Boredom (synonymous with melancholy and apathy) is one of the main reasons that prevents you from enjoying life. Unfortunately, no medications have yet been invented to help get rid of this mental state. However, you can try to remove unnecessary sensations forever in other ways.
Loneliness, boredom, apathy - all these are dangerous conditions that harm the individual. Therefore, it is imperative to get rid of them. And that’s exactly what this review will be about.
Dangerous mental anguish
Why is boredom so dangerous? It is not considered to be a simple kind of human mood that arises periodically without threatening our personality. In fact, it is one of the main sources of numerous problems.
Is boredom a feeling or an emotion? This is an emotional state that forces you to constantly look for external stimuli, any activity, in order to get rid of the feeling of discomfort caused by the lack of activity.
And there seems to be nothing wrong with that. However, it is worth understanding that when searching for activities, selectivity completely disappears. A person who is “attacked” by boredom is ready to do any, even the most meaningless, work, just so that the negative feeling disappears. Boredom is an emotion, and not a good one at that.
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.
State of dependency
Agree, this is very similar to addiction, where the role of narcotic substances is information, a certain type of activity. In such a situation, a person will begin to have a strong desire to do something, the satisfaction of which is not capable of bringing any tangible pleasure.
Moreover, it is almost impossible to control your condition. All that can be achieved is to temporarily reduce the feeling of discomfort. And then life will become at least a little brighter.
No one denies that a person needs fresh impressions just as much as a change of place, meeting new people, and entertainment. If this does not happen, then the personality will stop developing. However, all this is good within acceptable limits. And boredom is the very feeling that can make you cross all the boundaries of reason.
Prison of time
Time during boredom is subjectively experienced as a viscous substance. This is probably why children experience it especially painfully, because their subjective sense of time is more blurred, it flows more slowly, and therefore the boredom is more vast. Her childhood boredom is involuntarily recalled when looking at the painting “Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya” - she herself recalled that she felt a little strange, sitting for hours on the table in an uncomfortable position, with constantly numb legs:
Portrait of Varia Adoratskaya. Nikolay Feshin. 1914
However, the passage of time gradually accelerates - this concept of “proportional theory” was put forward in 1897 by Paul Janet. When we are 4 weeks old, a week is a quarter of our life, but by the end of the first year it is only a fiftieth of it. If we are lucky enough to live to be fifty, then a whole year will be the fiftieth part of our life. You can clearly see at what speed time passes in different periods of our lives, for example, here.
Increasing the concentration level of the past is in our memory. If it is true that “life is measured not by the number of inhalations and exhalations, but by the moments when you take your breath away,” then with age the density of bright moments in time decreases. Our experiences are less and less intense, and in order to experience the “first feelings” we need more and more effort. Every year, such temporary anesthesia becomes more and more noticeable: the density of events is lower, and the speed of time is faster:
... Of course, at the age of fifty, it seems as if each year flies by faster, and because it constitutes a smaller part of my expanded reserves of existence ...
Vladimir Nabokov. "Hell, or the Joy of Passion"
It is no coincidence that boredom plunges us into nostalgia and thoughts about the past - such a mechanism makes it possible to reflect on experience and fill the future with new meaning.
What is the danger?
Boredom is a state of mind that is extremely dangerous. What troubles can this feeling cause if it becomes chronic?
- The person will begin to constantly experience nervous tension.
- There is a high probability of addiction - alcohol or drugs.
- Long trips, vacations, meetings - all this will begin to cause torment, from which only work can help you get rid of it.
- You won't be able to concentrate.
- Chronic fatigue will appear, which will interfere with relaxation.
- There will be a painful craving for various and useless purchases.
- The brain will simply become clogged with information garbage and numerous tasks.
- There will be a feeling of anxiety and apathy all the time.
This list looks quite impressive. Few people view boredom as the main source of evil, so this set of problems can be surprising.
So why is boredom so dangerous? After all, at first glance, it is a completely ordinary condition that occurs in the absence of activity. Something like hunger or thirst. However, boredom is not only a feeling or a quality of nature, but also a serious personality flaw. Therefore it must be eliminated.
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.
Or maybe this is motivation?
There will always be people who will say that boredom is a serious motivator. And without it, it’s unlikely that anyone will move or do anything. Perhaps she even helped someone achieve great heights in one field or another.
But it’s worth drawing an analogy with drug and alcohol addiction. After all, she also forces people to work so that they have money to buy drugs. And if he does not look for opportunities to earn money, he will have to endure torment. Do you think a person should be grateful to drugs for helping him achieve something?
And the same can be said about boredom, which can turn anyone into a robot that obediently and diligently completes assigned tasks. And if you think that boredom is synonymous with motivation, then this is a mistaken opinion. The motivator should be a keen interest, a desire to improve and reach certain heights, while realizing one’s potential.
What boredom does to a person: the science of wandering consciousness
“Every emotion has a purpose from an evolutionary perspective,” says Sandi Mann, a psychologist and author of The Upside of Leisure: Why Boredom is a Good Thing.
“I wanted to find out why we need an emotion like boredom, which seems like a negative and useless emotion.” So Mann began working in her specialty: boredom. While studying emotions in the workplace in the 1990s, she found that the second most commonly suppressed emotion after anger was—yes, boredom. “They write bad things about her,” she says. “Almost everything is blamed on boredom.”
Diving into the topic of boredom, Mann discovered that it was actually "quite interesting." And it’s certainly not meaningless. Wijnand van Tilburg of the University of Southampton explained the important evolutionary function of this anxious and disgusting feeling: “Boredom drives people to do things that make more sense than what they have at hand.”
“Imagine a world where we weren't bored,” says Mann. “We would be constantly happy with anything—falling raindrops, corn flakes at breakfast.” After understanding the evolutionary meaning of boredom, Mann became interested in whether it had benefits beyond its contribution to survival. “Instinctively,” she says, “I felt that everyone needs to be a little bored in life.”
Mann designed an experiment in which a group of participants were given the most boring task she could think of: copying phone numbers from a phone book by hand. (If anyone has never seen a phone book in their life, Google them). The test was based on the classic creativity test developed in 1967 by J. P. Guilford, an American psychologist who was an early researcher of creativity. In Guilford's original test of alternative uses, the test taker is given two minutes to come up with as many alternative uses as possible for everyday objects—cups, paper clips, chairs. In Mann's version of the creativity test, she prefaced the creativity test with a 20-minute mindless task: copying phone numbers. Subjects were then asked to come up with as many uses as possible for two paper cups. They came up with several ideas of average originality, such as flower pots and toys for the sandbox.
In her next experiment, Mann increased the boring part. Instead of copying numbers from a phone book, subjects had to read the numbers out loud. And although some of them enjoyed doing this and were then removed from the room, most participants found the activity extremely, downright boring. It's harder to get into prostration when you're doing something active like writing numbers than when you're doing something passive like reading. As a result, as Mann predicted, subjects came up with more creative ideas for using paper cups: earrings, telephones, musical instruments, and, her favorite, a Madonna-inspired bra. This group was already looking at cups as more than just containers.
With these experiments, Mann proved her point: bored people think more creatively than others.
But what happens during boredom that triggers your imagination? “When we are bored, we look for some kind of stimulus that is not in our immediate vicinity,” explains Mann. “So we start looking for stimuli by sending our consciousness to travel to different places in our heads. This can stimulate creativity because when you start daydreaming and allow your mind to wander, you go beyond the conscious mind and into the subconscious. This process allows you to create various connections. And it's amazing."
Boredom opens the door to mind wandering, which helps our brains make the very connections that can solve anything from planning dinner to a breakthrough in the fight against global warming. Researchers have only recently begun to understand the phenomenon of mind wandering, the activity our brains engage in when it's doing something boring or doing nothing. Most of the research on daydreaming has been conducted in the last 10 years. With modern technologies for obtaining brain images, every day there are new discoveries about what our brain does not only when we are very busy with something, but also when we are in prostration.
When we do something mindfully—even if we're jotting down numbers in the phone book—we're using the "executive attention network"—the parts of the brain that control and inhibit attention. As neuroscientist Marcus Raechl says, “The attention network puts us in direct contact with the world, here and now.” Conversely, when our mind wanders, we activate a part of the brain called the passive mode network, discovered by Rachel. The passive mode of operation, so called by Rachel, is used to describe the "resting brain"; that is, when we are not focused on an external task with clear goals. Therefore, contrary to the generally accepted point of view, when we withdraw into ourselves, our mind does not turn off.
“From a scientific point of view, daydreaming is an interesting phenomenon because it determines the ability of people to create thoughts in a pure way, as opposed to thoughts that appear as a reaction to events in the external world,” says Jonathan Smallwood, who has studied mind wandering since the beginning of his career. career as a neuroscientist that started 20 years ago. It may not have been a mere coincidence that he received his doctorate in the same year that the passive mode of the brain was discovered.
Smallwood—so fascinated by mind-wandering that he adopted a Twitter handle of that name—explained why the field remains underdeveloped. “It has an interesting place in the history of psychology and neuroscience because of the way cognitive science is organized. In most experiments and theories, we show something to the brain and see what happens.” In the past, much of this task-based approach has been used to understand how the brain works, and it has yielded a wealth of knowledge about how we adapt to external stimuli. “Mind wandering has a special place because it doesn’t fit into this range of phenomena,” says Smallwood.
We are at a pivotal point in the history of neuroscience, according to Smallwood, because with the advent of neuroimaging and other comprehensive tools for figuring out what's going on in the brain, we are beginning to understand functioning that has heretofore eluded us. This includes our sensations experienced during idleness.
The key role of daydreaming became apparent to Smallwood as soon as he began studying it. Prostration is so important to us that “it may be the answer to the question of what distinguishes us humans from less complex animals.” She is involved in a wide range of skills, from creativity to predicting the future.
The brain's passive mode network turns on when the brain is not focused on a single task
. There is still much to be discovered in this area, but what is clear is that passive mode does not mean the brain is inactive. Smallwood is using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural changes that occur when test subjects lie in scanners and do nothing but look at a still image.
It turns out that in passive mode we use about 95% of the amount of energy that we spend during active reflection. Despite the lack of attention, our brain still does quite a lot of work. While people lay in the scanners in Smallwood's experiment, their brains continued to "show highly organized spontaneous activity."
“We basically don’t understand why he’s doing this,” he says. “When you have nothing to do, your thoughts don’t stop.” You keep generating thoughts even if you have nothing to do with them.”
Smallwood and his team are also working to combine this state of unfettered voluntary thought with the state of organized spontaneous brain activity, as they consider them "two sides of the same coin."
The areas of the brain that make up the passive mode network—the medial temporal lobe, the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex—switch off when we switch to tasks that require attention. But they play a very active role in autobiographical memory, mental model (essentially, our ability to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling), and, uniquely, self-image processing, that is, the creation of a coherent image of ourselves.
When we are distracted from the outside world and immersed in ourselves, we do not switch off. We tap into vast amounts of memory, imagine future possibilities, process our interactions with other people, reflect on who we are. We seem to spend time staring at the longest red light in the world, waiting for it to turn green, but our brains arrange ideas and events in the right order.
This is precisely the essence of the difference between mind-wandering and other forms of thought. Instead of sensing, sorting, and understanding things based on how they come to us from the outside, we do so within our own cognitive system. It gives us a chance to reflect and understand things better after the urgency of the moment has passed. Smallwood uses an argument as an example: While an argument is going on, it is difficult to be objective or see things from the other person's point of view. Anger, adrenaline, the physical and emotional presence of another person interfere with analysis. But in the shower or while driving the next day, as your brain relives what happened, your thoughts become deeper. Not only are you thinking about a million possible answers, but perhaps without the “stimulus of the person you were arguing with,” you can look at things from a different perspective and generate some ideas. Thinking about interpersonal interactions in a different way than what happens during a meeting in the real world is an excellent form of creativity stimulated by wandering mind.
“Daydreaming is especially important for a species like us with a high importance of social interaction,” says Smallwood. “This is because the most unpredictable thing in your daily life will be other people.” Our world, from traffic lights to grocery store checkout counters, operates according to a simple set of rules. Unlike people. “Daydreaming reflects the need to understand complex aspects of life, which almost always involve other people.”
After talking with Professor Smallwood, I became even more convinced that filling the free moments of the day with checking email, updating Twitter, or constantly checking the phone is destructive. I've learned why being willing to let your mind wander a little is key to creativity and productivity.
“Well, that’s debatable,” Smallwood said. “People whose minds are in prostration all the time will not be able to do anything at all.”
Really. I didn't like Smallwood's suppression of my enthusiasm, but daydreaming wasn't really always considered beneficial. Freud considered people with detached consciousness to be neurotic. Back in the 1960s, teachers were told that students who dreamed were at risk of developing mental health problems.
Obviously, there are different ways to daydream—and not all of them are productive or positive. In his insightful book The Inner World of Daydreaming, psychologist Jerome Singer, who has studied the wandering mind for more than 50 years, identifies three different styles of daydreaming:
- Uncontrolled attention.
- Dysphoric prostration with guilt syndrome.
- Positive-constructive prostration.
Their names speak for themselves.
People who are poorly able to manage their attention are easily excited, easily distracted, and find it difficult to concentrate even on their daydreams. When our mind wandering becomes dysphoric, our thoughts become counterproductive and negative. We blame ourselves for forgetting someone's birthday, or for not being able to stand up to someone at the right time. We are overwhelmed with emotions such as guilt, anxiety and anger. Some people easily get stuck in this cycle of negative thinking. Not surprisingly, this type of mind wandering is more likely to occur in people who report chronic levels of unhappiness. When dysphoric prostration becomes chronic, people may be prone to destructive behavior such as addiction to gambling, chemicals, or food. The only question is how mind wandering manifests itself in people who complain of chronic levels of unhappiness—whether it simply manifests itself more often in them, or whether it also contributes to a deterioration in their mood. In a 2010 study, “The Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingworth and Daniel Gilbert developed an iPhone app designed to monitor the thoughts, feelings, and actions of 5,000 people at any given time during the day. The app beeped at random times and the subject answered questions about their actions, thoughts about those actions, level of happiness, and other things. Based on their observations, Killingworth and Gilbert found that “people think about things other than what is happening almost as often as they think about what is happening,” and “such thoughts usually make them unhappy.”
You can hear it in any yoga class - the key to happiness lies in living in the present moment. So how does everything work out in reality? Is a wandering mind productive or self-destructive? Apparently, like everything else in this life, daydreaming is a complex and multifaceted thing.
Smallwood was involved in research into the relationship between mood and mind wandering, which concluded that "generating thoughts unrelated to one's current environment can be both a cause and an effect of unhappiness." I'm sorry, what!?
A 2013 study by Florence JM Ruby, Haakon Engen, Tania Singer suggests that not all types of distracted rumination or daydreaming are created equal. Data collected from hundreds of participants showed whether their thoughts were related to the task at hand, whether they were focusing on the past or future, and whether they were thinking about themselves or others in a positive or negative way. The study found that negative thoughts caused negative mood (of course). Distracted thoughts among depressed people were both a cause and a consequence of negative moods, and “thoughts related to the past are especially likely to be associated with negative mood.” But there's still hope—the study also found that "thoughts related to the future and self preceded improvements in mood, even when current thoughts were negative."
“Day dreams have characteristics that allow us to think about our lives in unusual ways,” Smallwood told me. “But in certain situations, maybe you shouldn’t keep thinking about the same thing.” Many states of chronic unhappiness are probably associated with mind wandering simply because these problems cannot be solved.”
Daydreaming is similar to smartphones in that it’s easy to overdo it. Smallwood argues that we shouldn't think of how our phones or our brains work in terms of "good" or "bad." It's all about how we use them. “Smartphones allow us to do amazing things, like connect with people across great distances, but we can get trapped by devoting our lives to them,” he says. “And it’s not the fault of smartphones.” Daydreaming allows us to look at things differently - whether good or bad, but, most importantly, differently.
The flip side of dysphoric prostration, the positive-constructive variety, occurs when our thoughts take a creative direction. We begin to enjoy the possibilities that our brains are able to mentally conjure up almost out of nowhere, as if by magic. This mind-wandering mode reflects our inner desire to explore ideas and feelings, make plans, and solve problems.
How to engage in healthy mind wandering? Let's say you had an argument with a colleague. In the evening, when you cut yourself a salad, you find yourself constantly replaying this scene in your head over and over again. Waves of anger wash over you and you kick yourself for not coming up with some smarter response to his unjustified claim that you weren't 100% invested in the last project. Using positive-constructive reflective thinking, you say goodbye to the past and come up with a way to show him how hard you really have to work for your joint projects. Or you decide to move to another team and no longer interact with this asshole because life is too short.
“Changing a mindset is harder than talking about it,” Smallwood said. — Daydreaming is different from other forms of distraction in that when your thoughts come across certain topics, it speaks volumes about where you are in your life and how you feel about it. The problem is that sometimes when a person's life is not going well, daydreaming becomes more difficult than when life seems easy. Either way, the point is that this pastime gives us the opportunity to understand who we are.”
All those hours as a new mom spent pushing my baby in a stroller because he was colicky and unable to sleep any other way, and worrying that I could be more productive or stay connected to society and the world. what it does actually turned out to be surprisingly helpful - I was unintentionally giving my mind the space and time to reach previously unreachable latitudes. I not only connected to past experiences, but also imagined myself in the future in different places I had planned, and was engaged in life planning.
And while ruminating on unpleasant experiences or constantly thinking back to the past is clearly a byproduct of mind wandering, research by Smallwood and others has shown that after enough time in introspection, our minds begin to lean toward “perspective thinking.” Such thoughts help us find new solutions - for example, in my case it was a completely new career. Daydreaming by nature helps us when we are faced with a difficult task, personal or professional. And boredom is one of the best catalysts for starting this process.
At first glance, boredom and insight are opposites. Boredom, if defined only as a state of fatigue and restlessness without signs of interest, has only negative connotations and should be avoided at all costs; insight is what we strive for, and it represents the quality of brilliant success and unusual mental abilities. Genius, intelligence, talent, lightness versus apathy, stupidity, despondency. It's not obvious, but these two opposite states are very closely related.
Andreas Elpidorou, a researcher in the psychology department at the University of Louisville and a self-described advocate of boredom, explains: “Boredom motivates the pursuit of new goals when current goals are no longer satisfying, attractive, or meaningful to you.” In his 2014 scientific article, The Upside of Boredom, Elpidorou argues that boredom “serves as a regulatory state that supports a person in achieving his or her goals. In the absence of boredom, a person would be trapped in unsatisfying situations and would miss out on many emotionally, mentally, and socially rewarding experiences. Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want, and a push that motivates us to switch goals and projects.”
You could say that boredom is an incubator for insight. It's a messy, unpleasant, confusing, frustrating place that you have to spend a little time in before you can come up with a successful formula or equation. This idea has been repeated many times already. The Hobbit was conceived when J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford professor, "was given a huge pile of exam papers and had to grade them over the summer, which was very difficult and, unfortunately, also boring." When he came across one student's work, which consisted of a blank sheet of paper, he was delighted. “Amazing! There’s nothing to read,” Tolkien told the BBC in 1968. “So I, I don’t know why, scribbled on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” And so the first line of one of the most beloved fantasy books was born. Steve Jobs, who changed the world with his technological ideas, famously said: “I truly believe in boredom. Technological stuff is great, but when you have nothing to do, that can be great too.” Steven Levy, the co-founder of Apple, wrote in Wired magazine how he recalled with nostalgia the long, boring summer months of his youth that fueled his curiosity because "out of curiosity grows everything else," and expressed concern about the erosion of boredom emanating from devices that he helped create.
Steve Jobs was a master of insight. So let’s take his advice to welcome boredom joyfully. Let your knowledge of the science and history of boredom inspire you to bring boredom back into your life. At first you will find it inconvenient, annoying, and you may even get angry, but who knows what you can achieve once you overcome the first phases of boredom and its amazing side effects begin to kick in?
From the book “Bored and Insightful” by Manouche Zomorodi [Bored and Brilliant], 2022.
Why does it occur
Do you often have to say the phrase “I’m dying of boredom”? Before telling you how to get rid of this emotion once and for all, it’s worth understanding the reasons that cause it.
- A person is unable to manage his time. Due to constant progress, people have more free time, because now they no longer have to spend a significant part of their lives trying to get food. And these minutes, not filled with work, many do not know what to do.
- There is no meaning to life. A person can go forward, or he can stand in one place. And yet nothing changes in his perception. He is simply unable to notice the difference between vigorous activity and a waste of time.
- Work is not a calling, and tasks are performed only “for money.” There is no interest as such. In such a situation, a person waits for the lunch break, the end of the working day and the working week. He is not interested in performing his tasks efficiently, and attends work simply because it is necessary.
- Not enough communication. In this situation, one’s own thoughts can poison oneself.
Trying to get rid of boredom can lead to the wrong path. You should consider how you can eliminate this state of mind, causing yourself even greater harm.
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.
Will new sensations help?
Search for new sensations and impressions. It seems that constant travel at first glance is a harmless way to get rid of boredom. However, it requires an almost bottomless wallet and a huge amount of time. In addition, over time, such entertainment will get boring. The same can be said about changing sexual partners. Boredom seems to disappear, but then it appears again. And the more often the change occurs, the shorter the period of time spent without this sensation.
Correct Methods
So how to get rid of this negative feeling correctly? Some fairly effective methods should be listed, and all you have to do is choose the most suitable cure for boredom.
- Find several goals in life that will push you to develop and improve your skills. Thanks to this, you can improve physical and intellectual parameters, as well as relationships with people. You can make an action plan for the near future so that you know in which direction to move.
- You need to learn how to manage your time correctly. Getting up in the morning, a person should be aware of what he will do during the working day and after it. Planning will again help with this. Weekends don't have to be spent solely on the couch watching a movie or TV show. You can devote your free time to communicating with friends, going to the movies, theaters and other events. You can go to nature or make a list of what to see and read. Don't forget about playing sports. With their help, you can get rid of apathy, and not just boredom.
- An excellent way to get rid of negative feelings is to change your job to one that you will like and bring satisfaction. In such a situation, you will be able to occupy your thoughts not with how to quickly complete the assigned tasks and go home, but with how to do everything efficiently.
- Close people will help you get rid of boredom. We need to communicate more often with friends and relatives, relax together, share thoughts and help each other.
Sleep and blood donation
In old cartoons, bored characters always inserted matches into their eyes, and today Japanese neuroscientists confirm that their actions were justified. Scientists experimented on mice, and at the same time studied the behavior of volunteers and discovered a very tangible connection between boredom and the willingness to fall asleep. There is a special region in the rodent brain that causes the animal to close its eyelids when someone begins to outline their economic program. Clever researchers even managed to control these cells: either deprive the rodents of sleep, or, on the contrary, instantly send them into the arms of Morpheus.
So, it turned out that putting a mouse to sleep when a cute animal of the opposite sex ran into its apartment is much more difficult. A chocolate bar or a toy had the same invigorating effect. There are several conclusions from this: firstly, boredom is a great helper when we need to fall asleep. Secondly, perhaps the invention of drugs that will specifically act on the found brain cells and will help you not doze off either in the conservatory or at a meeting of directors is just around the corner.
Such pills could be given not only to people who need hours of boredom to invent an innovative product or write a book, but also to other comrades - those who simply do not know what to do.
According to research from 2011, green melancholy reveals in us a special thirst for meaning, purposeful and meaningful actions.
“What really matters?” - as if a person who was not allowed into the cinema asks himself. And - what a surprise! - the likelihood that he will engage in prosocial activities seriously increases. Blood donation, charity and volunteering all help a person find meaning and significance and are, to some extent, provoked by a boring pastime. So if there is something incredibly dull in the world, it cannot be ruled out that it actually benefits society.
