is boredom good for you essay

• Mental Health/Psychology

Being Bored Can Be Good for You—If You Do It Right. Here’s How

I f you’re waiting for brilliance to strike, try getting bored first. That’s the takeaway of a study published recently in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries , which found that boredom can spark individual productivity and creativity.

In the study, people who had gone through a boredom-inducing task — methodically sorting a bowl of beans by color, one by one — later performed better on an idea-generating task than peers who first completed an interesting craft activity. (The task: to come up with excuses for being late that wouldn’t make someone look bad.) The bored folks outperformed the artists both in terms of idea quantity and quality, as ranked by objective outsiders who assigned uniqueness scores to each one.

Those findings are likely no surprise to Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. Mann is the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good , and a proponent of embracing the emotion, negative connotations and all.

Here’s why being bored can be a good thing for your mind, imagination and productivity, and how to do it right.

Boredom sparks creativity

At its core, boredom is “a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied,” Mann says. “If we can’t find that, our mind will create it.” As demonstrated by the new study and plenty others before it , boredom can enable creativity and problem-solving by allowing the mind to wander and daydream. “There’s no other way of getting that stimulation, so you have to go into your head,” Mann says. You may be surprised by what you come up with when you do.

Boredom is good for your mental health

Daydreaming can be “quite a respite” and provide a brief escape from day-to-day life, Mann says. But it’s also beneficial to simply step away from screens, work and other stressors long enough to feel bored. Studies have shown, for example, that modern tools including work emails , social media and dating apps can strain mental health — so taking a break can be a valuable opportunity to recharge.

How to be bored the right way

Mann says it’s important not to conflate boredom with relaxation. A purposefully tranquil activity, such as yoga or meditation , likely doesn’t meet the definition of trying and failing to find stimulation.

To tap into true boredom, she suggests picking an activity that requires little or no concentration — like walking a familiar route, swimming laps or even just sitting with your eyes closed — and simply letting your mind wander, without music or stimulation to guide it.

It’s also crucial to unplug during this time, Mann says. Our cultural attachment to our phones, she says, is paradoxically both destroying our ability to be bored, and preventing us from ever being truly entertained.

“We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom, because every time we get our phone out we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems,” Mann says, adding that people can become addicted to the constant dopamine hit of new and novel content that phones provide. “Our tolerance for boredom just changes completely, and we need more and more to stop being bored.”

Next time you find yourself in line at the grocery store, in a tedious meeting or killing time in a waiting room, resist the urge to scroll. You’re bound to get bored — and your brain, mood and work performance just might improve.

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Write to Jamie Ducharme at [email protected]

Why Boredom is Good For You

Fab giovanetti, author of reclaim your time off , explores the value of boredom for boosting creativity and productivity , welldoing.org readers can access a discount on fab giovanetti's book – code below, we have coaches ready to support you if you are feeling stuck, wanting to shift your mindset and move forward – find yours here .

I hope you don’t mind if I ask: how old are you?  I'm asking because I'm part of a generation that got very comfortable with the idea of being bored – we kind of had it forced on us. I find not everyone has truly experienced real boredom – away from screens, with no  distractions readily available at their fingertips.

When we were all confined to our homes during the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people met the feeling of being bored for the first time, and it only highlighted how scared we are of the idea of boredom. Boredom is bad. We must avoid it at all costs. We are uncomfortable  with being bored.

There was a time before we came to fear boredom in our children, before we offered permanent stimulation and entertainment, surveillance and never-ending activities. Before the instant gratification of the scroll or the YouTube “next up”. As a child, we used to have to wait  for things. Something being delivered by post (there was no Amazon Prime) may have taken six–eight weeks  in the 1980s. That would simply be inconceivable to a child now, when six–eight hours  (more like minutes!) might be pushing their patience.

But – here’s a new way of seeing boredom.

I personally do not associate it with anything negative. I can remember hundreds of times I felt bored as a young adult and even as a child. The hours spent in Russian class, doodling away, or the times I would steal my mum’s camera to shoot short movies with my stuffed toys. Boredom allowed me to get creative. Being bored – if you allow it to – lifts the lid on what your body might be trying to tell you. Your inner child. Your deepest desires. 

Let me use a practical example here, if I may. Often, as I am writing or walking, I dance in the middle of the room or the park, listening to a song. Why? Most times it’s because I just feel like it . I do it because I feel happy; it’s a feeling that comes over me without conscious thought. I do it for no reason . Boredom can be a turnstile to great things. To huge epiphanies, to joy, to freedom. To fun. These are the things that “top up” our brain power and invite greater productivity.

I am here to make sure boredom’s bad rep is dismantled once and for all. Over the past 100 years, the way we consume content has drastically changed (think Netflix, for example). As John Eastwood, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto, puts it: “We are very used to being passively entertained ... We have changed our understanding of the human condition as one of a vessel that needs to be filled.”

Take out your journal and write down the answer to these questions: 

1. What are you truly afraid of about “down time”? 

2. What will happen if you are not “busy”? 

Make sure you write down a list of all the things that will happen if you are not “busy”, or, for example, not spending your down time on social media but actually being with yourself, truly with yourself, listening to what you  really feel.

Which thoughts, beliefs or fears come up when your mind and body are quiet? How can you learn to sit with the uncomfortable feelings and embrace them? Essentially, we don’t know how to do “nothing” as we haven’t had the practice. Nevertheless, reconnecting with boredom can be incredibly beneficial, not just for our mental health – for switching our brains out of “doing” and into “being” and for soothing our nervous systems – but also for our creativity. Studies clearly back this up, suggesting that activities like walking can improve both productivity and creativity.17 They showed that boredom helped boost individual productivity on an idea-generation task for participants, which means it allows their thoughts to roam freely during activities such as walks, encouraging people to focus on what truly matters without any form of distractions.

Manoush Zomorodi’s book Bored and Brilliant  has inspired “Bored and Brilliant Challenges”, where participants are encouraged to watch but not photograph   their world, to write down small observations about their environment, and to block out time when they won’t be available online – all with the aim of boosting their individual creative process.

I say, embrace the boredom, let it be your friend. Do not shy away from it.

Practise being bored. What does “being bored” look like to you? What does it feel like? Do you have a creeping sensation to check your phone within seconds? Could you go without electronics for 24 hours? Can you even walk down the street without having your phone in your hand? Why not try? 

It all starts with your mindset. Yes, dear reader, I’m afraid no three-step blueprint, productivity hack or fancy tool can help you with finding work-life balance until you do the inner work to understand how you arrived at the working patterns you find yourself in. Mindset is where everything  starts. And, in order to change our beliefs, we need to start asking ourselves questions.

I once posed a very simple question to an audience of freelancers and entrepreneurs. I asked our community, peers and founders how they track and acknowledge success in work. It turns out, most of them were blindsided: they had simply never been asked this question before. Most people are either too busy working to find new work, or too busy finding new work to do what’s already on their plates, and a primary career goal was being able to balance the two. A lot of them also agreed that “having more time to enjoy life” was the reason they followed this solo career path. Given that you may have picked up this book because you find yourself grappling with the pressures of an employed job, which may now involve working solo and remotely since the pandemic, this applies to you as well. How do we unlock that time, rather than be swallowed whole by remote working?

When the same question was put to various employees in a LinkedIn poll, most of them said they were “told” what success looks like by their bosses or organisations. They followed metrics and targets set by their companies, because they lacked the guidance to set effective metrics for themselves. Yet, they also argued that they would feel more inspired if allowed to define what success would mean to them and have an active saying in the decision- making process.

Let me share with you two questions that can help you reframe work-life balance and what success means to you, whether you are a self-employed business owner or an employed worker in a large organisation – and everything in between.

Question 1: What did I learn today? 

Continual learning, and a curiosity about what life teaches you (both through “success” and “failure”) is one of the key traits that makes successful people successful. Every day is a school day. An openness to learning pushes you to acquire a skill or piece of knowledge that you didn’t have before, and it requires focus (more about focus, and flow, later). Curiosity is the hallmark of a growth mindset – which means you believe that there are infinite possibilities, that you can  grow, develop, get better.

Learning is about developing skills that help you uncover opportunities that you would never have seen otherwise: it can happen in the form of life lessons, a new skill or a new technique you are looking to implement. So, ask yourself regularly “What did I learn today?” as a way of not only noticing and acknowledging what you have done, but also of opening up your possibilities.

Question 2: Who did I help/inspire today? 

This is one of my favourite questions because, well, I am all about making an impact. Making an impact means measuring your day and how successful it was through impact rather than how many items you ticked off your to-do list. Taking the time to realise how you have added value to other people’s lives is an incredible tool, and one to cherish fondly. I can tell you that most times the simplest questions are the most powerful.

Fab Giovanetti is an entrepreneur, writer and marketing consultant. She is the author of  Reclaim Your Time Off.  A discount is available to welldoing.org readers using the code Welldoing20 from https://www.watkinspublishing.com

Further reading

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Why boredom can be good for you

Visiting Fellow at the School of Education & Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia

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Teresa Belton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Being trapped in a tedious job, with no possibility of escape, is a recipe for real boredom. This kind of boredom is unpleasant and definitely bad for us . But a flurry of recent media interest on the subject of boredom suggests that it is a frequent experience that really bothers people and is not limited to the workplace. This must tell us something about contemporary life.

One of the defining features of today’s culture is the near ubiquity of mobile digital technology, and smart phones in particular . Look around any bus, waiting room or queue, and chances are that many of the people confined there will be head bent, thumbing-tapping or scrolling down. Even at home, phones and their menus are never far from reach.

To be able to be transported to any time or place, real or virtual, to access unlimited information and entertainment, or to carry out unfettered communication, is an extraordinary possibility, with untold positive potential. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of people now sense that constant connection is not good for them and feel the need for a “digital detox” .

Go with the ‘Flow’

Turning to one’s smart phone in order to fill or kill time in the hiatuses of life has become a widespread, unthinking habit, an automatic response to a lull in activity. It is a distraction from the impatience of waiting for time to pass. Paradoxically, such an attempt to avoid boredom, may, it seems, actually result in a kind of dissatisfaction, which is itself experienced as boredom. Psychologist Mihalyi Csickzentmihalyi’s concept of “Flow” explains why .

Flow is the satisfying feeling of complete absorption we get when we’re wholly focused on an enjoyable, open-ended activity, of which we are in control but which stretches our abilities – such as rock climbing, writing, solving an equation or building a piece of furniture. But if our skills are greater than those needed to accomplish the activity – such as casual internet use – boredom is the result. Consequently, digital “surfing” can be psychologically as well as physically superficial.

In our hectic lives, in which we’re bombarded by attention-grabbing external stimuli, the chance, instead, to withdraw for a while is an important opportunity to recharge mental batteries. Moments when there seems to be “nothing to do” are times when we can turn inwards, to reestablish our relationship with our self and cultivate an inner life.

We can revisit past experiences, enjoy them afresh, maybe see them in a different light and gain new understanding, or rethink future plans. Such times also offer us the chance to be fully in the here and now. We can look around and notice new details, developing our familiarity with our own environment and our sense of belonging to it and it to us. This is important for well-being. A longer period with time on our hands can lead to the discovery of a new interest – if it’s not frittered away with distractions.

But if we are used to being constantly busy, unoccupied time, alone with our thoughts, can be hard to tolerate . If so, these suggestions might help.

Try to see the challenge of learning to be still as a form of adventurous living; to look forward to having “down time” or “quiet time” rather than fearing boredom; or to borrow from clowning tradition the practice of “staying with the problem” , that is, actively engaging with a problematic situation until a novel solution suggests itself.

Just pottering, carrying out simple tasks like washing up, deadheading garden flowers or mending, or lying on the grass looking up at the sky, can help the mind to disengage from purposeful thought and wander where it will, daydreaming, making new connections, reflecting, problem solving. Indeed, such free range mental activity is now understood by neuroscientists to be important for healthy brain function .

Embrace the gaps

While boredom signifies a lack of stimulus, gaps and pauses in engagement are potentially of great personal value. People who fully appreciate this are the those who say they never get bored: they are always able to find something that interests them to think about or do, or can find contentment in simply being. In business parlance, time is money, but time has its own intrinsic value. We need to learn to appreciate and enjoy raw time as a precious resource.

Indeed, people like the happily modest material consumers who took part in a study for my book Happier People Healthier Planet are notable for actually preferring to have control over their time than plentiful spending money. Viewing unassigned time as a positive asset encourages the development of inner resources, such as curiosity, playfulness, imagination, perseverance and agency, out of which all sorts of fulfilling activities can emerge.

A number of creative professionals have spoken of the benefit of boredom for their creativity . Novelist Neil Gaiman, for example, finds that getting really bored is the best way to come up with new ideas, and because constant social networking makes boredom impossible he committed himself to a period offline .

Millionaire businessman Felix Dennis, meanwhile, finding himself grounded in a hospital bed and bored silly without his phone, looked around for something else to do. As all he could find was a block of Post-it Notes on the nurses’ station and “you can’t write a novel or a business plan on a Post-it Note”, he tried his hand at writing a poem. Several published volumes of poetry followed .

Winnie the Pooh understood the need for a vacant mind. “Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get,” he said in The House at Pooh Corner. “They’re things that get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”

Farmers learnt long ago that land which is allowed to lie fallow from time to time becomes more productive. It seems that the same can be true of the human mind.

Listen to Teresa Belton in our latest Anthill Podcast on the theme of Growing Up .

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What Boredom Actually Means

The virtues and frustrations of being bored

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In 1933, the writer James Norman Hall had a bone to pick with the concise nature of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary . It defined boredom as “being bored; ennui.” “To define [boredom] merely as ‘being bored,’ appallingly true though this may be, is only to aggravate the misery of the sufferer who, as a last desperate resource, has gone to the dictionary for enlightenment as to the nature of his complaint,” Hall wrote in The Atlantic.

Hall proceeds to explain that a dictionary can’t help those suffering from boredom; exercise can’t do much either, in his view (“I have climbed mountains, and boredom has climbed with me”). All a person can do, he argues, is hold on until the moment the boredom chooses to leave. But Atlantic writers in recent years have also pointed to the benefits of boredom—how it can slow us down, how it can motivate us. Today’s reading list takes a closer look at what we really mean when we say, “I’m bored.”

The Virtues of Boredom

By Julie Beck

What’s going on under the surface when people feel bored?

Kierkegaard’s Three Ways to Live More Fully

By Arthur C. Brooks

Take a cue from the Danish philosopher: Instead of seeking a new life, go deeper into the one you have.

Boredom Is Good for You

By Jude Stewart

The surprising benefits of stultification

Still Curious?

• Why boredom affects us so much : If being isolated at home is starting to feel like your own personal prison, it’s because tedium is also used as a severe form of carceral punishment, Saida Grundy wrote in 2020.
• The state of being bored : Read Hall’s full 1933 essay. “Boredom is a lesser malady of the soul, of yet undiscovered origin,” he writes.

Other Diversions

• The return of TV’s most soulful show
• The barcode engineered its own downfall.
• Nine underrated movies that are worth your time

I’ll leave you with Margaret Atwood’s poem “Bored” :

“I could hardly wait to get

the hell out of there to

anywhere else. Perhaps though

boredom is happier”

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Three Essays on Boredom

Boredom has consistently been recognized as a powerful emotion that pervades modern society. Yet despite academic, literary, and media commentaries on boredom’s importance, it has historically received sporadic and sparse attention from scientific researchers. This trend of neglect has begun to change course, and researchers have recently made progress in measuring boredom in a given situation, generating a theory of boredom to account for its various causes, and documenting the correlates of boredom proneness. Nevertheless, some significant gaps remain. This dissertation contributes to the rising tide of boredom research by addressing three gaps in the literature. First, the majority of past researchers have confined their examination of boredom to one-shot surveys and laboratory studies, which has narrowed the shape of research questions and can limit the external validity of findings. The first empirical paper (Chapter 2) leverages a rich experience sampling dataset to document boredom’s prevalence, examine its situational and demographic correlates, and explore whether situational differences can account for group differences (e.g., whether men are more bored than women because of differences in how they spend their time). In addition to the gap in empirical work outside the laboratory, the work on boredom inside the laboratory is characterized by a significant methodological limitation, the lack of a validated boredom elicitation task. The second empirical paper (Chapter 3) addresses this methodological gap by testing and comparing the effectiveness of boredom inductions. This necessary methodological development contributes to the internal validity of laboratory experiments, which are indispensable in addressing boredom’s causal factors. Recently, a comprehensive theory outlining boredom’s function and causal determinants was proposed (Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, 2013). However, this theory has not been empirically tested, the main goal of the third essay (Chapter 4). These three essays contribute to empirical knowledge about the experience of boredom in everyday life, provide a validated methodological tool necessary to manipulate boredom in controlled laboratory settings, and advance the development of a comprehensive theory of state boredom that can be used to predict boredom’s occurrence and inform interventions. Taken together, these essays characterize the nature of boredom in society and help explain when, and why, this interesting emotion occurs.

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What Does Boredom Do to Us—and for Us?

Quick inventory: Among the many things you might be feeling more of these days, is boredom one of them? It might seem like something to disavow, automatically, when the country is roiling. The American plot thickens by the hour. We need to be paying attention. But boredom, like many an inconvenient human sensation, can steal over a person at unseemly moments. And, in some ways, the psychic limbo of the pandemic has been a breeding ground for it—or at least for a restless, buzzing frustration that can feel a lot like it.

Fundamentally, boredom is, as Tolstoy defined it, “a desire for desires.” The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, describing the feeling that sometimes drops over children like a scratchy blanket, elaborated on this notion: boredom is “that state of suspended animation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” In a new book, “ Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom ,” James Danckert, a neuroscientist, and John D. Eastwood, a psychologist, nicely describe it as a cognitive state that has something in common with tip-of-the-tongue syndrome—a sensation that something is missing, though we can’t quite say what.

Danckert and Eastwood are hardly alone in their inquiries. In the past couple of decades, a whole field of boredom studies has flourished, complete with conferences, seminars, symposiums, workshops, and a succession of papers with such titles as “In Search of Meaningfulness: Nostalgia as an Antidote to Boredom” (been there) and “Eaten Up by Boredom: Consuming Food to Escape Awareness of the Bored Self” (definitely been there). And, of course, there’s a “ Boredom Studies Reader ,” which bears the suitably stolid subtitle “Frameworks and Perspectives.”

Boredom, it’s become clear, has a history, a set of social determinants, and, in particular, a pungent association with modernity. Leisure was one precondition: enough people had to be free of the demands of subsistence to have time on their hands that required filling. Modern capitalism multiplied amusements and consumables, while undermining spiritual sources of meaning that had once been conferred more or less automatically. Expectations grew that life would be, at least some of the time, amusing, and people, including oneself, interesting—and so did the disappointment when they weren’t. In the industrial city, work and leisure were cleaved in a way that they had not been in traditional communities, and work itself was often more monotonous and regimented. Moreover, as the political scientist Erik Ringmar points out in his contribution to the “Boredom Studies Reader,” boredom often comes about when we are constrained to pay attention, and in modern, urban society there was simply so much more that human beings were expected to pay attention to—factory whistles, school bells, traffic signals, office rules, bureaucratic procedures, chalk-and-talk lectures. (Zoom meetings.)

Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard considered boredom a particular scourge of modern life. The nineteenth-century novel arose in part as an antidote to the experience of tedium, and tedium often propelled its plots. What was Emma Bovary, who arrived in 1856, if not bored—by her plodding husband, by provincial existence, by life itself when it failed to show the glittering colors of fiction? Oblomov (the eponymous novel by Ivan Goncharov appeared three years after Gustave Flaubert’s ) is a superfluous man on a superannuated feudal estate who passes the time with his family in thick silence and bouts of helplessly contagious yawning. Though it was possible in the English language to be “a bore” in the eighteenth century, one of the first documented instances of the noun boredom’s being invoked to describe a subjective feeling did not appear until 1852, in Dickens’s “ Bleak House ,” afflicting the aptly named Lady Dedlock.

Heidegger, one of the preeminent theorists of boredom, classified it into three kinds: the mundane boredom of, say, waiting for a train; a profound malaise he associated not with modernity or any specific experience but with the human condition itself; and an ineffable deficit of some unnameable something that sounds thoroughly familiar to us. (This third kind might have made a good additional verse for Peggy Lee in her languid “Is That All There Is?”) We are invited to a dinner party. “There we find the usual food and the usual table conversation,” Heidegger writes. “Everything is not only tasty, but very tasteful as well.” There was nothing unsatisfactory about the occasion at all, and yet, once home, the realization arrives unbidden: “I was bored after all this evening.”

One does find intimations of boredom long before its mid-nineteenth-century flowering. Seneca, in the first century, evoked taedium vitae , a mood akin to nausea, set off by contemplating the relentless cyclicality of life: “How long will things be the same? Surely I will be awake, I will sleep, I will be hungry, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end? Do all things go in a circle?” Medieval monks were prone to something called acedia—a “kind of unreasonable confusion of mind,” as the ascetic John Cassian wrote in the fifth century, in which they couldn’t do much of anything but go in and out of their cells, sighing that “none of the brethren” came to see them, and looking up at the sun “as if it was too slow in setting.” As scholars have pointed out, acedia sounds a lot like boredom (depression, too), although a particular judgment was attached to it: acedia was sinful because it rendered a monk “idle and useless for every spiritual work.” Still, these were exceptional harbingers of a feeling that would later be distributed far more democratically. In these earlier incarnations, boredom was “a marginal phenomenon, reserved for monks and the nobility,” Lars Svendsen writes in “ A Philosophy of Boredom ”; indeed, it was something of a “status symbol,” since it seemed to plague only “the upper echelons of society.”

This is persuasive, though I suspect that some subjective sense of monotony is a more fundamental affect—like joy or fear or anger. Surely even medieval peasants sometimes stared into the middle distance and sighed over their barley pottage, longing for the next village fête day and a bit of carnivalesque mayhem. In recent years, something like boredom has been studied and documented in understimulated animals, which would seem to argue against its being an entirely social construction. (It certainly seems to be boredom that gets into my workaholic dog when he drags a magazine off the coffee table, always checking first that some human has seen him, and runs around the house with it so we’ll chase him.) The classicist Peter Toohey, in his book “ Boredom: A Lively History ,” offers a helpful resolution for the debate between those who say that boredom is a basic feature (or bug) of humanness and those who say that it’s a by-product of modernity. He argues that we need to distinguish between simple boredom—which people (and animals) have probably always experienced on occasion—and “existential boredom,” a sense of emptiness and alienation that extends beyond momentary mental weariness, and that perhaps did not come into many people’s emotional lexicon until the past couple of centuries, when philosophers, novelists, and social critics helped define it.

Historically, the diagnosis of boredom has contained an element of social critique—often of life under capitalism. The Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that leisure is fundamentally shaped by “the social totality”—and is “shackled” to work, its supposed opposite: “Boredom is a function of life which is lived under the compulsion to work, and under the strict division of labor.” So-called free time—obligatory hobbies and holidays that reconcile us to the capitalist economy’s coldly regimented workday—is really a sign of our unfreedom. David Graeber, in his influential “bullshit jobs” thesis, argues that the vast expansion of administrative jobs—he cites, for example, “whole new industries,” such as financial services and telemarketing—means that “huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.” The result can be soul-choking misery. What Adorno called “objective dullness” is at hand, although, Graeber cautions, “where for some, pointlessness exacerbates boredom, for others it exacerbates anxiety.” Punk music evoked boredom as an incitement to quasi-political rebellion—the Clash’s boredom with the U.S.A., or Fugazi’s “Waiting Room,” where time like “water down the drain” made a boy lose his patience with the world as it was.

But, while social critics can endow boredom with a certain potent charge, many people downplay or deny their own ordinary experience of it. Maybe it’s the system’s fault, but it feels like ours. Boredom is a distinctly uncharismatic state of being. It “lacks the charm of melancholy—a charm that is connected to melancholy’s traditional link to wisdom, sensitivity and beauty,” Svendsen observes. Ennui would be its chic, black-clad, Continental cousin, but you don’t often hear even the most pretentious aesthetes complain of that . Depression has a connection to boredom (“the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality,” Andrew Solomon has written), but depression is perceived as clinical and chemical, and probably easier to confess to in a lot of social settings than chronic boredom would be. If you are bored, you might well be a bore.

The psychologist Sandi Mann, in her 2016 book, “ The Science of Boredom ,” argues that “boredom is the ‘new’ stress”: a condition that people are reluctant to own up to, just as they once were hesitant to admit to stress, but may be doing so more. But I doubt that boredom will ever become the same sort of sure-who-isn’t? complaint that you toss off to an acquaintance in the Starbucks line. To confess that you are stressed implies that you are needed, busy, possibly quite important; to say that you are bored suggests—as it did when you were a child, and adults got exasperated if you kvetched about having nothing to do—that you lack imagination or initiative, or the good fortune of having a job that reflects your “passions.”

“Life, friends, is boring,” John Berryman’s poem “ Dream Song 14 ” goes. “We must not say so. / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn, / and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’ ” Though boredom no longer strikes most people as a sin, as acedia was for medieval monks, a dusting of shame still clings to it, especially when it can’t be blamed on a job endured to pay the bills. To be bored more than occasionally seems a small, peevish grievance in the scheme of things, a sort of weak-minded disengagement from a world that demands urgent action to try to set it right (while offering endlessly streaming entertainment to distract us).

The interpretation of boredom is one thing; its measurement is quite another. In the nineteen-eighties, Norman Sundberg and Richard Farmer, two psychology researchers at the University of Oregon, developed a Boredom Proneness Scale, to assess how easily a person gets bored in general. Seven years ago, John Eastwood helped come up with a scale for measuring how bored a person was in the moment. In recent years, boredom researchers have done field surveys in which, for example, they ask people to keep diaries as they go about daily life, recording instances of naturally occurring lethargy. (The result of these new methods was a boon to boredom studies—Mann refers to colleagues she runs into on “the ‘boredom’ circuit.”) But many of the studies involve researchers inducing boredom in a lab setting, usually with college students, in order to study how that clogged, gray lint screen of a feeling affects people.

Creating dull content is a mission they approach with some ingenuity, and the results evoke a kind of rueful, Beckettian comedy. One of James Danckert’s graduate students at the University of Waterloo, for example, directed an exceptionally drab little video that has been used to bore people for research purposes. It depicts two men desultorily hanging laundry on a metal rack in a small, bare room while mumbling banalities. (“Do you want a clothespin?”) Other researchers have had study participants watch an instructional film about fish-farm management or copy down citations from a reference article about concrete. Then the researchers might check how much the stupefied participants want to snack on unhealthy foods (a fair amount, in one such study).

Contemporary boredom researchers, for all their scales and graphs, do engage some of the same existential questions that had occupied philosophers and social critics. One camp contends that boredom stems from a deficit in meaning: we can’t sustain interest in what we’re doing when we don’t fundamentally care about what we’re doing. Another school of thought maintains that it’s a problem of attention: if a task is either too hard for us or too easy, concentration dissipates and the mind stalls. Danckert and Eastwood argue that “boredom occurs when we are caught in a desire conundrum, wanting to do something but not wanting to do anything,” and “when our mental capacities, our skills and talents, lay idle—when we are mentally unoccupied.”

Erin Westgate, a social psychologist at the University of Florida, told me that her work suggests that both factors—a dearth of meaning and a breakdown in attention—play independent and roughly equal roles in boring us. I thought of it this way: An activity might be monotonous—the sixth time you’re reading “ Knuffle Bunny ” to your sleep-resistant toddler, the second hour of addressing envelopes for a political campaign you really care about—but, because these things are, in different ways, meaningful to you, they’re not necessarily boring. Or an activity might be engaging but not meaningful—the jigsaw puzzle you’re doing during quarantine time, or the seventh episode of some random Netflix series you’ve been sucked into. If an activity is both meaningful and engaging, you’re golden, and if it’s neither you’ve got a one-way ticket to dullsville.

When contemporary boredom researchers, in the discipline of psychology, write books for a popular audience, they often adopt a brisk, jaunty, informative tone, with a generous dollop of self-help—something quite different, in other words, from the sober phenomenology and anticapitalist critiques that philosophers tended to offer when they considered the nature of boredom. The analysis of boredom that the psychologists put forth isn’t political, and the proposed solutions are mostly individual: Danckert and Eastwood urge us to resist the temptation to “just kick back on the couch with a bag of chips” and instead to find activities that impart a sense of agency and reorient us toward our goals. They can be a little judgy through their own particular cultural lens—watching TV is pretty much always an inferior activity, they suggest, seemingly regardless of what’s being watched. More important, they don’t have much to say about the structural difficulties people might face in establishing more control over their time or agency in their lives. And you don’t have to be Adorno to be attuned to those difficulties. As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes in “ Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind ,” boredom, which presents itself as “a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” speaks to “a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”

Still, if you are looking for some practical ways to recast experiences that are often more tedious than they need to be, there are thoughtful, specific ideas to be found in boredom-studies research. It’s particularly helpful on the phenomenon of boredom in school. In a 2012 survey of American college students, more than ninety per cent said that they used their smartphones or other devices during class, and fifty-five per cent said it was because they were bored. A 2016 paper found that, for most Americans, the activity associated with the highest rates of boredom was studying. (The least: sports or exercise.) Research conducted by Sandi Mann and Andrew Robinson in England concluded that among the most boring educational experiences were computer sessions, while the least were sturdy, old-fashioned group discussions in the context of a lecture. Mann, in “The Science of Boredom,” makes worthwhile observations about two tactics that help people feel less bored while studying: listening to music and doodling. According to her, doodling (which also works in soporific meetings) “is actually a very clever strategy that our brains conjure up to allow us to get just the right level of extra stimulation we seek—but not too much that we are unable to keep an ear out for what is going on around us.” The boredom trough of school may also be a matter of age: studies that have looked at boredom over the life span have found that, for most people, it peaks in their late teens, then begins to drop, hits a low for those in their fifties, and rises slightly after that (perhaps, depressingly, because people become more socially isolated or more cognitively impaired).

“Out of My Skull” devotes considerable attention to the question of what boredom makes us do—a live one in the field. It’s become a bien-pensant trend in recent years to praise boredom as a spur to creativity and to prescribe more of it for all of us, but especially for kids—see, for example, Manoush Zomorodi’s 2017 book, “ Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self .” The idea has an intuitive appeal and an illustrious history. Even Walter Benjamin invoked boredom’s imaginative potential: it was “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”

Danckert and Eastwood crush that particular dream bird. They say there isn’t much empirical evidence that boredom unleashes creativity. One study showed that when people were made bored in a laboratory (reading numbers aloud from a telephone book was the chosen means of stultification here) they were more likely to excel at a standard task psychologists use to assess creativity—coming up with as many uses as possible for a pair of plastic cups. Pretty weak tea, in other words. When people wish that we could all be bored more often, or rue that kids are too scheduled and entertained to be, what they may really mean is that they wish we all had more free time, ideally untethered to electronic devices, to allow our minds to romp and ramble or settle into reverie—and that sort of daydreaming isn’t boring at all.

Like some of the other boredom researchers I read, Danckert and Eastwood can’t resist citing a few sensational stories that supposedly illustrate the dire consequences of the feeling—news accounts in which people who’ve committed some heinous crime claim that they did so because they were bored. But those stories don’t cast much light on the general phenomenon. Boredom is a more plausible culprit in certain more common social hazards. Wijnand Van Tilburg and Eric Igou, the leading research psychologists espousing the meaning-deficit theory of boredom, have conducted studies, for example, showing that induced boredom ratchets up people’s sense of group identity and their devaluation of “outgroups,” as well as heightening feelings of political partisanship. But Danckert and Eastwood argue, modestly, that boredom is neither good nor bad, neither pro- nor antisocial. It’s more like a pain signal that alerts you to the need to do something engaging to relieve it. Whether you go on a bender and wreck your car or volunteer at the soup kitchen is up to you.

They strike a similarly mild and commonsensical note when they wade into the discussion of whether boredom might be increasing in this particular stage of late capitalism. Are we more bored since the advent of ubiquitous consumer technology started messing around with our attention spans? Are we less able to tolerate the sensation of being bored now that fewer of us often find ourselves in classically boring situations—the D.M.V. line or a doctor’s waiting room—without a smartphone and all its swipeable amusements? A study published in 2014, and later replicated in similar form, demonstrated how hard people can find it to sit alone in a room and just think, even for fifteen minutes or less. Two-thirds of the men and a quarter of the women opted to shock themselves rather than do nothing at all, even though they’d been allowed to test out how the shock felt earlier, and most said they’d pay money not to experience that particular sensation again. (When the experiment was conducted at home, a third of the participants admitted that they cheated, by, for example, sneaking looks at their cell phone or listening to music.) I wonder if research subjects in an earlier era, before we were so seldom left to our own devices without our devices, would have been quite so quick with the zapper. Erin Westgate, who was one of the authors of the study, developed a deeper interest in how people can be encouraged to enjoy thinking, which sounded to me like a poignant quest, but she said her research showed that it was possible—by, for instance, encouraging people to plan what they would think about when they found themselves alone to do so.

Since, in Danckert and Eastwood’s view, boredom is largely a matter of insufficient attention, anything that makes it more difficult to concentrate, anything that keeps us only shallowly or fragmentarily engaged, would tend to increase it. “Put another way, technology is unrivaled in its capability to capture and hold our attention,” they write, “and it seems plausible that our capacity to willfully control our attention just might wither in response to underuse.” Yet they also say that we don’t have the sort of longitudinal studies that would tell us whether people are more or less bored than they used to be. In a 1969 Gallup poll they cite, a striking fifty per cent of respondents said that their lives were “routine or even pretty dull.” Their lives , not their day at work. Unfortunately, the pollsters didn’t ask the question on later surveys.

In a study that investigated emotional responses to the COVID -19 quarantine in Italy, people cited boredom as the second-most-negative aspect of being required to stay home, just after a lack of freedom and just before a lack of fresh air. In March, an article in the Washington Post explored the upside of the pandemic for researchers in the field of boredom studies. Would boredom be an opportunity for a creative reset, as people are forever hoping it will be, or would ordinary monotony, and its new co-conspirator, quarantine fatigue, lead to risky, self-defeating, or antisocial behavior? Westgate, who has begun an online study of self-reported boredom and people’s responses to it during the shutdown, told me that she thought the COVID -19 pandemic did constitute something of a natural experiment. Ordinarily, people cop to being bored for about a half hour a day, so it was hard to catch them in the throes of it, but it might be easier now.

If boredom arises in the absence of meaning, though, the constraints that the pandemic imposes on us may not feel boring, exactly. (Anxiety-inducing, emotionally depleting, fraught with uncertainty, yes.) If you’re leading a more circumscribed existence these days, at least you are likely doing so with the goal of trying to bring the pandemic under control and save lives. And the little kindnesses that we show to the people we’re hunkered down with, and that they show to us, have a certain consequential new hum to them.

Yet there is also something restorative and humane about asserting the right to complain of boredom in a harsh time—an unbridled yearning after the ordinary vividness and variety of life. In a new book called “ Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars ,” Francesca Wade quotes the historian Eileen Power, in 1939. “Oh! That this blasted war were over,” she wrote. “The boredom of it is incredible. My mind has been blown out like a candle. I am nothing but an embodied grumble, like everyone else.” Sometimes it’s the grumbling that keeps us alive.

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Our Boredom, Ourselves

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By Jennifer Schuessler

• Jan. 21, 2010

If you read a lot of book reviews, there are certain words that tend to crop up with comforting, or maybe it’s dismaying, regularity. Lyrical. Compelling. Moving. Intriguing. Absorbing. Frustrating. Uneven. Disappointing. But there is one word you seldom encounter: boring. It occurred a mere 19 times in the Book Review in 2009, and rarely as a direct description of the book under review.

This isn’t because books sent out to reviewers never turn out to be boring. (Trust me on this one.) Rather, boredom — unlike its equally bland smiley-faced twin, interest — is something professional readers, who are expected to keep things lively, would rather not admit to, for fear of being scolded and sent back to the Weekly Reader. As a general state of mind, boredom is morally suspect, threatening to shine its dull light back on the person who invokes it. “The only horrible thing in the world is ­ ennui ,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, suggesting that boredom doesn’t feel much better in French. “That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”

And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.

Boredom, like the modern novel, was born in the 18th century, and came into full flower in the 19th. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “to bore” dates to a 1768 letter by the Earl of Carlisle, mentioning his “Newmarket friends, who are to be bored by these Frenchmen.” “Bores,” meaning boring things, arrived soon after, followed by human bores. By the time of the O.E.D.’s first citation of the noun “boredom” in 1852, in Dickens’s “Bleak House” (where it occurs six times by my count), everyone, or at least everyone in the novel-reading middle classes, seemed to be bored, or worried about becoming bored.

Boredom, scholars argue, was something new, different from the dullness, lassitude and tedium people had no doubt been experiencing for centuries. In her ingenious study “Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind” (1995), Patricia Meyer Spacks describes it as a luxury — and a peril — born of the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the rise of individualism, leisure (especially female leisure) and the idea of happiness as a right and a daunting personal responsibility. “Boredom presents itself as a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” Spacks writes. “It implies an embracing sense of irritation and unease. It reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”

In Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift,” the narrator — a writer who spends the “final Eisenhower years” trying to write the definitive treatise on boredom — describes it as “a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, . . . accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities.” But boredom may itself be a highly useful human capacity, at least according to some psychologists and neuroscientists, who have begun examining it not just as an accomplice to depression and addiction but as an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.

Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing — for example, lying in an f.M.R.I. scanner, waiting to be given some simple mental task as part of a psychology experiment — the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say. When this so-called default mode network is activated, the brain uses only about 5 percent less energy than it does when engaged in basic tasks. But that discrepancy may explain why time seems to pass more slowly at such moments. It may also explain the agitated restlessness that compels the bored to seek relief in doodling or daydreaming.

It’s common to decry our collective thaasophobia, or fear of boredom, manifested in our addiction to iPhone apps, the cable news crawl and ever mutating varieties of multitasking. One cellphone company has even promoted the idea of ­“microboredom,” which refers to those moments of inactivity that occur when we’re, say, stuck waiting in line for a latte without our BlackBerry. But novelists, for all their own fears of being dismissed as boring, continue to offer some bold resistance to the broader culture’s zero-tolerance boredom eradication program.

In April 2011, the limits of literary boredom will be tested when Little, Brown & Company publishes “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s novel, found unfinished after his suicide in 2008, about the inner lives of number-crunching I.R.S. agents. An excerpt that appeared last year in The New Yorker depicts a universe of microboredom gone macro: “He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number. . . .”

For all the mundanity of its subject matter, the excerpt presents boredom as something more strenuous and exalted than the friendly helper depicted by the neuroscientists, keeping our minds revved up even when we think we’re idling. Boredom isn’t just good for your brain. It’s good for your soul. “Bliss — a second-by-­second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom,” Wallace wrote in a note left with the manuscript. “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

It remains to be seen whether “The Pale King” will break through to the ecstasy beyond boredom, or just put readers to sleep. (Or perhaps cause serial brain injury, like the unreadably dense experimental novel that keeps laying waste to readers in “The Information,” by Martin Amis.) But if Wallace’s last work turns out to be unbearably dull, perhaps we should be grateful. After all, if it weren’t for all the boring books in the world, why would anyone feel the need to try to write more ­interesting ones?

Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.

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Why neuroscientists say, ‘boredom is good for your brain’s health.’.

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Boredom has been given a bad rap. It's counter-intuitive, but it can actually be healthy for your ... [+] brain.

Your brain works 24/7. Even when you’re asleep, it never is. It’s listening, sensing and dealing with stressors to keep you safe and sound. It’s resolving solutions, making decisions and thinking about possibilities even when you’re not aware of it. This “always on” organ is so devoted, it never takes a break or a vacation. But neuroscientists also say it has its limits. Sleep is one way your brain cleans up after a full day, although it’s still on the job.

Go To The Land Of Nod

According to brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke Of Insight , “Every ability you have, you have brain cells that are communicating. When you’re walking, you have brain cells communicating with the muscles to move. The cells in your brain are constantly working. They eat and they create waste, so sleep is the optimal time for the waste to be cleared out between the cells so they can actually function. I compare it to when the garbage collectors go on strike, we know how congested the streets become. That’s exactly the same thing going on with the brain cells. If you wake up to an alarm before your system is ready to wake up, you have cut part of a cycle of sleep off that your brain wanted. Sleep is about rejuvenating the brain.” A study at Iowa State University published this month in the journal Sleep shows that sleep restriction actually amplifies your anger. It’s as if the brain gets mad when it doesn’t get the rest it needs.

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There

“Sit and do nothing?” you ask. I can imagine you rolling your eyes, glancing at your to-do list. You’re up to your eyeballs in work, deadlines loom and you can’t find enough hours in the day to juggle emails, work remotely and home school the kids. It’s counter-intuitive, but doing nothing is productivity’s brakes to doing something’s gas. If you were a car without brakes, you’d burn out your engine, but you don’t have to let that happen to achieve career success. According to neuroscientists, boredom has gotten a bum rap, and it can actually amp up your creativity, task engagement and job productivity.

Neuroscientist Alicia Walf, a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says it’s critical for brain health to let yourself be bored from time to time. Being bored, she says, improves social connections. Social neuroscientists have found that the brain has a default network mode that is on when we’re disengaged from doing. Boredom can actually foster creative ideas, refilling your dwindling reservoir, replenishing your work mojo and providing an incubation period for embryonic work ideas to hatch. In those moments that might seem boring, empty and needless, strategies and solutions that have been there all along in some embryonic form are given space and come to life. And your brain gets a much needed rest when we’re not working it too hard. Famous writers have said their most creative ideas come to them when they’re moving furniture, taking a shower or pulling weeds. These eureka moments are called insight.

Make A To-Be List

The Italians have a name for it: “il dolce far niente”—the sweetness of doing nothing. It doesn’t translate in the United States, where tasks and schedules define us. The closest translation we have is “killing time.” But “il dolce far niente” demands more: to intentionally let go and prioritize being alongside of doing. Doing nothing has been compared to the pauses integral to a beautiful piece of music. Without the absences of sound, the music would be just noise. “Il dolce far niente” provides the brain the brakes it needs to recharge so that it can be more productive.

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So ditch that outdated adage, “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” and alongside your to-do list, create a to-be list—a time when you can be mindfully present in each moment. You give yourself elbowroom to stretch and deep breathe between appointments, time to walk around the block and clear your head. Or meditate, pray, practice chair yoga at your desk, watch the grass grow or just contemplate the universe. Your brain will be happier and healthier when it coexists with idle moments without imperatives, nothing to rush to, fix, or accomplish. After applying the brakes and doing something for nothing more than the sheer pleasure of it, you’re ready to go again. Then watch your resilience, creativity and productivity soar.

Krizan, Z., et al. (2020). Does losing sleep unleash anger? Sleep , 43. DOI.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaa056.274

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Boredom is at once both easy to identify and difficult to define. A small but growing collection of scientists have devoted their research to boredom, and some conceive of the state as a signal for change. Boredom indicates that a current activity or situation isn’t providing engagement or meaning—so that the person can hopefully shift their attention to something more fulfilling.

There’s a distinction to be made between the state and the trait: State boredom refers to feeling bored in a specific situation, while trait boredom refers to how susceptible one is to boredom. Trait boredom is correlated with self-control , anxiety , depression , and substance use.

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Boredom may occur when our energy isn’t channeled into an outlet that provides meaning or fulfillment. But this encompasses a few key components. One is mental arousal, having energy you want to devote to something engaging. A second is difficulty concentrating on a single task. And a third is lack of control over your surroundings, such as in a waiting room or lecture, in which you can’t redirect your attention to a different activity.

Boredom is a catalyst for change and an opportunity for reflection. Therefore, the feeling may arise during a task that isn’t challenging or is extremely repetitive. It can emerge due to a lack of self-awareness about what we find fulfilling. Personality traits also play a role—those prone to sensation seeking , extraversion , and novelty may be more likely to experience boredom.

Some therapists who treat patients that constantly struggle with boredom believe that boredom may be due to masking emotional pain, such as a childhood trauma , which renders the person unaware of their true wants and needs. The person may also be under-stimulated or navigating procrastination and anxiety . 

Susceptibility to boredom is correlated with substance use. People may use alcohol or drugs to relieve boredom and avoid confronting painful emotions or thoughts. Targeting boredom early with engaging activities that children or teens find meaningful may theoretically help them avoid turning to drugs or alcohol.

Boredom can’t kill you—but it may be correlated with dying earlier. A study of 7,500 British adults found that people who were often bored at work were more likely to die earlier and 2.5 times more likely to die of heart disease than those who weren’t bored. They also reported less physical activity and poorer health, which could be a link between boredom and mortality.

The best way to overcome boredom may be to explore and identify why you feel bored in the first place. If you realize that an activity isn’t valuable to you, perhaps you can explore how to engage in more valuable experiences in the future.

In a situation that you can’t control, meditation can help you feel boredom less acutely. And in the case of a dull work task, simply getting it done quickly may be the best option.

Boredom is a state of failing to find meaning, which is a deeply uncomfortable feeling. Yet rather than try to escape it, throw yourself into boredom so that you can explore what might provide fulfillment to overcome it. Eastern cultures have long understood the value of embracing boredom, believing it to be a path to a higher consciousness. 

Think of the experience as meditation, such as “bus-waiting meditation,” and turn it into an opportunity for breathing exercises. Take time to reflect on an aspect of your life for which you feel grateful . Approach the experience as a journalist or scientist, exploring what specifically is fueling your boredom. These tricks and others can reframe the moment.

Making an activity more intense can make it seem more exciting. For that reason, trying to complete a work task quickly may curb boredom at work. Research shows that paying employees per unit of work, which incentives speed, boosts motivation and output.

Boredom has the capacity to spark creative ideas and launch new projects. For children, boredom can propel new routes of play and self-entertainment, which can help develop creativity , self-reliance, and relationship skills.

As a motivator toward change, boredom can lead to new ideas, reflection, and creativity. It can fuel the search for novelty, including setting a new goal or embarking on a new adventure. In today's information-loaded world, allowing yourself to step away from screens can also help alleviate stress .

Boredom can provide unexpected opportunities for children to learn and grow. When children are bored, and responsible for entertaining themselves (without screens), they develop new ways to do that. They learn to tolerate uncertainty, exercise creativity, communicate with others, and negotiate conflict.

In cultivating their own identity and preparing to leave home, adolescents may disavow everything they previously loved to make space for new interests, hobbies, and relationships. Frustration and confusion during this process can manifest in boredom. This can lead some teens to act out to relieve boredom or struggle internally with feelings of hopelessness or despair.

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Algorithms are designed to keep your attention engaged and programmed to be passive and predictable. Fortunately, mindfulness connects you to this moment with joy and spontaneity.

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