[Thanks to smartphones, all the entertainment and distraction they offer can be in your back pocket or purse, accessible 24/7. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to remember the uncomfortable, mind-numbing, aggravating feeling of boredom.
In line at the bank or drive-through without a podcast or music? Interminable! Waiting at the doctor’s office without texting or scrolling social media? Excruciating! Even sitting on the toilet without an online crossword puzzle or news story to while away the minutes can cause you to die a little inside.
Boredom can be as distressing as pain and, in some cases, even less preferable: In one famous 2014 research experiment, a large percentage of participants chose the pain of a self-administered electrical shock over sitting in a room for 15 minutes with only their thoughts.
As it turns out, boredom may serve the same purpose as pain. “Pain is not there to make you feel hurt. Pain is there as a signal to sort of galvanize you into action, to address whatever it is that caused the hurt in the first place. Boredom is the same,” cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his Chasing Life podcast recently.
“It’s not there to make you feel bored,” Danckert said. “It’s there to get you going, to get you doing something, to get out of that bored state.”
Danckert, coauthor of the book “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom,” turns to a literary giant to define boredom. “I like, when I give a definition of boredom, to resort to this quote from Leo Tolstoy, from (his novel) ‘Anna Karenina,’ where he talks about ennui, or boredom, as ‘the desire for desires,'” he said. “Boredom is a motivational state. You want to be doing something that matters to you, but you just don’t want anything that’s currently available to you.”
Danckert sees boredom as this frustrated desire to be fully engaged with the world around you that’s unsatisfied at the moment. So, what can you do to alleviate boredom?
Instead of offering an array of options for what they could do instead, Danckert recommends not giving solutions for those who are prone to boredom. “A fairly consistent and strong finding is that people who are prone to boredom feel like they don’t have a lot of agency,” he said. “They feel like they’re not really taking control of their lives. And if you just give them a list of suggestions, that doesn’t solve the agency problem, right? You’re sort of, in some sense, taking agency (away) from them by trying to tell them what to do.”
Instead, make a list of activities, tasks, and projects that you can turn to when you’re bored. For Danckert, the primary one is turning to his guitar. But then you should have a second or third or fourth option, so that when that primary thing that usually works doesn’t work, you can turn to these other things on your list.
Despite technology bringing the world to our fingertips, society is experiencing higher levels of boredom, particularly in teenage girls, than it did even one or two decades ago, Danckert said. “Our phones and social media are not solutions to our boredom. In fact, they can make it worse,” he said. “Again, that ties into the agency, because if you’re just sort of mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds, that’s not being very agentic. … It’s going to make your boredom worse in the long run.”
Danckert said he doesn’t want to imply that technology is all bad – engaging in an online fishing community, for example, or finding a YouTube video to learn guitar or knitting can have a positive effect. “It’s that mindless part that makes it probably a negative for your boredom,” he said.
Danckert also argues that boredom will not make you creative. “The evidence for that claim is very weak, and we actually published something fairly recently showing that if I make you bored, you’re actually less creative,” he said.
Instead, people probably are expressing the view that downtime is good for creativity. “Disconnecting from the sort of hustle and bustle of life gives you time to think and maybe means that you have thoughts that are creative and make connections that you otherwise wouldn’t make, and that feels creative. And that I don’t have any issue with,” he said. But boredom is not the ingredient that magically makes someone creative, he said.
Boredom has a message for you, so pay attention. “I don’t think we should embrace boredom, but I also don’t think we should try to outrun it,” Danckert said. “It’s neither good nor bad, so we should just learn to listen to it and figure out what it tells us in that moment. We need to adapt it and respond to it in good ways.”
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