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People hate feeling bored. We hate it so much that we spend hours mindlessly scrolling through our phones. Many of us would rather experience physical discomfort than sit quietly with our own thoughts, as a 2014 University of Virginia study found. Nearly half of participants sitting alone in a room for 15 minutes, with no stimulation other than a button that would administer a mild electric shock, pressed the button.
On the other hand, we also romanticize boredom. Philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote in his book Illuminations: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” That is: boredom is a rich, loamy soil of creativity, and stepping back from the constant stimulus of everyday life allows the mind to expand.
So which is it: a fertile, imaginative state or mind-numbing agony?
The answer, according to experts, is both. Like life’s proverbial lemons, boredom is what you make of it.
What is boredom?
Leo Tolstoy’s description of ennui – as “the desire for desires” – is fairly apt, say experts.
When you’re bored, you want to be engaged, but you don’t want anything that’s currently available to you, explains Dr James Danckert, professor of neuroscience at the University of Waterloo and author of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom.
Boredom is often conflated with laziness or apathy, but they’re very different. Boredom is “much more of a motivational, restless, agitated state”, Danckert says.
Dr Erin Westgate, an associate professor of social psychology at the University of Florida, suggests that there are two types of boredom with two different causes: meaningless boredom and attentional boredom.
Meaningless boredom occurs when we feel like what we’re doing lacks meaning, Westgate says – for example, when a student says “math is boring” because they can’t understand how calculus relates to their life. Attentional boredom happens when “we can’t do something because it is too hard or too easy for us, so we can’t pay attention” – for example, when a student says “math is boring” because calculus is too advanced for them.
Is boredom bad?
Boredom is a negative affective state, meaning it’s an unpleasant emotional experience, like anger or sadness.
But like anger or sadness, boredom isn’t inherently good or bad. Westgate compares it to pain, like the twinge of a twisted ankle. “It doesn’t feel good,” she says. “It hurts. But it’s critical because it lets us know when something is broken and needs to be fixed.”
What matters is how we respond to the emotion when it comes up. Does it prompt us into positive or negative action? Do we use boredom as motivation to do something creative or productive, or do we do something destructive – like self-administering a shock – in an attempt to escape it?
How we react to boredom has a lot to do with our mental state before we get bored, says Dr Yasmine Saad, a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of Madison Park Psychological Services in New York City.
When a person is balanced and able to regulate their emotions, they can approach boredom with curiosity rather than aversion.
On the other hand, when we keep ourselves busy and distracted all the time, we might perceive a sudden lack of stimulation as scary or overwhelming. Not only that, the thoughts and emotions that we were too busy and distracted to process during the day can flood into the mental space boredom creates.
“All the negative [experiences] that had no place to go come to the mind,” Saad says.
Are some people more prone to boredom than others?
There is a popular truism – often trotted out by adults to scold aimless children – that only boring people get bored.
This is not true, say boredom experts, many of whom are very interesting. Everyone experiences boredom; some just deal with it more quickly and efficiently than others.
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The people we tend to find boring are not those who are bored themselves, says Danckert: “They’re the people who don’t listen to us or engage with us. When you’re trying to have a conversation with them and it’s all about ‘me, me, me’ and not about you.”
Some groups and personality types are more likely to experience boredom. Children are more likely to feel bored than adults, Westgate says, as are people with conditions that affect attention, like ADHD.
Danckert says people who are boredom-prone also tend to struggle with a “failure to launch” – meaning initiating and maintaining action in pursuit of their goals – as well as neuroticism and a perceived lack of agency.
Counterintuitively, some people are more prone to boredom because they don’t let themselves experience it, says Saad. “People who constantly need to be busy for self-esteem purposes, the moment they stop, they feel shame about the boredom,” says Saad.
Are we more bored now?
Boredom is not new. In the first century AD, the Roman philosopher Seneca described the feeling as a kind of nausea.
What is new is the ease of avoiding boredom thanks to digital means including smartphones, social media, video games and streaming services. “The constant stimulation makes it so we’re so much more busy, so much more stimulated, and less well-equipped to deal with boredom,” says Saad.
Still, Danckert says, he isn’t sure that our boredom is worse now than at any other point in history. In some cases, he argues, turning to your phone to stave off boredom is “perfectly reasonable”. Being stuck behind 20 people at the DMV is not a particularly enriching experience, so why not play sudoku or text a friend?
How do you deal with boredom?
Calm down: Boredom is an agitated state. “When you’re restless, you don’t always make the best decisions,” says Danckert. When you feel bored, he says, the first thing to do is take a deep breath and try not to get flustered.
Reframe the situation: If a project or exercise feels meaningless, find a way to inject meaning. “Think about why you’re doing what you’re doing,” says Westgate. She says research has shown that when high school students reflected on why math was important to them and how it related to their own goals – for example: “I need good math scores to get into my first-choice university” – they not only became more interested in their classwork, but went on to get better grades.
Adjust the difficulty: If you’re experiencing attentional boredom, meaning a project is too easy or too difficult to hold your attention, find ways to make the task more or less difficult. Projects that are too difficult can be broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks, Westgate says. And tasks that are too easy can be gamified to inject more of a challenge – try to complete the task in a limited amount of time, for example, or give yourself rewards for completing certain activities.
Make space for play: Boredom often results from “a lack of connection to yourself”, says Saad. If you don’t know what you enjoy or what interests you, how can you pull yourself out of boredom? Give yourself time and space to explore what activities engage and stimulate you. “The more playful you are, the less bored you will be,” Saad says.
Just do something else: In some cases, there is no solution to boredom – you just need to do something else. “Recognize that you’re bored and instead of shoving that feeling away, figure out what it’s trying to tell you,” Westgate says. “That might be finding a new job or a new relationship.”
