In 1990, when James Danckert was 18 years old, his older brother Paul was involved in an accident when he crashed his car into a tree. He was pulled out of the crumpled body with numerous fractures and bruises. Unfortunately, there was also a traumatic brain injury.
The rehabilitation period was very long and difficult. Before the accident, Paul was a drummer and loved music. However, even after his broken wrist healed, he had absolutely no desire to pick up the sticks and start playing. This activity no longer brought him pleasure.
Over and over again, Paul complained to his brother that he was incredibly bored. And it wasn’t a matter of bouts of post-traumatic depression. It’s just that now the things that he used to love with all his soul did not evoke absolutely any emotions in him except deep disappointment.
A few years later, James began training to become a clinical neuropsychologist. During his training, he examined about twenty people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries. Thinking about his brother, Dankert asked them if they felt bored. All twenty people who took part in the study responded positively.
This experience greatly helped Danckert in his future career. He currently works as a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. This place is famous because it was here that scientists first began to seriously study boredom.
Academia and Boredom
It is believed that a universal and generally accepted interpretation of the concept of “boredom” has not yet been derived. Boredom is not just a type of depression or apathy. These words cannot be considered synonyms.
Scientists prefer to give the word “boredom” the following definition.
Boredom is a special mental state in which people complain about the lack of even minimal motivation and interest in something.
As a rule, this condition has negative consequences for a person’s mental health, and also significantly affects his social life.
There has been a lot of research on boredom. For example, it turned out that it is one of the reasons that provokes overeating, along with depression and increased anxiety.
Another study looked at the relationship between boredom and driving behavior. It turned out that people prone to boredom drive at a much higher speed than all other participants. They are also slower to respond to distractions and danger.
In addition, in 2003, a survey was conducted among American teenagers, the majority of whom claimed that they were often bored. As it turned out later, such teenagers were more likely to start smoking and using drugs and alcohol at an early age. The research also touched upon issues of education.
Students' performance is directly related to whether they experience boredom or not. Boredom is a problem that requires increased attention.
Jennifer Vogel-Walcutt
teenage psychologist
Scientists are trying to understand how boredom affects our brains, how it affects our mental health, and how it affects our self-control. “We need to do a lot of research on boredom before we can draw any conclusions,” says Shane Bench, a psychologist who studies boredom at the University of Texas.
There are more and more people interested in boredom issues. Geneticists, philosophers, psychologists and historians are beginning to actively unite in order to work together to study it. In May 2015, the University of Warsaw organized an entire conference where topics related to boredom, social psychology and sociology were discussed. In addition, a little later, in November, James Dankert gathered about ten researchers from Canada and the United States for a thematic seminar.
Why is it so important to spend more time alone with yourself?
Boredom reduces the amount of time you can spend alone with yourself because it constantly forces you to look for something to do or socialize. This can be a serious life obstacle. Because in moments of calm contemplation and reflection, the most valuable thoughts come to you. You can make an important decision, rethink your past experience, realize the meaninglessness and futility of your current aspirations, set a goal that is more suitable for you and not follow false impulses imposed on you from the outside.
The more people are busy with their own affairs and the less often they have moments of reflection, the less able they are to make independent decisions and follow a conscious course, since they think little and all their energy is “extinguished” by various activities. Do you know why in the army a soldier must be busy all the time? And so that he thinks less and obeys more.
In totalitarian societies or various book dystopias (books Orwell - 1984, Huxley - Brave New World), in order for an individual to be successfully enslaved by the ruling class, he must be subject to constant information or sensory influence: have an unreasonably long working day in terms of productivity, which must completely exhaust so that there is no strength left. And in moments of relaxation, he either listens to the radio or watches TV with stupid patriotic programs. So no seditious thoughts about the imperfection of the state and the meaninglessness of his life as a social unit, a worker ant, do not come into his head, since there is no time for these thoughts to come.
As a result, a person can no longer spend time alone with himself: he is bored and sometimes even scared. He is panickingly looking for something to do or a way to clog the “information channel.” Now do you understand that boredom does not arise simply as a natural need of consciousness? Rather, this is a consequence of constant busyness, disorderly consumption of information and impressions by the brain, or it is a symptom of existential emptiness and lack of internal content (I’ll talk about this at the end of the article).
As a result, you stop perceiving life as a valuable gift, as a set of opportunities and interesting events, as an existence in the name of yourself! You strive to kill every priceless moment of existence, drown it in unnecessary activities, meaningless entertainment and alcohol. You are in constant flight from yourself, from your thoughts! It turns out that life loses its value for you and you can no longer enjoy it just like that.
History of the study of boredom
The study of boredom began in 1885, when the British polymath Francis Galton published a short report on how restless and inattentive listeners at a scientific meeting behaved.
Quite a lot of time has passed since then, and relatively few people are interested in the topic of boredom. John Eastwood, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, is convinced that this happens because boredom seems to everyone to be a rather trivial thing that is not worth paying close attention to.
Things began to change when, in 1986, Norman Sundberg and Richard Farmer of the University of Oregon showed the world a way to measure boredom. They invented a special scale that could be used to determine the level of boredom without asking the subjects the question “Are you bored?”
Instead, the following statements needed to be confirmed or refuted: “Does time seem to pass too slowly?” “Do you feel that you are not using your full potential when you work?” and “Are you easily distracted?” They were formulated by Sandberg and Farmer based on surveys and interviews in which people talked about how they felt when they were bored. After the respondents gave their answers, each was given a score, according to which the degree of susceptibility to boredom was determined.
Sandberg and Farmer's Boredom Proneness Scale became the starting point for a new round of research. It served as a prototype for other types of scales, and has also become incredibly useful in other applied sciences, helping to link boredom to things like mental health and academic performance.
However, the proposed boredom scale also had significant drawbacks. According to Eastwood, this indicator directly depends on a person’s self-esteem and is therefore very subjective, which spoils the purity of the experiment. In addition, the scale only measures the level of susceptibility to boredom, not the intensity of this feeling. The imprecision of concepts and definitions still creates some confusion among scientists.
Work on improving the boredom scale is still underway. In 2013, Eastwood began developing the Multidimensional Boredom Scale, which includes 29 statements about various sensations. Unlike the Sandberg and Farmer scale, the Eastwood scale measures the state of the respondent at the current moment in time. With its help, you can determine what a person is feeling right now.
However, before measuring the level of boredom, the researchers had to make sure that the participants in the experiment actually experienced it. And this is a completely different task.
Key points
- Boredom is a motivational state: when we are bored, we want to be engaged, which is not at all like laziness or apathy.
- It can push you towards positive or negative behavior, but which path you choose is up to you.
- Boredom serves an important purpose—it signals the need to reclaim authorship throughout life.
- Avoid medication—minimize passive entertainment, which only pacifies discomfort without addressing the root cause of boredom.
- Look for activities that stem from and express your curiosity, creativity, and passions.
- To help you get started, think about your values and goals in life and consider changing your perspective - point your curiosity at something and suddenly tiny details can become exciting.
- Don't let anyone tell you what to do—it's up to you to decide how to respond well when boredom strikes.
The most boring video in the world
In psychology, for many years, one of the most effective ways to create a certain mood in a person is considered to be watching thematic videos. There are special videos that stimulate a person’s emotions such as joy, anger, sadness, and sympathy. That's why Colleen Merrifield, while writing her dissertation, decided to create a video that would be so boring that it would make people cry.
What happens in the video is that two men are in a completely white room with no windows. Without saying a single word, they take clothes from a huge pile and hang them on the lines - jackets, shirts, sweaters, socks. The seconds are ticking: 15, 20, 45, 60. The men are hanging up their clothes. Eighty seconds. One of the men takes a clothespin. One hundred seconds. The men continue to hang up their clothes. Two hundred seconds. Three hundred seconds. And again, no change - the men are hanging up their clothes. The video is looped in such a way that nothing else happens. Its total duration is 5.5 minutes.
Not surprisingly, the people Merrifield showed the video to found it incredibly boring. Then she decided to try to study how boredom affects the ability to concentrate and focus.
Merrifield asked participants to perform a classic attention task: watching spots of light appear and disappear on a monitor. All this took an incredibly long time on purpose. The result exceeded expectations: this task turned out to be many times more boring than the most boring video. More than half of the subjects were unable to cope with it.
This was not a surprise. In many past studies, scientists also asked participants to perform monotonous activities instead of watching videos. In order for a person to begin to get bored, he was asked, for example, to fill out identical forms, unscrew or tighten nuts. Comparing the results of different studies was quite problematic because there was no single standardized approach to methods of stimulating boredom. It was impossible to find out whose results were correct and whose were not.
In 2014, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, published a paper that attempted to begin the standardization process. They identified three groups of activities that most often cause boredom in people:
- repetitive physical tasks;
- simple thinking tasks;
- viewing and listening to special video and audio recordings.
The researchers used Eastwood's Multidimensional Boredom Scale to determine how much each task they performed made subjects feel bored and whether it aroused other emotions in them. There were six unusually dull problems in total. The most boring thing was to endlessly click the mouse, turning the icon on the screen half a turn clockwise. After this, it was decided to no longer show special videos to induce boredom in people, but to use ordinary behavioral tasks instead.
Change your diet
If you are used to starting your morning with oatmeal, cook yourself fried potatoes with brisket. Once is possible.
Prepare food you haven't tried before. There are many different culinary recipes on the Internet. Visit these sites. Try cuisine from different countries. Compare them. Any knowledge makes us stronger.
Watch films that are not from the area you are used to. Replace romance novels and detective stories with popular science literature and vice versa.
Buy groceries not at the nearest store, as usual, but at the other end of the city.
Invite friends you haven't seen for years.
Boredom and self-control
Many scientists associate the occurrence of boredom with a deficit of self-control. The more responsible you are for your actions, the less prone you are to spontaneous manifestations of boredom. This is why researchers often link a predisposition to boredom and a tendency to develop bad habits such as gambling, alcoholism, smoking and overeating.
Does this mean that boredom and lack of self-control are related? Scientists have not yet undertaken to answer this question. Using the example of people who have had traumatic brain injury, Danckert suggests that their self-control system has failed. That is why they begin to behave excessively impulsively and often acquire a lot of bad habits. The scientist managed to notice this while watching his brother.
However, for several years, Dankert's brother actively struggled with problems of self-control and almost stopped complaining of boredom, simultaneously reviving his love for music. Therefore, researchers have every reason to believe that boredom and self-control may depend on each other, but the facts and evidence are not yet sufficient.
Happiness inflation
Here we are trying a kiss on the lips for the first time - and ten years later it turns into automatism. For the first time we get behind the wheel with sweaty palms - as time passes, the road becomes a routine. A kind of inflation of happiness.
But the existential boredom that is constantly present within us requires new sensations. And we start a new business in the hope that it will give meaning to our lives. We decide to change apartment or country in the hope that everything will be new there. We change partners or decide to be alone forever in the hope that the new relationship will not become commonplace.
In the film 50 First Dates, the main character suffers from an unusual disorder: she wakes up every day without remembering the previous ones. Adam Sandler's hero conquers her again and again, receiving that very cherished first kiss every day. But can the fiftieth first kiss still be the same first?
Spoiler alert:
There is success, there is no holiday
If your life is work, work, and more work, life will become extremely boring. Even if you do what you love, you still need to celebrate all your successes, otherwise you will simply stop noticing them. There's no point in having a goal if you don't celebrate achieving it and remind yourself what it means to you.
For example, take a time out and celebrate the transition to a new stage in your activity. Or pat yourself on the back for a job well done. This will increase your self-confidence, add a couple of points to your self-esteem and will motivate you to go further and look for more difficult tasks.
Get a pet
Who, if not the smaller brothers, are able to lift a person’s spirits and constantly make him happy? Pets really prolong life and fill it with meaning, so you will never get tired of it. It’s more pleasant to return home when you know that they are waiting for you there. But it is worth taking a responsible approach to such an important decision and choice of animal. Some pets will definitely bring joy, while others will only cause trouble. Therefore, it is important to study in detail all the information about the breed before getting one.
Birds, fish, turtles and other animals that can calm the nervous system can become pets. But practice shows that the happiest people are those who take a dog or cat into their home. And some people have both for complete harmony. These furry animals charge a person with energy, health, make him more active, confident, sociable, responsible, independent and optimistic.
It is important to think a hundred times before getting a pet. This is a very important decision! Buying an animal can bring not only positive emotions, but also a lot of hassle.
No changes or development for a long time
Over time, everyone grows and develops. What once seemed interesting becomes less enjoyable and exciting. You grow, needs and views change. You can't keep doing the same things over and over again. They will not always bring pleasure.
Always try something new, make changes to existing processes in your work or hobby. For example, take up a new sport. Meet new people and make new friends. Develop an interest in new genres of literature, try watching unfamiliar films or listening to music from someone else’s playlist. Develop new skills, do things that develop your imagination and help you create something new.
Laziness
If you observe social networks, you will notice that laziness is almost cultivated. They joke about it, they compete to see who is the laziest. This erases an important fact: laziness is definitely a negative quality. It leads to the fact that a person cannot force himself to do anything, even what is really necessary. Because of this, life becomes boring and monotonous.
It’s worth asking yourself: why has my life become boring? Because there really is no time? Or are all your free minutes spent reviewing endless news on your social media feed? Is the evening devoted to aimlessly wandering through TV channels?
To overcome laziness, you first have to make an effort and force yourself to do something. To make it easier, you need to learn to enjoy the process, even from doing the most boring work. It’s worth giving yourself the mindset: action is better than inactivity.
You are chasing many goals at once
In order to maintain a keen interest and passion for your business or hobby, realize your goals one by one. After all, if you try to do everything at once, you will quickly begin to feel tired, physically and psychologically.
In this state, will you be able to enjoy life and fulfill your goals in your plan? No, the process will be slow and cumbersome.
Break down each goal into small, achievable tasks. This will give you more strength to work in one direction at a fast pace. Thanks to focus, you will quickly “conquer” one goal and move on to another.
Change the scenery
Almost all people are tired of monotonous life. Everything is already familiar and known, so it begins to seem that nothing new will happen. There will be no prospects and the future will not get better. This is where personal dissatisfaction with life arises. In such cases, psychologists recommend changing the environment in order to relax, get new impressions and recharge with positive emotions. This is very good advice. By following it, you can significantly improve your mood.
If you can take a break from work, you can go on a trip. But time should be spent outside the hotel walls. A great idea would be to visit natural beauty (deserts, mountains, steppes, jungles), castles, palaces or unique national holidays (Venice Carnival, German Oktoberfest, Hindu Holi - the festival of colors) with an experienced guide.
If you don’t have extra finances, you don’t have to go on an expensive trip. You can visit local history and art museums, antique souvenir shops, national gardens, and parks within the city. Yes, it’s elementary - go to the beach, to the cinema, swimming pool, bowling and other entertainment venues. The main thing is to visit a new place.
Find your favorite thing
If you’re tired of being, it means you don’t have a job you adore that makes you want to live. Therefore, you need to find your purpose, your favorite thing. Those who have it do not have negative thoughts, psychological and physical problems. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, then you need to try and experiment. Then there will be not only money, but also success, happiness, meaning in life and the opportunity to give happiness to others.
