Speaking of Psychology - Are you burned out or ‘bored out’? With Lotta Harju, PhD, and Sharon K. Parker, PhD

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Burnout gets all the attention, but some employees struggle with a different problem: chronic boredom on the job, sometimes called "boreout." Lotta Harju, PhD, of EM Lyon Business School, and Sharon K. Parker, PhD, of Curtin University, discuss how boreout differs from burnout, how it can affect workers’ health and well-being, and what individuals, managers and organizations can do to design more engaging work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've all heard of workplace burnout, the physical and emotional exhaustion that workers feel when they're overwhelmed with too many deadlines, too many tasks, or too many hours on the job. But for some employees, too much work isn't the problem. Instead of burnout, they're suffering from Borout, chronic boredom that leaves them feeling disengaged, unfulfilled, and frustrated with their jobs. While Borout might not get as much attention as burnout, researchers say that its effects can be just as damaging. Today we're going to talk with two psychologists who study chronic workplace boredom about why it happens and what individuals and employers can do to combat it. So how common is chronic boredom at work? How does it affect workers' mental health and their job performance?

How can bosses and organizations recognize it in their employees? How does Borough look different in different types of work and at different career stages? And how can companies design jobs better to make the work as engaging as possible. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. We have two guests today.

First is Dr. Lada Harjou, an associate professor at the EM Lyon Business School in Lyon, France, where she studies employee well-being and mental health at work. She holds a PhD in work and organizational psychology. Her research on chronic workplace boredom has looked at topics, including how boredom affects workers' health and the relationship between boreout and burnout. Next is Dr. Sharon Parker, who is the John Curtin Distinguished Professor in Organizational Behavior at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, where she founded and leads the Center for Transformative Work Design. She's a world-leading

research in work design and has published more than 150 journal articles on topics, including performance, proactivity, employee mental health, and organizational change. Dr. Parker is a fellow of the Academy of Management, the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Dr. Harjou, Dr. Parker, thank you for joining me today. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, let's start with the big picture and try to expand on the brief description I gave in the

introduction. What is bore out? And I know it goes by a few names, including chronic boredom, and rust out. What do you each call it and how do you define it in your work? Boredom or boreout. I myself call it boredom. There are different types of boredom. I believe that all of us have experience of it. It can be long-lasting. It can pass quickly once we read ourselves of whatever it is that's boring. Or it can be a more persistent chronic type of of boredom, which doesn't pass or at least not as quickly as a shorter type of boredom.

Right. So it's not an everyday thing. I mean, we can all expect to be bored from time to time at our jobs, but this is much more chronic, is that right? Yes, so it's very normal to be bored every now and then, even though we so dislike boredom. I find in our culture at least, we are kind of allergic to feeling bored, try to avoid it. But it's very normal. It's a lot. It's not dangerous as such, but it's very different to experience boredom most, if not all of the time when at workplace. So that's a different type of situation then. Dr. Parker, let me ask you, how is boredom related to burnout? So if you're bored, are you more likely to experience burnout as well? No, they're quite, they're different things. So,

you know, in a sense, burnout is usually a state that you experience. of exhaustion, cynicism, and feeling that you're not really getting anywhere. And it comes typically from excessive workload, too much to do, demands that are overwhelming and so on. Again, tends to be a fairly chronic situation. Whereas bore out really is there multiple causes, but one of them is not having enough to do or not at least having enough challenging, interesting, meaningful work to do. So they're quite different. I think they can have those feelings of cynicism in common.

And I believe there is some research that shows that people who are chronically bored can also feel exhausted. It's because, you know, I think if you're really bored and checked out with your work and it's meaningless, but you've got to keep on going, you know, then that sort of just wears you down and makes you cynical and exhausted. So different things, but they can connect and you can experience them sometimes at the same time. How common is actual boreout? I mean, the real syndrome that we're talking about, not just regular everyday boredom.

How common is it? Do we have any data on this? Yeah, I mean, the kind of prevalence of boreout at workplaces is, is underestimated because, well, for the same reason, then probably burnout is underestimated among workforce because we tend to assess these things with questionnaires and then people who are maybe suffering of this phenomenon the most are not the most likely to answer these questionnaires. So it's most likely also underdiagnosed.

at workplaces. So it's probably more common than what we can actually grasp in our surveys. But we have tried. I mean, so for example, we published a study some years ago where we looked at prevalence of boredom in its different frequencies, you know, how often do people experience boredom versus how often they experience burnout seem to. terms, namely exhaustion. We had different samples. We had a big sample of Finnish employees, and then we had another sample of employees in the UK. And in both of these samples, we found that actually there was a large proportion of workers in our data who reported experiencing boredom very often. And this was a large perversion. And these were the employees who also reported

than exhaustion, so burnout symptoms, almost equally as often. So indeed, as Dr. Parker mentioned earlier, these phenomena, they can go, if not hand in hand, at least people can experience them simultaneously. And yes, it is probably more common than what we think, because indeed, as also was just mentioned, we kind of think about boredom as something that, a result of not having enough things to do. And it's not that many workplaces that where this actually is the situation. I mean, some workers would like to have more to do than what they actually have. But I mean, this is maybe not as common. But it's indeed not the only reason for why people are

bored, but because we so strongly associate a boredom with not having things to do, we kind of think that it cannot be that common or it cannot happen in certain types of work. And this is not the case. Dr. Parker, you're nodding your head. So all that jibes with what you see in the research as well. Yeah, I'm not sure if it's your study, Dr. Hajjou, but one I'm aware of is a finished study that looked at sort of combinations of exhaustion and boredom.

and there's about 7% of the people in this sample were bored and exhausted, so it's a fairly small number, but there were about 20% of people that were somewhat bored and exhausted. So if you put those two numbers together, that's about 27% that are saying that they are bored with some degree of feeling exhausted as well. And so that's about a third actually, which is quite a high number. again, I think we tend to think that boredom or bore out is something that's typical, you know, in certain sorts of jobs. But in fact, it can happen in all jobs, can happen in professional jobs even, where you might be doing things that look on the surface quite challenging and interesting, like law, for example, but you might just be bored because you've done it for 15, 20 years and it's not stretching you and challenging you and you're not growing anymore. You know, so it's something that can, I guess, happen in any occupation, at any age, you know, in any sort of role, really.

What is the impact of boreout on workers' physical and mental health? I know you just mentioned exhaustion, Dr. Parker. Are there other characteristics that are emblematic of boreout? I think there are a lot of outcomes. And if I can just stick with the mental health outcomes, first of all. And I guess actually, Dr. Hadju, I'm not sure if you're, I'm sure you're very familiar with this case, but I first became aware of this concept of boreout as opposed to boredom by learning about a French guy, actually, that took his employer to court because of borout, not burnout.

And that specific case, it was a few years ago now, but it was a guy that felt that he had lost a client and therefore his manager was not giving him any interesting or meaningful work to do. So he literally would go to work and it sort of push pencils around, but he sort of had to stay at work. And that went on for four years. And ultimately, that really affected his mental health, as you would expect, right? Because he's not doing anything meaningful and feeling useless and all of these sorts of things. And he was actually successful in his case. he was awarded about 40,000 euros,

and because it was found that the employer had not given him sufficiently meaningful work and that that had a consequence for his well-being, a mental well-being, and that that was something his employer should have done differently. So mental health is a really important one. And I think those of us who are sort of perhaps the more burnt out, end of the spectrum, which I suspect is many people, well, we know, actually, it's many people. It's, you know, we sometimes think, oh, wouldn't it be great to have a boring job? You know, wouldn't that be great?

But of course, you know, that's probably good for an hour or so, you know, and in fact, is a nice little relief to have some somewhat boring tasks. But, you know, chronically for a long time, it is a real mental drain. And so I'm sure that Dr. Hajj can talk about other. effects and I'm happy to as well. But I did just really want to reiterate that it is a very aversive mental state and it can harm people psychologically. Yeah, if I can pick up on that. Indeed, and kind of relating to the question of how boredom or borough is different from burnout, actually they can manifest in similar ways. So there is this lack of energy, even pervasive fatigue

that goes along with these kinds of states when they persist. And also there are symptoms of stress. So again, you might not think that bored and being bored is stressful. It's rather we think that it's antithetical to stress because, again, because we think that these are people who don't have enough things to do. So hence they cannot be stressed out. But again, this is not true. We found in research that the more people report boredom,

the more they also report stress symptoms, they report poorer workability, they report poorer self-rated health. We also did a study. These were workers in a municipality in Finland. We asked how often they felt bored at work, and then we had them wear heart rate model. for three days.

And we actually found that the more often people reported being bored at work, the lower their heart rate variability was, which is indicative of poor recovery and this kind of persistent strain. And it's a physical, physiological symptom. So it's not just psychological outcomes, but we have also found physiological outcomes that indicate this kind of severe stress reaction. Yeah.

So there are similarities in this sense in how also burnout manifests. BOROT can also have the similar manifestations that are harmful for both mental and physical health. And I think also harmful for the organization insofar as, you know, in the end, it's a very demotivating state to feel chronically bored. And so people are disengaged, checked out. Withdrawal is a common response. So that means being absent, not putting all your energy and effort into your job when there are things to do.

And even leaving and exiting and turning over from the organisation. So performance is affected as well. And that's really important from that employee perspective. And I often will talk about what you're also doing as an employer is you're really wasting people's talent because people are usually bored because they're not using their skills, developing their skills. And people are an incredibly important resource that it really means you're not actually using and developing and deploying in an optimal way. So that's also important from that perspective. Well, let me ask, is there a way to design jobs better to prevent burnout? And are some jobs just intrinsically less engaging?

Can any job be designed or redesigned to make it more engaging? Absolutely. And I guess this is this area of work redesign. And I guess one thing to say is I would normally talk about it from this perspective of creating better work, creating good work. for people and I use a particular model that's been published, so it's an evidence-based model of work design, the smart model. And just very quickly, that sort of is a synthesis, I guess, of decades of research around what is it that makes for healthy, meaningful, motivating work.

The first letter is actually stimulating. And this is about having work that has variety, where you use your skills, where you develop your skills, where you're learning, where you're growing, where you have challenge. There's a little bit of challenge is good in jobs. And of course, what we're talking about here with bored them and bore out is almost the opposite of stimulating work. So, and actually, whenever I present this, and there's other parts of the model, mastery, autonomy, relational aspects of work and then demands is that T is tolerable demands.

But whenever I present the smart model to leaders, I always get this question, oh, but not everyone wants stimulating work. I know people who, you know, but actually it's really about what is stimulating for you. And I think also just to pick up on one of your other points about is some work sort of inherently boring, I think you can compensate for that factor a little bit through allowing people to craft the work. But you can also redesign the work completely. And I guess that's where a lot of our research has been done.

You know, for example, the classic would be, you know, if you think about a traditional sort of assembly line where people are doing a very routine thing, many, many times a day, you know, you can actually make that job broader. You can actually give people more autonomy, create perhaps a self-managing team. And these sorts of experiments have been done in many, many, many. countries around the world and shown really quite significant positive effects for workers and for the company. So you can certainly redesign the work to make it less boring. We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk more with Dr. Harjou and Dr. Parker about how to redesign work to make

it more engaging. Well, speaking of redesign, who is the best person to design a job? Is it the manager who's going to be overseeing the employee, the employee, him or herself, the human resources department, or do you just need, you know, I.O. Psychologists everywhere. How do we get rid of bore out? Yeah, look, I would always say work design is a multi-party responsibility. I don't think that it's the responsibility of any single group. You get the best outcomes when actually all of those groups that you mentioned are involved. You know, job crafting is this idea that individual themselves can make their work better. And that is to be encouraged.

But you mentioned Amazon workers. In many cases, it wouldn't matter how much crafting some of those workers did. The work design is pretty horrific. You know, they're intensely monitored with wristbands or whatever. Their movements are tightly controlled. You know, they can't even get to the bathroom half the time. So you could encourage those guys to craft. as much as they like, but they're going to be very, very constrained.

So in that case, the redesign has to come from the leaders, and probably in all honesty, the leaders will not have enough power. It would have to come from even higher level people, the CEO or whatever, who really want to do things differently. But a lot of the work redesign that we've done, and we do it in contexts like aged care or public sector, all different contexts. You know, we really encourage its employees,

can play their part, the leaders have got to play a part. HR is important, often production managers or what other managers are critical as well. So it's a multi-party approach is when you get the best result. If I cannot just add to that because Dr. Parker, you mentioned job crafting. I think that the best way to get rid of borrout is to prevent it because if people are bored. So if it's a symptom already in the organization, so if it's not just one person, but if it's more widespread. We've also done studies on this and found that when people are bored out, they actually craft their jobs less, not more. So that's when you are already kind of disengaged. You're not motivated. This is not the time to ask people to just craft their

jobs to be more meaningful, whatever, that's actually kind of grotesque. If we think that, that, you know, first there is this circumstance where people get chronically bored and then we just kind of place the responsibility to the individual. That's not what we should be endorsing at all. Rather, it's better to prevent boredom from becoming this kind of systemic experience at the workplace and indeed by designing good healthy jobs is a good place to start. But then because boredom is, it's a very subjective experience. I mean, it signals this lack of meaning, which is different for any individual. I mean, what is meaningful for me might not be meaningful for you and so on.

So then for that, it's also good to give some space for people to influence their own work design by crafting their jobs, for example, or adding some bits of meaning in there, bits of challenge, whatever. It is that is motivating to that individual, but indeed it's better to act before problems such as borrower out arise. And if I can just build off that of Dr. Hajjou's point there, even if the work design is led by leaders or managers, it's absolutely vital that the workers themselves are involved or represented because they are ultimately the experts in the work. They spend all of their time doing that work. And so I think the worst sort of work design cases are the ones where they are just done to their employees and the employees are not involved in the process.

So even if it is led from the top, I would always encourage really good systems of workers getting involved or represented at the very least. So I want to ask, there's been a lot more remote work as a result of the COVID epidemic, and that's even continued now that the epidemic is passed. Has this resulted in less bore out because workers were given more trust and the ability to structure their jobs? Yeah, actually my colleagues in Finland have done some research on this and with any trend I think in the work life at the moment, it's kind of a double edged sword in the sense that there are some employees that can really benefit and in terms of their motivation and engagement for them remote work can be hugely beneficial and motivating. stimulating because it then helps them to do their jobs better, but maybe also just organize their lives a bit better as well. But then there are also those employees who suffer, for whom this is not a preference. So they suffer from the isolation. These are typically people to whom the social environment of the workplace is really important.

So for those people, it is not very stimulating to work at home and just meet people via Zoom or whatever other technology there is. So again, it's somewhat individual. And of course, it's also a matter of whether it's chosen, if it's a choice that employees can themselves make or whether it's kind of a forced. arrangement that they have to adapt to. So it's a bit different depending on the situation. But during COVID when it was forced for many people,

there have been these kinds of findings that for many employees it was also a boring situation to be at home alone. Yeah. And I think sometimes, and I remember even feeling this a little bit, you know, that it's sort of invoked a sense of meaningless. like you couldn't start, you sort of start thinking, what is this all for, when you don't have the opportunity to connect with the people who benefit from your work, whether it's students as professors or, you know, other sorts of clients or whatever.

And so you're right that that disconnection for some people can sort of engender a sense of meaninglessness and boredom, yeah. I was going to say the other thing I think is that if you have got a board, and disengaged workforce, you probably wouldn't want them working from home either. Because, I mean, a lot of the benefits of working from home from a sort of employer productivity perspective are about it's more motivating to work at home and people are likely to work harder, perhaps put some of their commuting time into their work, you know, and because you're signalling trust and so on, you know, they want to put in effort and they want to respect that flexibility that they've

got, if you've got a really disengaged board workforce, you know, actually having them all working at home probably wouldn't be great because I suspect they, you know, they're disengaged and bored. They're not necessarily going to be very productive at home either. Well, let me bring up the 800-pound gorilla in our lives today, which is, of course, artificial intelligence. On balance, do we know is AI making our jobs more boring and tedious, or is it giving us more room to be stimulated because it's taking over a lot of the dull work? How much does it depend on the individual job? The bottom line is it can go in either direction. And it's not so much about role or occupation.

I think it's about the choices that are made about their technology and how it's designed and implemented. So let me unpack that a little bit more. So, you know, on the positive side, you've got AI taking up, doing the dull, dirty and dangerous work. You know, that's what technology is supposedly good at. And we're certainly seeing evidence of that, right? You know, routine administrative tasks, record keeping, all the things that we find a bit boring. In theory, AI, this is what AI is really good at. So that's the positive side.

But I think what we're also seeing are, you know, So on the one hand, we're seeing things like people cognitively offloading their tasks and that having some consequences for their growth, their skills, their learning, maybe not immediate consequences, but longer term consequences. So I think there's a little bit of a sense in which some people may be slightly deskilling themselves almost through overusing AI and sort of using it too much and becoming too dependent on it. I think another big trend that we're going to see more and more, and we're already seeing, is that roles are shifting from active roles to oversight roles. So let's go to the pilot.

I mean, we're talking automation, not necessarily AI, but we're just going to see more and more of this. You know, with the introduction of autopilot in planes, it got to a situation where pilots were never flying the plane. Okay, great, until something goes wrong with autopilot, and then they can't remember how to fly the plane. And there were a few very high-profile accidents where pilots effectively couldn't fly the plane. So, you know, for all sorts of reasons now, pilots are mandated to fly the plane at least a certain amount of time, and they have simulations and they have things like that that keep those skills out and so on. So, the role turned from an active flying role to an oversight role, a monitoring of another system

doing the role. And that's going to happen more and more with AI. The AI systems are making the decisions, just reading today about some loan consultants in a bank. You know, they're not making the decisions anymore about whether clients will get a loan. The AI system is making that decision. And the humans are just overseeing that, hopefully. And actually, they're not always. And these can be more boring roles. They have less autonomy. They're not using their skills and judgment in the same way anymore. So I think that these more passive monitoring oversight type roles are going to grow with AI. And it's going to be sort of interesting to see, are we going to have the same problem that we historically had with pilots, where people monitor,

these systems, just lose the skills and knowledge that they need to actually do that effectively. So I think it can go either way, but we've got to be very thoughtful as the developers of tech and as the implementation, the people implementing AI about how we do that and making sure that we are continuing to keep that stimulating work where people are learning and growing and not just watching. And this is probably more for the white-collar professional jobs that can also happen or is happening, is that AI replaces parts of those jobs. So it augments those jobs. It doesn't replace entire jobs, but parts of those jobs.

And it may be that those parts that are replaced by AI are actually parts that people very much like to do. So there's been studies on sales jobs. sales professions where customer interface is almost completely handled by bots now. So the salespeople, they don't actually encounter clients, at least not as much as they used to. And this is also, I mean, at least based on, I've talked to many, many salespeople in my research. And this is something that most salespeople actually very much love, you know, interacting with clients, talking to them, meeting them, negotiating, all that jazz. And then they don't have this anymore.

So what is left? So, I mean, this kind of not necessarily de-skilling as such, but just this narrowing down of the scope of many jobs. That is also something that needs to be, you know, when organizations adopt these technology is it's and I'm sure Dr. Parker is the expert on this, but that they have to be very aware on how, what's the impact on people's jobs and motivation and what are the implications for work design. So I want to ask how BORO out looks at different career stages. You know, there are some types of problems that are more common around young people at the beginning of their

career versus mid-career or late-career workers? Yeah, I think, and again, it's, of course, quite individual, and age is probably just one factor. But I think I certainly, you know, has someone who's taught lots of MBA students, you know, you see those sort of 35-year-olds mid-career who are finding that they are not stretching themselves in their work anymore. So, you know, they've gone through uni, they've done well, they've got promoted, that, you know, but they just sort of bored. Maybe they're even 45, but that sort of rain,

you know, they still got quite a long time ahead of them and they're looking for that new growth. And I guess that's why they choose to do an MBA. So you see that sort of boredom. And then I think in young people, you know, it can be all the things that we've talked about,

just not very interesting work. I think there is a study that Adam Grant and colleagues did a long time ago, which showed that young people, people sometimes can put up with boring work or work that's not very well designed a bit better in the sense of they're doing it because it's part of the journey that they're on with their career and they know it's a temporary state. And I think an example of that might be as a young lawyer, it's pretty boring perhaps for the first couple of years, but you sort of know that it's a trajectory that you just got to get through. So that's perhaps something also to take into account

It's a little bit like, yes, the meaning of the boredom might shift at different stages in your life. And, you know, maybe if you're a young parent with small children, you crave a little bit of boredom because you're so exhausted from your family life, you know. So I think, so I guess, I guess, you know, stages of career can make a difference sort of in how you interpret that stimulating work and how much of an issue it is for you. What can also change is what is stimulating work for you in those different stages of career. We know from early career workers that often there can also be this mismatch of expectations. I mean, highly educated early career workers can come.

They're eager to really develop their skills, to show the world what they have. and they are eager to get ahead. This might not happen as rapidly as they might sometimes like or maybe they have to do some searching first to find a place in an organization. I mean, we do find in our research that younger employees tend to report more boredom. So this might be the reason that they're not necessarily established enough yet to get those challenging tasks in organizations. And there might be this kind of mismatch of what they would like to do,

but the kinds of tasks that they're given at that career point. So that could be one explanation. Also, it might also be that younger employees haven't yet kind of figured out what it is that they actually want to do. They might be directed by, you know, whatever they learn in a business company school, what they should be doing and, you know, parents, whoever. You know, so they were in this stage where they're kind of figuring stuff out. So that may play a role there as well, whereas indeed later it might be more about just

meaning, you know, that people kind of, when they reach a certain point in their careers, but also lives, they might kind of rethink what's meaningful. They might want to do more meaningful things because they've already kind of seen and done some things become established in a career and they might yearn through more meaning, kind of having more of an impact, more meaningful impact in the world rather than just making a living.

One thing we haven't talked so much about is the importance of stimulating, interesting, meaningful work from a growth perspective and a learning perspective. And, you know, if we look into the future and ask that question, what are this most important skills in an AI world? You know, probably the most important meta skill is learning, you know, and the ability to adapt and change and upskill and re-skill as work evolves and changes. But actually, if we've got boring, unstimulating work, we're really cutting off that growth and learning opportunity. So I just think that is a really important thing we need to.

to be sure that those employers out there creating boring work are aware of. And just to wrap up, I want to ask you both, what are you working on now? I mean, what are the big questions you have studies ongoing? What are you still trying to figure out? In terms of research on boredom, I'm currently interested in the work kind of leisure interface and things like whether people who are bored at work, do they then, kind of try to find more meaningful engaging things to do during their leisure. So do they kind of orient themselves more to their life outside of work?

Or whether people who have this fulfilling things going on outside of their work life, they have great hobbies or whatever challenging pursuits outside of work, does it actually make them choose less stimulating, demanding jobs because this is not what they want to be investing in. So this kind of interplay, these dynamics, I'm interested in that right now. And I'm also interested in looking at boredom at work and kind of ethics, ethical behaviors and ethics in organization as well. Dr. Parker, what about you? What are you up to?

Well, we are very lucky to have recently received an award for a very large research center on, it's called Quality Work in a Digital Age. And it's exactly in the context of your earlier question, Kim, about, you know, what is all this, what does it mean from an AI perspective for work? But we have a very diverse group of scholars from, you know, artificial intelligence professors to computer scientists to a competition. to economists, lawyers, psychologists. So we have social researchers and technical researchers and we're really adopting very strongly this socio-technical perspective, which is really to say we've got to stop thinking about AI

and purely from a very technical point of view and actually look at these sorts of issues that we're talking about, work design, culture, leadership, skills, regulation. And so that's what our centre is all about. We've got seven years. And, yeah, super excited to be sort of embarking on this journey. It's absolutely the right time. Yeah.

In fact, we're a bit late, but better late than never. Well, Dr. Harjou, Dr. Parker, I want to thank you both for joining me today. It's been very interesting and stimulating, not boring in the least. Thank you so much for having us. You can read more about Boreout in the September issue of APA's magazine Monitor on Psychology, which you can find online at www.apa.org backslash monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. The American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.