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.
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.
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.
Boring job
Life can seem boring if most of it is spent doing work you don't like. In order not to howl with melancholy, some psychologists recommend doing work as if it brings pleasure - this is a way to beat your perception. If it doesn’t work out, then you should try, doing your work and focusing completely on it, without being distracted by thoughts about your lunch break or flirting with a colleague. It's easier to get carried away by a process you're completely focused on.
There can be a great temptation to do something you don't like carelessly. This is also obviously a dead end path. On the contrary, if you do your job in the best possible way and monitor your results, your work will be more interesting. Some people compare work to an empty house. Doing only what you need to do is like living in an empty house. And if you bring something of your own into it, it will be more interesting.
For example, the cashier is required to say hello, offer a package, punch the item and take the money. But if this cashier remembers regular customers, greets them and remembers, for example, that they never take a package or inquires about the health of other family members, he himself will be more interested in his job.
It is important to get rid of a negative attitude towards your business and gossip that someone is given a more interesting job. By talking about this you can convince not only others, but also yourself. This approach does not make you happy.
Another way to add variety to a boring job is to get better at it. Improve your qualifications, or learn more about communicating with people or about the technology you will have to work with. By gaining new knowledge, it is easier to see the big picture, it becomes easier to solve problems and, in general, life is more interesting. In addition, there is a greater chance that a person who is good at his job will be valued more: his salary will be increased or he will be offered a different position.
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:
Lack of time
It may seem strange, but some people may find life boring because they believe that they do not have enough free time. Firstly, as stated above, they can try to enjoy what they spend most of their time doing.
You can try to arrange a day for yourself without the Internet and TV. This will help you notice how much time is actually wasted. But they could be devoted to something actually interesting: learning a new language, a hobby, communicating with loved ones.
How to get rid of boredom
Photo: Pexels.com
The first thing you can do to get rid of boredom is to introduce meditation into your life for relaxation and peace. Turn them on, lie back and allow the tension points in your head and throughout your body to unravel and release. To combat this negative condition, try to get enough sleep and rest regularly. Find time to walk, turn off your phone for a while and just enjoy the opportunity to be alone with yourself. Initiate meetings with friends and organize your own leisure time.
Add these items to your to-do list and just start doing them.
Find positive things in your environment and life. Try to record your successes and achievements. For example, if at work you have to do something you don’t like, try to perform your duties even better so that you can be proud of your success.
Add time to exercise in your daily routine. This could be table tennis, brisk walking - you don’t need to exhaust yourself too much.
The state of boredom can last from three months to six months, but then recovery will begin, your psyche will calm down, and you will feel better.
What else can you do?
There are opportunities to bring interest into your life every day. For example, set yourself a goal every day to do something differently than usual. It could be a small thing: for example, instead of taking the bus to work, ride a bike or walk. The changes don't have to be rational: it may be faster and more convenient to travel by bus. But you can drink coffee on foot along the way. Everyone decides for himself what exactly new he will do: put on a different shirt, smile at a colleague, or put a flower in a pot on his desk.
Being may not determine consciousness in everything, but it certainly influences it. This means you need to change something in your home. Rearranging the furniture or re-pasting the wallpaper can also help you learn something new. An important step is to throw away everything old, something that no one has used for the last couple of years, but is lying around just in case. Our attitude towards life is greatly influenced by the things we have.
There is a simple psychological trick: if you want to put things in order in your head, put things in order in your closet. Following this analogy, you can get the conclusion: if you want changes to happen in your head, change something in the closet and in the house, throw away the old, dull, broken and give it to someone you don’t need.
Another way to avoid boredom is to agree to help someone more often. This is an opportunity to get joy from what was useful, make new friends and learn something new. There is no need to dive headlong into altruism, allowing people to sit on your neck. But you shouldn’t be too upset because of someone’s ingratitude either: we do good first of all for ourselves.
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.
What not to do
Do not try to abuse alcohol or take drugs. This is not the kind of variety that brings long-term results. Firstly, after alcohol or drug intoxication, life does not seem so interesting. Secondly, the consequences that appear later do not make you bored, but they also cannot make you happy.
Don't spend hours on the Internet. Jokes, videos, news (fake and real) - the series of changing pictures on social networks is simply addictive. Some of this can be really interesting, but most of it is viewed automatically, just looking for something new.
Firstly, this takes an unreasonably long time - if all the time spent on social networks is spent on learning to play some musical instrument, then in a couple of months you can achieve good results. Secondly, the Internet creates the illusion of busyness. It’s like expecting to have a toned body by watching fitness classes: expecting to have an interesting life for yourself by watching how exciting it is for someone else.
Don't feel sorry for yourself. This is the root of laziness and most fears. There is no need to feel sorry for yourself, giving up after the first thought that something is impossible. These may be thoughts: “Well, I can’t get up so early!” Why? I really can’t because I have to be at work at five in the morning? Or is it because we stay on our smartphones until midnight? "I can not do it!"
Really can't, or am I just not willing to put in more effort than usual? If you constantly feel sorry for a child, without forcing him to read, get up early for school, study and train hard, he will eventually grow up to be a deeply unhappy person. The same thing happens to an adult who is used to feeling sorry for himself.
If you live each day as just a to-do list, life can actually become boring. But this is not a verdict: you can always change either your lifestyle or your attitude towards it. And enjoy these changes.
Stella, Svirsk
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.
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], 2021.
How to treat chronic boredom
There is no need to despair. If boredom is deep-rooted and arose due to the shocks of the past ten years of such a life, then there is still a way out.
The first thing to do is to take care of your values and desires, giving them the same attention as you give to other people. And do it with the same enthusiasm.
Answer the questions for yourself: what do you love, what do you want to get? Test, try new things. Remember what you like, even if we are talking about your favorite color, weather, favorite treat. As children, many had questionnaires in notebooks in which we answered the questions: “What is your name, what boy’s name do you like, what’s the girl’s name?” This is roughly how you need to regress into your little self and start collecting bits and pieces of information about yourself: what you liked, what you loved.
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Then try adding gamification to your usual everyday activities: throw ingredients into soup with an ominous laugh, jump around the apartment on one leg, throw out trash backwards. Have you always drank tea from a cup? Pour into a jar. Such unusual actions lead the brain off its usual route. And this is the first step you can take.
Over time, when the motivation for change awakens within you and you really start to change something, the boredom will pass.
Boredom is not an event, but your perception of reality. It leads to dissatisfaction with life, with yourself and with the people around you. Without paying enough attention to this problem, you risk becoming dependent: on food, changing pictures (when you feel good only when traveling, but not at home) or an endless series of partners. There is a way out, but first it is important to realize your feelings, acknowledge them and begin to influence your own body and life.
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