Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too
This most ordinary of feelings is proving far richer than anyone had expected
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Everyone recognises the sensation: your thoughts refuse to settle, the minutes seem to drag, and nothing on offer looks likely to lift your mood. Pinning the feeling down precisely enough to examine it in a laboratory, however, has turned out to be surprisingly awkward. Part of the trouble is that boredom shades into so many neighbouring states — irritation, listlessness, gloom and plain indifference among them. Researchers cannot even agree on whether it is invariably a dull, low-energy condition, or whether the jittery, can't-sit-still version deserves the same name. Anneli Virtanen, a psychologist at the University of Tampere in Finland, likens it in her book The Restless Mind to nausea — a response whose task is to keep us clear of particular circumstances. 'Where nausea steers us away from food that might poison us,' she writes, 'boredom may steer us away from company and settings that offer us nothing.'
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Working from interviews about how people actually experience being bored, Lukas Brandt and his colleagues at the University of Graz in Austria have lately mapped out five separate varieties, which they label vacant, drifting, seeking, agitated and resigned. Each can be located on a simple grid: one axis stretches from low to high arousal, the other from pleasant to unpleasant feeling. What Brandt finds striking is that, although most of us pass through every variety at one time or another, we each tend to lean heavily towards a single one. The version to be most wary of is the agitated kind, in which high arousal collides with thoroughly negative feeling. The kindest is the vacant sort, where a person, though absorbed in nothing rewarding, stays calm and untroubled. Whether particular personalities are drawn towards particular types of boredom is a question that has yet to be settled.
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Rosa Feldmann, a psychologist at Ghent University in Belgium, takes the case still further. Every emotion, she maintains, exists for some purpose, and boredom is no exception. Her own work suggests that a bored mind is a more inventive one. 'People dread boredom,' she notes, 'yet it can be the doorway to all sorts of remarkable ideas.' In a study she published last year, volunteers who had first been made thoroughly bored — by spending a quarter of an hour transcribing entries from a dictionary — went on to devise far more imaginative uses for an ordinary plastic spoon than a comparison group did. A dull, undemanding task suits creativity precisely because it lets the mind roam, Feldmann argues; indeed, she recommends that we deliberately build more boredom into our days.
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Not everyone is persuaded. Daniel Voss, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, objects that once your mind is wandering freely, you are no longer bored — to his thinking, boredom is by definition a state we do not want. This is not to deny that it may be adaptive. Physical pain is adaptive too, he points out: without it we would come to serious harm, yet no one would argue that we should go looking for pain, and boredom, however useful evolution has made it, can turn poisonous when left to fester. What lies at the very heart of boredom, for Voss, is the mind's failure to shift its 'attention system' into gear, and the result is an inability to concentrate on anything at all, so that time appears to crawl. Worse still, the harder you struggle to put things right, the more wretched you may feel. 'People reach out to the world, and when they fail to connect, the frustration and irritation set in,' he says. Most troubling of all, in Voss's view, is that a repeated failure to marshal one's attention can tip a person into a state of no longer knowing what to do — and no longer caring.
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Why the attention system should break down in the first place is what Voss's group is now investigating. The research is at an early stage, but they suspect that personality accounts for at least part of it. A proneness to boredom has been tied to a range of traits. Those whose behaviour is driven chiefly by the pursuit of reward appear to suffer worst of all, whereas a quality such as inquisitiveness seems to lift a person's threshold for it. Further signs that boredom does real damage come from comparing people who are easily bored with those who are not: the former tend to fare worse in their schooling, their working lives and their fortunes generally. Boredom, admittedly, does not kill anyone directly — the danger lies in what we do to relieve it. So how might it be eased before matters reach that point? Brandt's team offers one answer. In work with adolescents, they found that youngsters who 'approach' a tedious situation — recognising it as dull and throwing themselves into it regardless — reported less boredom than those who reached instead for snacks, television or their social-media feeds.
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There may even be a fresh source of boredom in the way we now live, suggests the psychologist Mira Lindqvist. 'Modern life bombards us with stimulation, and yet people still struggle to find meaning in it,' she observes. The remedy she proposes is not more mental stimulation but less: rather than reaching once more for our phones, we might let boredom do its work and prompt us to engage with the world around us in some more meaningful fashion.
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Question 1 - 6
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of heading
What schools can do to reduce boredom
Sorting boredom into categories
Working out who suffers most from boredom
A fresh cause of boredom and a way to respond
Why boredom is hard to pin down for researchers
The useful things boredom can produce
Which age groups feel boredom most
A risk that boredom can bring