing of small fidget objects for anxiety and neurodivergence is now ubiquitous. But do they actually reduce anxiety? Do they really help people with ADHD focus and regulate emotional needs better? Do they help students do better academically regardless of whether they have a diagnosis?

Are fidgets BS? Or are they legitimate ways to self-regulate? Quick note: the following is about fidget objects, not intrinsic fidgeting, which refers to movements like foot-tapping or knee-bouncing, that involve the person’s own body and movement.

Fidgets for Anxiety

Research is severely lacking for anxiety given the popularity of marketing fidget toys and objects specifically for anxiety. Due to the sparse information available, I will be discussing a mix of sub-clinical anxiety and clinically significant anxiety. It is important to note that anxiety in this section does not include traumatic stress, which was an exclusion criterion in one of the studies discussed (Krishnadasan et al., 2025).

Krishnadasan and colleagues (2025) tested the anxiety management value of giving children ages 5-10 a pop-it fidget toy to use both before their dental appointment and during a dental procedure to manage dental anxiety. They discovered that  children allowed to fidget showed greater reductions in anxiety than the tell-show-do (TSD) that is standard practice for explaining dental procedures to children to reduce anxiety and facilitate safe and productive dental work. The children who received both TSD and the pop-it had the biggest reduction in anxiety. The main critique sited in the little peer reviewed research on fidgets for anxiety was difficulty determining if children were using the fidgets as intended for emotion regulation or as toys (Jones, Riggs, & Kuo, 2019), which applies to adults as well as children. 

Notably, Jones and colleagues (2019) reported on a classroom test taking anxiety feasibility study versus Krishnadasan and colleagues’ (2025) dental anxiety study. One could argue that children were more motivated to distract themselves from unpleasant dental work with the fidget object than the children in the classroom study, who had a different (and possibly less anxiety inducing) target of a typical school day. It’s pretty tough to play with dental instruments in your mouth! Thus, the odds of using the fidgets as toys may differ depending on the anxiety-provoking stimuli and the ease with which one can play instead of use them as intended for emotion regulation.

Fidgets for ADHD

Fidgets have been a popular suggestion to accommodate the needs for stimulation and movement experienced by people with ADHD. Fidgets have also been suggested as a way to help those with ADHD sustain focus or attention. Son and colleagues (2024) found an association between intrinsic fidgeting and sustained attention among adults with ADHD.

Graziano, Garcia, & Landis (2018) found that, among children, the use of fidget spinners was associated with a decrease in activity levels, but this effect faded later in the study. They also found that fidget spinners were associated with poorer attention throughout the study. Similarly, Driesen and colleagues (2023) also report a detrimental effect of fidget objects as attention aids in elementary school classrooms.

Aspiranti & Hulac (2022) not only reviewed the conflicting literature on fidgets for focus, but also provide one of the few positive findings: fidget spinners provided only during a high-demand task to each of three 3^rd grade students with ADHD resulted in more on-task behavior during fidget use. The limitations of the small, case study sample would require replication among more children to warrant drawing a sweeping conclusion. However, one notable difference between this and other classroom studies is that the fidgets were not always available and were only used in tandem with a specific demanding task, which may have reduced habituation and reduced effect that other studies (Graziano et al, 2018) observed.

Tying it all together, Elahi and colleagues (2025) found that fidget objects did not improve self-regulation in adults with ADHD during an anxiety task and that these objects interfered with the regulating effects of intrinsic fidgeting. For people with ADHD, intrinsic fidgeting may be the better option over fidget toys or objects.

Fidgets for Academic Improvement

A meta-analysis by Schoenen and colleagues (2024) on general student populations (as in, not targeting students with a psychiatric diagnosis or learning difference) analyzed 10 studies with over 500 students total. They found that the effect of fidgets on academic and behavioral abilities in the classroom varied widely with an average effect size of Hedges’ g = −0.014, which represents a negligible negative difference between the fidget groups and the control groups. They further found no significant moderators, meaning there were no reliable indicators of who might benefit more or less from a fidget intervention. They concluded that there is insufficient evidence to justify classroom academic or behavioral interventions using fidgets. This finding is consistent with an earlier review that concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support classroom fidget interventions for educational support (Kriescher, et al., 2023). Hulac and colleagues (2020) actually found that fidgets detracted from student academic performance in a multisite study of 3^rd grade students.

In sum, the general classroom literature suggests fidgets either have no effect to a slightly negative effect on student academic performance and behavior in the classroom. One thought on this is that it may represent a ceiling effect. People with ADHD and people facing unusually anxiety inducing situations (i.e., children undergoing dental procedures) may benefit from fidgets as a form of compensation. However, when children were in a more ordinary situation (i.e., normal classroom activities) and do not have significant anxiety, there may be no deficit to compensate for and thus show no noticeable increase in focus or emotion regulation. This would imply that fidgets have some value as a way to make up for certain deficits, but less or no value as a way to enhance performance.

So, are fidgets BS?

The answer is: it depends what for. Fidgets appear to be BS for enhancing the performance of people in ordinary situations who do not face clinically significant attentional or anxiety challenges. Fidgets seem to be legit for coping with anxiety inducing medical procedures. The literature on ADHD and fidget objects is largely negative to mixed, but intrinsic fidgeting for people with ADHD may be more promising.

Sources

Aspiranti, K. B., & Hulac, D. M. (2022). Using fidget spinners to improve on-task classroom behavior for students with ADHD. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 15(2), 454-465.

Driesen, M., Rijmen, J., Hulsbosch, A. K., Danckaerts, M., Wiersema, J. R., & Van der Oord, S. (2023). Tools or toys? The effect of fidget spinners and bouncy bands on the academic performance in children with varying ADHD-symptomatology. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 75, 102214.

Elahi, H., Son, H. M., Calub, C. A., Nasiri, N., Shapiro, D., Isbister, K., ... & Schweitzer, J. B. (2025). Impact of fidget devices on anxiety and physiological responses in adults with ADHD. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 158, 104944.

Graziano, P. A., Garcia, A. M., & Landis, T. D. (2020). To fidget or not to fidget, that is the question: A systematic classroom evaluation of fidget spinners among young children with ADHD. Journal of attention disorders, 24(1), 163-171.

Hulac, D. M., Aspiranti, K., Kriescher, S., Briesch, A. M., & Athanasiou, M. (2021). A multisite study of the effect of fidget spinners on academic performance. Contemporary School Psychology, 25(4), 582-588.

Kriescher, S. L., Hulac, D. M., Ryan, A. M., & King, B. L. (2023). Evaluating the evidence for fidget toys in the classroom. Intervention in School and Clinic, 59(1), 66-69.

Krishnadasan, A., Bhayya, D. P., Samaddar, K., Tejaswini, V., & Krishna, A. J. (2025). POP IT AWAY! Evaluating Pop-It Fidget Toys to Ease Dental Anxiety in 5–10 Years old. Bharati Vidyapeeth Journal of Dentistry and Allied Sciences, 2(4), 121-124.

Jones, T., Riggs, A., & Kuo, N. C. (2019). Helping Middle School Students Acknowledge and Navigate Anxiety: An Action Research. Current Issues in Middle Level Education, 24(2), 2.and meta-analysis. JAMA psychiatry, 77(3), 294-302.

Schoenen, E. C., Alsip, B. S., Martinez, J. C., Grekov, P., Aspiranti, K. B., & Hulac, D. M. (2025). A meta-analysis of fidget devices as academic and behavioral interventions. School Psychology Review, 54(3), 315-327.

Son, H. M., Calub, C. A., Fan, B., Dixon, J. F., Rezaei, S., Borden, J., ... & Liu, X. (2024). A quantitative analysis of fidgeting in ADHD and its relation to performance and sustained attention on a cognitive task. Frontiers in psychiatry, 15, 1394096.