Instant Genius - How understanding your boredom can improve your life

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

It's easy to try to ignore feelings of boredom, but it can actually be trying to tell you something. We spoke to James Danckert, a professor of cognitive neuroscience to find out more about this strange feeling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Focus magazine. We all experience boredom, whether it's during a long week at work or simply when we're stuck in a queue, but what is boredom really trying to signal to us? And is it something we should just accept? We spoke to James Dankert to better understand boredom. He's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo, an all-round expert in the science of boredom. He explains why we experience boredom, how to deal with it, and why it is an important part. part of our life.

I think we have a tendency to talk about boredom in this very vague sense as something that's, it's almost floating around, you know, it's ready to ruin our day. But what actually is the experience of boredom? Why is it happening in our brain that makes us feel this way? Yeah, boredom, I think, is best captured by a quote from Leo Tolstoy that I really like, that is that bored is the desire for desires. That when we're bored, we want to be engaged in something. We want to be doing something that matters to us.

But we just don't want any of the currently available options. And so it feels very restless and agitating to be bored because you're motivated. You want something, but you just don't know what's going to satisfy. So it really is this kind of disengaged state. You're not well connected with the world around you or the tasks that you have in front of you. And that's reflected in what we see in the brain. So when people are bored, if we put them in an MRI scanner, we see activity in what's known as the default mode network,

and that really is just a network of brain areas that's activated when you don't have any external task to do. The problem for Bortem, of course, is that you want that external task, and so having that default network activated is not as satisfying to you in that moment because you'd rather have other networks of the brain engaged in intentionally demanding meaningful pursuits. And is Bordham, I guess, an essential part of life,

Or is this more of a consequence of the way that we live in a more modern world? Bortem isn't really a consequence of the way we live in the modern world. Bortem, I think, is something that serves a purpose that has a function for us. And as such, you can see boredom in other species. And it's not just a human phenomenon. Anyone who has a pet dog will know of those times where you come home and if you've left him alone for too long, he's destroyed your shoe. Well, that's evidence of a bored animal in my mind.

So the function then, the reason why boredom exists and why it's useful to us is that it is a call to action. It's pushing you to find something to engage in that's meaningful and valuable to you. So given that it has that function, it serves that purpose. It is quite useful if we can respond to it in adaptive ways. Is that the same for animals that it's a push for them to do something? I think so. There's some great work looking at boredom in mink. There's a recent paper that looked at mice who were put in a room with nothing to do but one option, and that one option was aversive. The mice could poke their nose through a hole. get a puff of air, which mice typically don't like. And you see in that study and in studies with

mink and other animals as well that they will act and often act in ways that are not necessarily good for them, but they're doing so because the other option is to just sit there and be bored. And we should be careful with animal studies not to anthropomorphize too much, because we can't ask the animal, are you bored right now? But I think that their behavior is closely linked to the ways humans often behave when we're bored as well. So I think it's pretty evident that you can see it in other species. And is there a way for us to, I guess, differentiate between, let's say, boredom and disinterest or even certain mental health problems? The differentiation between boredom and disinterest is an easy one because boredom is a motivational state. You want something when you're

bored. So you're not disinterested. You care about what you're doing, whereas a state of disinterest or apathy is really the opposite of that. It is, I don't care. You know, so I think think people have often associated the couch potato with someone being bored, but the couch potato is an apathetic individual, a person who isn't motivated and doesn't care about what they're doing. So that differentiation is easy. Asking also about the association with boredom and other mental health challenges, boredom used to be thought of as a kind of symptom of something like depression, so just a minor component of that bigger syndrome.

But we've shown in the past that it's not. it's indeed a different experience and a unique experience. But we're still left with the challenge that boredom is correlated with a range of mental health problems. People who suffer from boredom a lot also tend to suffer from depression and anxiety. And we need to do a lot more research to understand what the link is between those things. Is there a causal arrow that we can draw from boredom to depression and anxiety? Or does it go the other way around?

And at the moment, we just don't know. And you're talking about boredom in the sense of it's a push to do something. and I mean I and I imagine lots of other people often find myself I guess reaching for my phone to fill these tiny spaces of time wherever you know I'm queuing or I'm waiting to meet someone or there's just a few seconds to kill has this connection to technology kind of quelled that sense of trying to find something to do and it's just a very quick easy solution to that moment of boredom it's an age old thing that at each generation with each new technology we start to lament that it's going to ruin our brains socrates was worried about

writing, ruining our capacity to remember things. And so it's not a new thing to worry about what new technologies might be doing to us. And certainly when the internet became a big phenomenon in the mid-90s, people immediately started worrying that it was going to lead to internet addiction and problems for particularly young people. There is some truth to the fact that for some of us, and depending on the study you look at, it's between four and eight percent of people, we have these problematic relationships with our phones. And we call that problematic smartphone use. And what's problematic about it? Well, it seems to be that for a very small percentage of people, it can start to look a little bit like addictions, that people will turn to their phones more and more over the

course of the day, or if they want to use whatever's on their phone more over time. So same sort of thing that you might see in drug use, that you continue to want more and more use of it. And that then when you're away from your phone, you feel anxious without it. So you feel like things are not going well if you're not with your phone. And those two components are very much addiction-like behaviours. But as I that's for a fairly small percentage of people. What we do know from that work, though, is that boredom can sometimes be a driver of that problematic behavior, that if you're bored and you just turn to your phone very quickly,

you're not really responding very well to the signal that is boredom. You're sort of passively occupying your mind. You're allowing whatever's on your phone or your social media feed to occupy your mind, but not in a very active way. And what boredom is really pushing you to try and do is to be an active agent in the way that you engage with the world. And if we were to try and quell the sense of boredom and do it in a way that would appeal to what boredom's trying to make us do, is that something that would make us happier? Is it something that would be a better way to sort of tick all that itch?

Given that I think that boredom is, serves a purpose, that it's functional in our lives. I first think that we shouldn't try to eliminate it because I think that's impossible. I don't know that you'll be able to fully ever eliminate boredom from your life. Maybe some people out there will claim that that's the case for them, but I think the people who claim that only boring people get bored, these are just individuals who very quickly and adaptively and rapidly respond to their boredom, and that's great for them. Would we be happier if we have better responses to boredom?

Absolutely. I think there's great evidence that people who are prone to boredom have a lot of challenges. I've already mentioned increased rates of depression and anxiety, but we also know that people who are prone to boredom have higher rates of drug and alcohol use. There's an association with problem gambling. and we already mentioned problematic use of your smartphone. So if we can respond better to the boredom signal, absolutely the outcomes ought to be better.

We haven't done a lot of work yet on how we can intervene with boredom to promote those adaptive ways of responding, but that's work should be coming soon. And when people do get this sense of boredom, what is the best way to react? Is it to, I guess, embrace it or is it to try and fill that space with something? I never suggest to people that they ought to embrace boredom. only because it sounds like if I suggested that, that you should welcome more boredom into your life.

And I don't really think that that's the case. What you want to do is just try and cultivate the best possible responses that you can have to boredom. So we're not trying to eliminate it, but we're also not trying to embrace it. So what would be the things to do? And as I say, we don't really have good research yet on the best interventions for boredom. But there's at least two things I think that are important to do. The first is to try and stay calm. one of the most common things people report when they report talking about being bored is that they say that

they're also agitated and restless. And in that phase of being restless and agitated and really searching desperately for something to engage in, but failing, that's a hard state to be in to find a positive way forward because you're just focusing on that feeling of restlessness instead of looking for better options to engage. The second thing then is to ask yourself why. I think when we get bored, we don't often do the harder work of asking, what is it about this situation right now that makes me feel like I'm bored? Because they could give you a couple of chances to do things. One, it could allow you to reframe what you're doing. We've known from anecdotes of people on assembly line work that they often aren't as bored as you might imagine they would be by that monotonous work. Instead, they sort of recast

their jobs in terms of personal challenges. Can I beat my personal best from the last hour? And now all of a sudden, what looks like it's monotonous and boring to us becomes a personal challenge to the individual. So if you think about why am I bored right now, you may also discover a way to reframe what you're doing so that it's not as boring so that you can find meaning in it. And the other thing that asking why can help you do is to help you focus on, well, what are my goals for engagement? What are the things that I find most satisfying? Because again, I don't think that we give ourselves much time to contemplate those challenging questions about what's most important to me in my life. And if you use your boredom signal to do that, then I think your outcomes will be better. So is that I guess a sense of sometimes

for people boredom is that they haven't looked deep enough to quite understand what it is that's causing that feeling in that time. I would agree that when we're bored, we're probably not doing that hard work of thinking more deeply about what matters to me. That's what boredom is really asking you to do, is to figure that out. And as I say, I don't think it's an easy thing to figure out. I also think that when we think about our personal goals, we sometimes try and leap to the more grandiose and don't think just about the small things that matter. When you're bored, I don't think it's a great idea to ask yourself, well, why haven't I cured cancer yet? I think you instead want to just think carefully about what are the small goals that I have? Am I cultivating the relationships I like?

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I think there's a tendency to see boredom or disinterest and think to an extreme and say, I'm bored or I don't feel very interested in life right now. I should climb Mount Everest or I should run a marathon or I should do something like that. And I do want to, is I guess, a self-perpetuating thing of trying to set these lofty goals. And then when you obviously don't actually go through with them, that it puts you back to where you started. There is a sense for people who are highly prone to boredom that they feel as though some of their bigger life goals have been thwarted and they've kind of failed to launch

into those goals. Your example of, I'm bored so I'm going to climb Mount Everest or I'm going to skydive, I'm going to do something thrilling, points to this sort of tendency when bored for some people to seek sensations. But ultimately those will be temporary kind of feelings. Certainly people who are out there who are mountain climbers or skydivers can spend a lot of their time doing that exercise and engaging in it and enjoying it and finding it quite meaningful. But if that's not something that you've spent time developing the skills on, leaping to it as a single thing to try, I don't know will satisfy your need for meaning

or your need to eliminate your boredom. So I'm not sure if I'm fully answering your question yet, but I think seeking out sensations is one thing that people might do, but at the end of that particular episode of sensation is still going to be the need to find something meaningful, right? If I pay the money to do a tandem skydive, it might be very thrilling and exciting in that much, moment, but when I hit the ground, but when I land nicely on the ground, I'm still going to be

faced with those things of what are the goals that are important to me in my life, big and small, because you can't skydive every day. And we're talking about boredom in this sense of it being one particular reaction to a variety of things, but is boredom different in different situations? For example, is boredom of waiting in line the same as the boredom that you might experience if you have a monotonous job that you've lost interest in? I think that the, signal of boredom, the function of boredom, the thing it's trying to propel us to do is the same no matter what. Now, that doesn't mean that it doesn't feel somewhat different depending on the thing that's led to it. So waiting in line or being in a circumstance that you can't escape so you

constrained. Perhaps you've gone to listen to somebody talk about something and you thought it was going to be interesting and it turned out to be really dull, but it's impolite for you to leave. That's a little bit like the kind of waiting in line sort of thing. Those things in the moment might feel somewhat different, you might represent them differently, but the function that Bortem is serving in those situations is identical. The function is to say, this is not satisfying your need to engage in a satisfying way with the world. You need to do something else. The problem with the waiting in line or sitting in a lecture that you find boring is that you're constrained. You can't get out, right? You need to wait in line. Whatever it is that you're waiting in line for was

clearly important for you to achieve. And so you have to stay there and there's nothing much that you can do about that. In those instances, you know, engaging in something like daydreaming might be a useful way to eliminate your boredom, but those constrained circumstances often feel a lot worse than other circumstances because you know you can't get out of them. And we spoke a little bit earlier about this idea that some people are better at quelling the feeling of boredom or that they're better at dealing with it. Does this change with certain types of people? Is it, I don't know, people that are more creative that can deal with better or artists maybe that are less prone to experiencing it? We don't know a lot about artists per se as to whether or not they're better at dealing with boredom.

And there's certainly lots of anecdotes that, you know, people we lionize as being artists and creative often use boredom as an inspiration. That's the myth that we all like to believe in. And it's a really pervasive myth that boredom will somehow help you become creative or aid you in your creativity. And I say myth because there's really not good data to back it up. So we showed fairly recently, in fact, that if anything, the more board. you were, the less creative you were on a fairly standard task that we use to measure creativity.

And I think the logic in that myth is just backwards. People who are creative, whether it's in art or music or any other sort of endeavor, they spend hours practicing their craft. And they use lots of different techniques to practice their craft. They might borrow techniques from others. They might learn different skills along the way, but then they have to practice them. Creativity is a practiced skill. So you can't hope that somehow, this episode of boredom that you're in the middle of is going to magically make you creative because creativity takes a ton of work. What I think is true is that boredom is a push to act. It's a call to do something different. So for those people who have creative outlets, when they're

bored, maybe that's the moment that they say, well, I'm bored with the way I've been writing songs or I'm bored with the way I've been doing sculpture or painting. So I'm going to do it differently now. And there's a great anecdote about Jimmy Hendricks that says exactly that, when he was asked how he got to be such a genius on guitar. He said he'd started playing music in a circuit that required a fairly staged style of playing, and he was bored by it. So the boredom didn't make him a better guitar player. The boredom made him try something new on guitar. And then he practiced and became the genius that we know. So yeah, I don't think that there's a great link between creativity and boredom, but you're asking also about where there might be individual differences of people who

do experience or don't experience boredom a lot. And there certainly are. So we put boredom in the context of self-regulatory control and people who struggle with that tend to be more prone to boredom. So people who are low in self-control, low in impulse control, people who have troubles with self-esteem and people who really struggle to believe that they're efficacious individuals, they tend to have higher levels of boredom proneness. We talk about the big five personality inventory. These are these dimensions along which we can categorize people in their traits. And some of those are related to boredom as well in the opposite sort of direction. So people who are open to experience tend not to be bored very much. People who are conscientious tend to be less bored. So there are

those kinds of factors that are associated with people who are more or less prone to boredom. And I don't know if you've seen much of it, but there's this growing trend of people trying to teach their children to embrace a level of boredom and to try not to, I guess, jump onto an iPad to find a way to distract themselves. Is it something that we should be addressing from childhood or is this just more, I don't want to say a fad, but, you know, a trend that people are following without much research. There's that word embrace again that I'm really a little bit reticent to endorse. I don't know that we should have children or adults embracing boredom, but I think we do need to give children the capacity to effectively deal with boredom.

And here it comes down to agency, right? So we showed recently, and some of my colleagues showed that people who are highly prone to boredom don't feel like they're very effective agents. And what I mean by that is, you know, typically on your day-to-day life, you feel like you are in control of what you're doing. You're guiding your actions, you're choosing your actions, and you're effectively deploying your choices, right? That means that you're feeling like an effective agent. You are in control. But for the boredom-prone individual, they don't feel like they're in control. And when it comes to our children, I think we want to promote their sense of agency. I think parents of particularly young children are well aware of that circumstance where their child

comes to you and says that they're bored. And what we've done in the past, at least, certainly I did as a parent, is the knee-jerk reaction is to give them options. So why don't you go play with your Lego? Why don't you play outside? Why don't you go ride your bike? Why don't you do this, do that? And at every turn, the child says, no, I don't want it. No, I don't want it. And what they're saying is they've thought of those options too, because they're not stupid. They're not silly. They know what's in front of them. They know their toys. They know what they're capable of doing. They know what they normally like. Sometimes they love Lego. Sometimes they love riding their bike. What they're saying to you is, I know those things exist. They just don't want them right now.

And what that highlights to me is that if we try to be their solution for boredom, it's doomed to fail. They need to develop their own solution for boredom. Now, whether or not that's keeping them off screens, because we don't want them to be distracted, I think there's a lot to be said for active engagement with screen time versus passive engagement. And the active engagement will foster to their sense of agency. So I don't think screens per se are a problem. I think what they do on the screens is the thing that we need to pay attention to. But I would also say that for the young children,

maybe in a time where they're not bored and things are calm, if the parent sits down and says, okay, next time that you're bored, why don't we make a list of the things that you know are going to work, even if they work for only five minutes? And then when you're bored, you can turn to that list and you can choose. And again, if you make them the active agent in the creation of that list, it might be more helpful or more successful in eliminating their boredom.

So not just for children, but for people of any age, from what you're saying, I feel like the main thing is having the tools and the understanding of how to address it in that moment and I guess more understanding what your boredom is trying to tell you. Right. It's important to pay attention to what boredom is saying, as opposed to just succumbing to how negative it feels, how bad it feels. Because it really does feel bad. No one likes being bored. And so you need to find a way to get out of that negative rumination about, I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored. And instead, think about why and think about what your best avenue out of it might be. And does the way that we frame boredom or view it affect our experience of it? I mean, there's this,

as I'm sure you know, a big movement of self-development and this idea that every bit of free time should be spent making money or learning skills. If you view boredom as a problem, does it become, I guess, a self-percutuating problem because you're trying to solve it with things that aren't going to make you happy in that sense. Yeah, the push to fill every second of time with something productive, I think is potentially problematic. And if you simply do that for the sake of filling time, then you're not fulfilling the call that Bortem is making because Bortem is asking you to find something to engage in that's meaningful to you. And that could be something as simple as I actually need some downtime from work. And what's fulfilling to me is I enjoy Jigsaw puzzles.

great, do it, right? And that's not going to earn your money and that's not going to develop your skills, but it is going to be something you chose to do and something that occupies your mind well. So, yeah, and there's a book 4,000 weeks or something. It's a time management for a limited life or something like that. And then another book by Martin Haglund called This Life, and both of them make the point that life is meaningful and important because it's limited, because it's finite. But the point from the 4,000 weeks book is that simply pushing yourself to occupy every single minute because we've got this societal desire to be productive, leads you on a treadmill that's never really going to work,

because once you work harder to fill that time, you'll find another thing that you have to fill the next piece of time with, and then another and another and another. And that's not the response to boredom that you want to make. I think the response to boredom you want to make is to consider, again, the things I said a while back, why am I bored right now? What is it about this that I can reframe or think about differently? and what are my goals?

What are the things that matter to me? It doesn't mean you have to launch into them right away. Just give them some consideration and think about how effectively you're pursuing those goals. I wanted to ask you if we could design a perfect world, you know, this perfect utopia, if we'd remove boredom as an experience completely. But from the conversation, I feel like in your eyes,

and I guess my eyes now as well, that it is a useful tool and that in any kind of society, it's important to keep it in there. I think there's a great metaphor that I get from my colleague, a philosopher, Andreas Alpidou, to be had with pain here, right? And so in that same utopian world, would you just eliminate pain? But you would then live a very dangerous life. Congenital analgesia is a disorder in which people can't feel pain,

and it's extraordinarily dangerous for them because they might put themselves in situations where they'll cause great harm to their body and to their integrity of their body, but just not know it, right, because they don't feel any pain. And the function of pain too is not to make us feel hurt, but again, to push us into action, to deal with whatever caused the hurt. So eliminating pain or eliminating boredom will lead to a

psychologically less rich life because you're not going to be getting those signals that propel you to act in purposeful and meaningful ways. So no, I wouldn't ever advocate eliminating boredom or pain. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was James Dankert on the story. Science of Boredom. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now at supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com.

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