Boredom: What it can do for us

Contributors: Daniela Pasqualini and Alice Rushing, MASc. Psychologist

Everyone’s experienced the restless agitated feeling of boredom – having so much energy and not knowing where to apply it but needing to put it somewhere. Boredom has been the long-term frustration of many of us during this pandemic and is associated with many maladaptive behaviors such as substance abuse, binge eating and excessive gambling.

But why would something so widely experienced be so seemingly unhelpful?

The truth is, it’s not.

Boredom has a similar function to pain in that it works to motivate us to cause change in our current reality. People can most often experience boredom when they are mentally ‘done’ or unengaged with an activity or goal – the negative feeling of boredom pushes us to reassign purpose in our lives by either reengaging with our current activity or finding a new one.

Boredom can also often occur when we are ‘half-committed’ to an activity; we are ‘half paying attention,’ so our brains aren’t able to completely focus on either subject and becomes unengaged and in need of an activity that we can focus on entirely.

To help ourselves progress from boredom, we can determine if what we need is to completely refocus on the task at hand or to find a more engaging one right now.

It is important to understand that boredom only becomes a truly unhelpful state when we do nothing about it and instead ruminate in its feeling, or seek out negative coping mechanisms, such as abusing substances or continuously turning to adrenaline-inducing activities. Boredom is an intricate mental state with an ever-growing body of research behind it.

In any case, boredom exists to help us progress and adjust our lives, keeping us engaged and pushing us to learn and live well. With time and practice we can identify the symptoms of being bored with increasing ease, and it can be turned into an astonishingly life-enriching and positive state.

References

Bench SW, Lench HC. On the function of boredom. Behav Sci (Basel). 2013 Aug 15;3(3):459-72. doi: 10.3390/bs3030459. PMID: 25379249; PMCID: PMC4217586.

Tam KYY, van Tilburg WAP, Chan CS. What is boredom proneness? A comparison of three characterizations. J Pers. 2021 Aug;89(4):831-846. doi: 10.1111/jopy.12618. Epub 2021 Feb 3. PMID: 33484603.

Westgate, E. C. (2020). Why Boredom Is Interesting. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(1), 33–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419884309