Stuff You Should Know - How Boredom Works

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Are there benefits to boredom? Or is it all negative? Why do we get bored? What can we do to break free from boredom? The answers to those questions and more are coming your way today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Bell, connection is everything. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of women's health and gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard.

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Hey, and welcome to the podcast, and I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, and we are going to do the opposite of making you bored with this episode on Boredom. That's right. Before we get going, though, we want to recommend a podcast to our listeners from our always friend and former colleague. Forever friend. Forever. Yeah, he's our FF. But former colleague, we used to work with Mangesh, Haddockadour at How Stuff Works. And I'm not lying when I think we'll all agree, because Jerry's listening to, that Mangash is one of the, like, sweetest, sweethearts, kindest, like, most intelligent, nicest dudes of all time. And that's reason enough to listen to anything that he does. He's a high quality person. He's the best. Mangesh is great. So he has a show out called How to Live Forever. which is not like, here's how you live forever.

It's more like trying to understand this sort of movement that's going around of people that want to try and like extend life into like, you know, hundreds of years or forever, which is super up stuff you should know, listeners, Allie, I think. Yeah. And it's a great show. He wants to recommend in particular, if you want to just give it a shot, he said the third and the fifth episodes are really standouts.

Yeah. And I listened to episode five because it sounded super interesting. And it is. buddy because in episode five mangesh kind of goes um investigator to track down this uh startup that's trying to create brain dead clones for billionaires so that when you get to be like you know 90 years old you can do a body replacement and transfer like this is real uh futurerama kind of stuff right to transfer like the head of a billionaire to like a younger body and this is actually happening.

Peter Thiel is a funder of this thing. So is ARPA H, and it's just kind of crazy stuff. So that's episode five. But the podcast is How to Live Forever, and it's awesome. Yeah, and Mangesh is super interesting and entertaining. And if you're like, I'm not quite convinced of this Mangesh guy, put this in your pipe and smoke it. He, along with another colleague of ours, Will Pearson, co-founded mental floss back in the day when he was in college. Yeah, man.

Yep. That's all you need to know. Yeah, man gush is the best. So check out how to live forever. I'm going to get all corporate here and say wherever you get your podcasts. Ooh, is it guaranteed human? I think so. Okay, great.

Okay, Chuck, so we're talking about boredom. I found it exceedingly hard to concentrate while I was studying this. Did you? Yeah, it was. I hated to say it, but it was kind of boring. I actually liked it. Oh, really? Yes, I did.

At first I was like, this is kind of. to boring. It's very dry. But if you put it all together, it actually, boredom did become a little more interesting to me than it had been before. Let me just say it like that. How about that? Well, that's good. But it's like when we researched sushi or yawning or whatever, I wanted sushi, I couldn't stop yawning. Right, right. Like reading about boredom actually makes you, like, it's hard to concentrate, which is one of the traits of boredom. I just thought that was very interesting. For sure. If you want to talk about just how boredom is sort of defined, it is the experience of wanting to engage in something that is like satisfying to you, but not being able to and being left in a state. In this case, it's called an adaptive state. Yeah.

Where, you know, you don't have an optimal energy level. It may be, there may be some discomfort. this is a big part of boredom is it urges new action because as we'll see just being bored can lead to you doing really dumb things just so something is happening if you put all that together man it really just sounds like you need a snickers right yeah maybe so because boredom you know know it's boredom definitely urges you to pursue something different than what's going on that's sort of the whole point behind it. Yes. Now, whether what you pursue is up to you and it can be negative, it can be positive,

it can be really bad for you, it can actually be great. And this is like, this is like it's really well studied. I think one of the things I appreciated about it is the philosophers, starting in the 19th century with Schopenauer and then Nietzsche, like they really thought a lot about boredom and what boredom was. and they created a great basis for it that science then took over, and science has done a really good job of investigating it and explaining it too. And I love topics like that because we cover so much stuff.

Like I like it when it's like no one understands this and here's this theory and here's that theory. I like topics like that. But I also like topics where it's all like, oh, all the components are here and we can put them together and now I understand it. Yeah, for sure. I agree too. If there's boredom happening, that means there's obviously nothing new or stimulating happen. there may be a time distortion, like things are really dragging on, and it might feel meaningless. And you mentioned Schopenhauer.

He put forth that boredom and pain are like the twin poles of life, and you just kind of swing between those. Yeah. Yeah. And Nietzsche came along, and he was like, I agree. He said, yes, and I think boredom can actually lead to creativity. I don't think it's all bad. And he went on to say, which I think is going a little far, that God. created humans because God was bored.

Okay. It's a little, it's like, how are you going to prove that? And he said, I'm a philosopher. I don't have to prove a goddamn thing. Emily has always, and I've since gotten on board when you have a kid, you know, when you have a kid, you know, I'm bored, I'm bored. You hear that a lot. And she, from the very beginning with Ruby was like, well, you know what's on the other side of boredom, creativity. And, you know, Ruby's tired of hearing that.

But that's a good way to handle it with kids. is, and they say to like, you know, don't hand them something to do. Like, you're bored, oh, here, do this and do this and, like, try and solve their problem. Right. You're like, solve it yourself. Go find something to do. Right. And if all goes well, and generally it does, at least with my daughter, all of a sudden,

she's, you know, drawing something or writing something. That's neat. Yeah. Or you're like, where did she get that pony? Right. All of a sudden. I know. How creative.

So one thing that the philosophy. did have in common, Chuck, was that they considered boredom important. And I think today most people, including me, I did not think of boredom as particularly important. But if you look at it a certain way, say like have science now does, it's extremely important in that if you think about us never getting bored, we would just sit around either blist out all day or sitting around doing nothing, right? Like boredom actually prompts you to action. And they believe now that essentially it's because your brain is constantly seeking new novel stimuli that when it's not granted that, when it doesn't have the opportunity to do that

anymore, and we'll see in a second there's different reasons why that can happen, it just basically shuts down to a certain extent. And that's not just it. If it just kind of shut down, you would just be daydreaming. there's also a negative arousal state to where you just feel restless, agitated, you can't concentrate. Yeah. And that, those two things combine, make boredom kind of unpleasant and spur you to action to go do something that will give your brain the novel stimuli it gets to search for. It likes to search for signal among noise and then engage with the signal is how I saw it put.

And that when it can't do that, that's where boredom comes. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. Because I was today years old when I found out that the brain is constantly predicting sensory inputs. Right. I always just kind of thought the brain was processing information as it receives it. But the brain is predicting, like actively predicting sensory inputs. And the brain loves it when those predictions are validated. But what it really loves is when it's an environment where it makes a prediction that,

is slightly different than what it predicted in reality. Yeah, we would call that learning, in other words, right? Yeah. And that's where the brain gets a little dose of dopamine. Because we've talked about dopamine before, it's a reinforcing reward chemical, right? Yeah. It's not like, oh, I ate the stickers and there's dopamine. That's a misstatement of what dopamine is.

Dopamine is what our brain gets when we get it, our brain gets it slightly wrong, so that it learns. It says, this is important. Here's what the correct answer. was and now your brain just learned. That's what it seems to like the most like you said. Yeah, for sure. And boredom could also, or at least what it could represent, is a faulty prediction where the brain has an unrealistic award or reward that they think is coming. So in that case, it varies from like the prediction, but not in a good way. So like there's a hypothesis that if you're prone to boredom, that your brain isn't predicting well. It's like bad at predicting what's happening. Yeah, right. There's other

situations that they've identified where you can get bored or where boredom sets in. One is obviously where you're just not getting enough stimulation. Like an example I thought of is, let's say your quality control for the Schatz Brewery production line and your job is to look for a glove on a bottle. Uh-huh. And it's only happened one time and it's never happened since. And you're really getting bored by this point because you know that nothing new is coming along. So your brain is like, I'm bored, right? Yeah. Which, as we'll see, is a terrible state for you to be in as a worker for years and years on end.

And then the other one is the opposite. Like, you're getting so much information that you don't understand that you get bored because your brain can't find signal in the noise. And a good example I saw that is like a really dense lecture on a topic that you are totally unfamiliar with. Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah, for sure.

I fall into that trap a lot, I feel like. Yeah, I think most people do. Yeah, and you can become really restless if you're trying to become mentally engage. And then if he failed to, that a real listlessness can follow. I mentioned the time thing. It can really feel like time has slowed down and that there's no value in what's going on and your concentration is off. We did talk about, like, you don't necessarily yawn when you're. you're bored, but you can yawn when you're bored. Like, you can change your, like, physical state.

You could slouch a lot more. It's, you know, sometimes this may be a signal to other people that we're with of, like, you know, this party's lame. Let's get out of here. Yeah. Right. Yeah, because I remember in our yawning episode that they, one of the theories was that it was a signal to others that danger was nearby when we ya, we were anxious. Oh, yeah, that's right, danger. So there's been studies about what it's like to be bored. All of us know what boredom is like, but I think if you just took me aside and, you know, five days ago said like, okay, what is boredom? Like, explain it, describe it. You'd say this.

Yeah, I probably wouldn't have been able to. So people have studied to try to figure out subjectively what boredom's like. You ticked off a lot of it, but it seems like the studies that really kind of got to the root of it went to the further. extreme and induced the deepest possible boredom that you can through sensory deprivation. And what they found is that the brain just goes haywire when it's bored to those extreme levels. Yeah, they did, you know, they've done studies like this, you know, for decades, but there was one in the 50s at McGill University in Montreal, shout out Montreal, where they paid people 20 bucks a day to stay in these little rooms.

You had to wear like sensory deprivation goggles and headphones. and gloves and cardboard tubes on the arms. I didn't quite get that. I guess they just wanted you to be fully sort of, I don't know, blocked down. No sense of touch, maybe? Yeah, I guess so. And I think it was over the period of a few days.

They never went longer than a week. Right. But it was not good. You know, people couldn't fix on anything, like any thought for any length of time at all. And their word pattern recognition got all over the place. their arithmetic skills were terrible. They started, like, hallucinating, and they became more susceptible to supernatural beliefs.

Yep. So obviously something like solitary confinement in prison, which I think, did we do a whole episode in solitary or just? Yes, we did, and we concluded it's not only inhumane, it's inhuman. Yeah, completely, because it physically alters the brain. Like, it shrinks your hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that, you know,

we talk about a lot, but it's involved in emotion control, spatial orientation, memory, that kind of thing. So you're basically just, you're shrinking that part of your brain when you throw someone in solitary. Right. You want to take a break and come back and talk about how boredom can be useful? Yeah, let's do it. The long loading times, the glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month.

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If we experience boredom, and it seems like a lot of different animals experience boredom, too, as we'll see, there has to be some sort of evolutionary benefit from it for it sticking around for clearly tens or hundreds of millions of years, right? Yeah. And what they finally landed on was the same thing that Schopenauer and Nietzsche and Henry David Thro and a bunch of other philosophers pointed to, which was it prompts you to go out and do other stuff. And it doesn't necessarily prompt you to go out and do the safest thing. It turns out that it prompts you to go do anything else, even stuff that is outside of your comfort zone.

If it's an alternative to whatever you're doing now and you're bored, you're much likelier to go try it than when you're not bored. And that's what a bunch of research has turned up. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, you think about the scenario of a bunch of kids board in the summertime, and they're like, hey, let's go jump off the roof of the house right now and see what happens. Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. There was a study in the, I guess it's a scientific paper, emotion or a magazine. A journal, yeah. Journal, yeah. Journal. Quarterly, maybe. I don't know. A rag. A white paper.

Yeah. By doctors Heather Lynch and Shane Bench, Lynch and Bench, where they subjected the participants to stimuli that would make them bored, either neutral board, positive board, or negative board. And across all the studies, people reporting high boredom were more likely to choose something unfamiliar, which included negative experiences. And people bored by positive conditions sought out negative experiences. And if you were bored by negative content, you sought out positive experiences. So almost like you're seeking out the opposite of whatever you're. experiencing in your boredom.

Exactly. Yeah. They kept showing them like picture after picture after picture. And even if it was positive, they're like, do you want to switch to the negative pictures? It's like cockroaches and stacks of dirty dishes. And the people were like, yes, please, hurry up. Yeah.

So yeah, that's pretty good study pointing out that, you know, it will leave our comfort zone. At least we'll go look at pictures of dirty dishes if we're bored, right? And then other studies have kind of followed this up. There was one in 2014 that attached something that could deliver an electric shock around participants' ankles and then just left them to be bored in a room alone for 15 minutes and see if anybody would press the button that gave themselves a shock. Knowing that if they press this button, that's what was going to happen. It wasn't like a surprise.

And people did. A lot of people did, as a matter of fact. They got so bored, they're like, I guess I'll just give myself electric shocks. I could see myself totally doing that, by the way. I think it depends on the shock. I would at least try it once, probably, eventually. Yeah, my deal. I would try it once and be like, well, I got to see what the button does.

There's like, no way I'm just going to sit here and not know. Right. Yeah. One guy apparently pressed the button 190 times in that study. Yeah, I think they should do follow-up studies with that guy. And just that guy. Something's going on there. Exactly.

So circling it back around to evolution, What they basically put all this together is that, you know, just sitting around like a campfire or something, if we got bored or Tuktuk got bored, that might prompt him to be like, I'm going to go see what's over here. I'm going to go, you know, see what's down this river. And then maybe Tuck Tuck encountered a new animal that Tuk Tuk had never seen before. And Tuk Tuk was kind of forced to create a new weapon to hunt that animal. Or even better, even better. took-took made friends with that animal, and all of a sudden,

both of their brains just enlarged because of the empathy and love that developed between the two. Yeah, I mean, that could go either way. You know, I've talked a bit about watching the survival TV show alone, and a common theme among all participants on that show is like,

you're out here by yourself, and like, it gets boring. And sometimes that has led to them making decisions that leads to, like, the end of their stay there, because they did what, took took did they're like hey i'm bored i want to go across that stream that i thought it was probably a really bad idea to cross and uh and turns out that was correct and all of a sudden

they're getting helicoptered out yes but it can also work out too and that you go make a friend with an animal on the other side of that stream yeah or kill it and eat it so uh i think also one of the more prevalent interpretations among lay people like us um meaning people who like to just lay around Yeah. Is that dumb people are more prone to be bored. And apparently this is the idea of Henry David Thoreau. He was like, if you're smart, you can always find something that occupy yourself. And I was like, shut up Thoreau.

Yeah. We know that you're so smart and cool. We get it. You don't have to put everybody else down. Studies have not borne out Thoreau's idea. It finds that intelligent people and people of lower intelligence are not, neither one's more likely to become bored more easily. But there are personality traits that create, like, trait boredom.

There's trait and there's state, just like optimism. There's trait boredom and there's state boredom. And trait boredom seems to be kind of identified with two different types of people. Yeah, there's a psychologist named John Eastwood that said, if you're an impulsive person and if you're always looking for that new thrill and that, you know, generally kind of understimulated by the world. around you, then that totally makes sense that you would be prone to boredom. This one, I don't know, it can't make sense of, but if you're highly sensitive to pain

and fearful of the world around you, maybe you're unsatisfied by the idea, like the safety net of not leaving your comfort zone. So you might be more prone to boredom. But I guess maybe more willing to live with it? Yes. Your anxiety or your fears overcome your... you're aversion, your natural aversion to bored as a human because, and so you're just not feeding your brain any new stuff anymore, so you become bored. It's a very sad reason for being prone

to boredom. Yeah. In school, you know, you were talking about intelligence, in school, boredom is a big, you know, can be a big challenge for any student. But there are eight precursors for boredom in school, which is your under-challenged, like maybe you're in a, like a remedial class and you're a little more advanced, over-challenged, and go the other way, too, where if you're like, I just don't get this stuff, so you just slip into boredom, like you were talking about earlier, monotony in classrooms, if you don't like your teacher,

if you think there's a lack of meaning and going to school or a lack of involvement. And then the other one is just the, you know, man, I could be doing whatever. I could be outside throwing the frisbee right now instead of being in this dumb class. Yeah, and if you're an adolescent, You're essentially born to be bored.

Like your boredom levels peak between the ages of 10 and 17. Apparently, where you and I are in life right now is where boredom levels dip the most. Yeah, I feel that. I can't, too. It's not like I'm always doing something meaningful or important. I just don't feel bored ever. That's all. I don't either.

Yeah, even when I'm not doing anything, I'm never bored. Same, man. I don't feel boredom anymore. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's great. I wonder if it's just getting to a certain point in your life where you're maybe just satisfied with where you are or maybe drinking the small things more. I don't know. Yeah, for sure.

I think that's definitely part of it. And apparently it starts to go back up as you get older, which I'm not looking forward to. Yeah, let's avoid that. Let's agree to avoid that. Yes, all right, agree. Pinky swear. Pinky swear. But nothing compares to your levels of boredom from 10 to 7.

Part of it is that your brain is still developing. So you said impulse control and needing stimulation is one group of people who get bored more easily. Well, adolescents by nature are like that because their brain is still developing. And then also they have much less agency or control over their lives. And control or lack of control is positively correlated with boredom. Oh, sure. So, yes. So if you're like, I want to go buy a mad magazine at this awesome used comic book store.

But I can't because I can't drive and it's all the way on the other side of town, you're probably going to really resent the situation that you're in right there. And nothing is going to make you, like, you're not going to say, oh, I'll just go play duck hunt then and be happy. You're just upset about that. And that can create like a sense of boredom in and of itself. buddy do you remember the feeling you got when you got that driver's license um no not really i don't oh really yeah man i that that is uh and it might just be me then it that was a one of the

single most like important sort of things that happened in my life up to you know my 20s or 30s even wow that's awesome that freedom when i finally got that car key and was able to go and leave the house by myself to go do something and go somewhere there I wanted to go. That's cool, man. It was incredible. I remember the feeling of just being like, now I can leave. I mean, no shade toward my family or anything. I've talked before about not having the greatest situation with my parents and all.

So, yeah, I wanted to get out of there. But just the freedom to go to my friend's house or whatever, go to the Turtles record store or whatever. No, I remember those. Yeah, it was incredible. Yeah, no, totally. You prize freedom. Yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah, for sure. We should probably talk about digital media, though, because if you look at like boredom generationally, it's a different ball of twine these days. Yeah, so I think most people think when you get bored, you pull out your smartphone, you go on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, I guess is how you pronounce it. And like now you're not bored any longer. And there are theories, starting with our good friend Arthur Schopenhauer, that you are still bored. What you have done is actually lowered your cognitive levels so that you're not bored anymore. You're not going and doing something meaningful or fulfilling to stave off boredom. You've just undertaken a deeply maladaptive response to boredom, which is, I'm going to stop thinking so much.

And that's what you're doing when you go scroll on social media. Yeah, I guess it's a temporary SAV kind of thing. But like chronic exposure to that, like your smartphone is basically pushing up the standard of what you find engaging enough to keep you from being bored. Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's so that's a little different from what I'm saying. That totally makes sense to me. The one I'm talking about is this idea that what you're engaging is existential escape.

And there's a whole school of thought that boredom represents a threat to meaning. It shows you what you're doing right now is not meaningful. What you're doing is meaningless. Maybe your entire life is meaningless. Maybe everyone's life is meaningless. So you're threatened by that. Bordom is, it generates those thoughts in you. So when you go pick up your phone and start scrolling, you are escaping those existential thoughts by not thinking about that kind of stuff.

Right. And when people spend hours and hours every day on their phone and everybody has it in their pocket, we have now this quick and easy way to just stop thinking and stop going and doing something else is more meaningful to you personally, not necessarily to society, but something that's more meaningful to you. you, and so we get trapped in this state of living to a lesser degree than we would if there weren't social media apps on smartphones. Seriously, it's as cut and dry it as that. Yeah, for sure. I'm getting a dumb phone. Are you? Yeah, I've got to figure it out because I just started sort of looking into it, but I want to be able to have both with the same phone number. Oh, neat. Because in certain situations, I'm going to still want my iPhone, like when I'm traveling or whatever, a lot of situations where I'm going to want it.

But I want to get one, and I just have, and maybe if someone knows how to do this, that would be great if they could write in. But I want to get one that works with the same phone number on the same carrier. I'm happy to pay for the extra, whatever it costs to manage that account or whatever. But yeah, in a lot of most situations, I would try to have the dumb phone on me. I'm just like talking out of turn here, but it seems like spoofing your sim would be the answer to that. And I don't know how you would do that, but that would be my guess. I don't know what spoofing a sim means.

Your SIM card is what gives your phone its individual characteristics, like it's phone number and all that stuff. Oh, okay. So if you can figure out how to duplicate that or spoof it in TikTok terms, you could conceivably have two phones with the same number getting the same number getting the same. same info at the same time. You know, I don't know why Apple doesn't put out a dumb phone that's like, here's another thing we can sell you. Right. That works perfectly with your phone number and everything.

Like, I think they would sell a ton of those because people would be like, yeah, I want two phones. When I'm out with my friends, I want my dumb phone so I can just stay present. And when I, whatever, I want my smartphone. I think that, I think you just kind of answered it, that there's people who would say, because generally people in charge don't want you to be present. Yeah, maybe so. That's, yeah, it's my guess.

I just saw where social media companies are being sued for $220 billion by a handful of states. Good. For getting children addicted to social media. Which they 100% did. Yeah. I'm really curious how that pans out. Yeah. I mean, it's a slam dunk case.

It's just those guys are so powerful. that I mean, they make the tobacco companies look like, you know, a local auto body shop. Yeah, I'm with you. And hats off to Australia because they mandated countrywide and no social media for any children under 16. Yeah, they did that a while back, didn't they? I don't know how recently, but they're sort of leading the way in a lot of other countries are like, hey, maybe that's not such a bad idea. And certainly, you know, we're going to do that in our family.

And I don't even think 16, man. I would love to see Ruby get through all of high school, without any exposure to social media. That would be something. Really great. Yeah, I think it's very sad and I think it's going to be something that we, it's just going to get more and more clear as time goes on,

like just how harmful that was. Yeah, and especially as it gets more and more fake and deep faked in AI to the point where people are sitting around staring at something that isn't even real, ever. Yeah, I tend to hope, though, Chuck, that it's been ground in. so hard and in such a compressed amount of time over the course of just several years

that people are just going to have a natural backlash against it and maybe like the cool thing will be to spend all your time outside doing stuff, you know? I hope so, man. I would love to see it swing. And things a lot of times do swing back hard the other way. I would love to see that of like people like smashing their smartphones and being like, no, man, things were better before.

Let's go back to that. Yeah. That'd be great. Maybe we'll take a break and talk about animals and benefits of boredom. Does that sound good? Yeah. All right. We'll be right back.

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Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the host of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. This week on the show, it's Star Trek. So we're going to be talking about the Borg all week long. Are you ready to get some probes put in your flesh? That's right. Tune in. Resistance is futile. We're going to talk science, the culture of the Borg, various interpretations,

and we're going to talk about Star Trek First Contact on Weird House Cinema on Friday. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin this season on my podcast. Here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers like actor Stephen Root. I think for me to be any good or for any character actor to be any good, you've got to put enough of yourself and your empathy for people in it. I'm a people watcher. You see that guy going down the dream? Yeah, I can use that. Open Igloo co-founder, Alia Mohamed. I love staying on top of what is going on in our city, what is going on in city politics, what is on renter's minds, and taking all of that

knowledge to build a platform that hopefully is going to make New York City better in the long run. And actress and singer Melissa Eriko. Partnership took on a whole other meaning when I started making my own work. It's like you with a great actress or actor. It was best to come out of your trailer, full of life, and just face another person who's full of life and don't talk. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts

Or wherever you get your podcasts Stuff you should know All right everyone We're back after our little rant I hope it was taken in the right way Tim Cook is like Those guys really hurt my feelings Tim Cook would be

I hope he gives me credit when they invent a dumb phone That they can tell you for like $700. Yeah, at least. They're like, you can text and get the map to places and, uh, and call people. And that'll be $700. Right. We're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're paying not to go with a cognitive decline.

I think that's really what the price reflects. Uh, all right. So I promise talk about animals getting bored, uh, animals that aren't us that is. And they have done research to and basically kind of said like, yeah, animals for sure get bored. Um, I think we, I mean, people that are, you know, you know, dog in, at least dog owners, have seen their own dogs get bored and get, like, get destructive because they're not stimulated enough. And I think that's kind of the same thing. But they studied mink, like the animal the mink that's, they house them in non-enriching environments. It was terrible. And then they said they

definitely experienced boredom-like states because they found that they would, these mink would approach anything novel shown to them, even if it was like a predator, like what they thought was predator, like a predator's shadow and the noises of a predator, the mink was like, well, I'll go check it out. I don't care. Anything but this cage. Yeah, isn't that interesting, though? It increased curiosity in them, like, because they were bored.

So that kind of goes to support that evolutionary idea, too. Yeah. There's another one that studied rats where basically they switched up foraging material and the flavor of the pellets under the foraging material for some rats. And then others, they just gave them the same ones over and over again. And the ones that got the same ones over and over again exhibited behavior, like trying to find the exit out of their cage and other really sad stuff. So what's heartening about this is animal welfare people are pointing to this and saying like, if you have a pet or an animal that you keep, you have a greater responsibility to it than just keeping it alive and giving it food and water, maybe taking it for a walk. Animals get bored, which means you're responsible for stimulating something that gets bored if you've taken responsibility for it.

in any way. Yeah, for sure. My one dog Gibson is a hound dog, and he is very stimulated by smelling stuff, obviously. So they say when you take your dog for a walk to let them smell. Like if you're constantly just pulling your dog, you know, because you're trying to get your steps in, they get more worn out from a 20-minute sniff walk than an hour, like, hardcore exercise walk. And my walks with Gibson, like, they're 45 to 50 minutes long, and I bet half of that is standing around while he smells stuff. I am so glad you said that, dude, because that is absolutely true. And you see a lot of people who are just like, come on.

And that's, yeah, it doesn't, like, that's how your dog, like, enjoys life is by sniffing other stuff. Yeah, it's great. And it's a good lesson for me, like, as a person. Like, I thought you were learning to sniff things. No, no, no, just to slow down. Like, yesterday, another weird example is I got, I went, sometimes, I'll, sometimes I I'll go out to play golf by myself if no one's around and get in like a little, you know,

if they don't pair me with anyone, it's kind of great because I can, you know, drop as many balls to take the shot over again and really like just sort of treat it as practice. Yeah. But I went out to do that the other day and they paired me with these two old fellers that were probably mid 80s to 90s. Oh, wow. And boy, these guys were slow, slow, slow. And I was like, you know what, Chuck?

This isn't that day. You're just going to be there with them. You're going to help look for their balls. You're going to carry the clubs to them when they drop them, and you're going to slow it down. And it was a really lovely, relaxing experience. I didn't get bored. I tried to, like, revel in the slowness of it all, you know? They kept dropping their clubs?

No, like, you know, you carry a pitching wedge and a putter to the green, and you drop your pitching wedge to putt. I would always go, like, catty their club for them or get their ball or whatever. You know, try to help these guys out. I got you now. They didn't like me very much of that. It was still fun. So, yeah, I think that's great advice, too, just to slow down and stay present and mindful. Yeah, and all that, I think, comes around to the bored and thing.

It's like, there are many ways to keep yourself from being bored, and one might be to just try and look at the circumstance you in a different way. For sure. Also, I think it's important to bear in mind that you, like, what's meaningful to you or what's boring to you is boring or meaningful to somebody else. Right. So it's not, like, you'll get all sorts of advice. Like, go out and read a book. Go and ride a bike.

That might not necessarily be meaningful to you. There's something else that's going to be meaningful to you. And that's advice that's typically given to deal with boredom, which is identify things that you care about and then go do those things. Just have them on hand. You know, you don't have to do them all the time. You don't have to become the best at them. You don't have to drive yourself.

You don't have to share your experience with anybody else. Yeah. But just identify some things like this is meaningful to be so that if you do find yourself bored, you don't necessarily just pull out your phone. You go, hmm, maybe I'll go to, you know, rescue guppies out of elementary school aquariums. Right. Whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, it definitely can lead to creativity. There's a psychologist name, Sandy,

man that says that, you know, embrace that boredom. There was a study that she did where she had people copying numbers from a telephone directory. And she found that they were more creative after, like she gave them a task, like, hey, try and think while you're doing this, try and think of new uses for plastic cups. And once they were subjected to the tedium of just copying numbers, it allowed their, you know, they embraced that boredom and their mind wandered all these creative things they could do with the cups.

And beer pong was born. Yeah, exactly. And that there's something called the default mode network where if you're not doing anything, that gives your brain space to go in that default mode where your brain isn't engaged in a specific thing, but it can get creative. Yeah, we've talked about that a lot over the last few years. I know it's a big deal with ADHD that it's really hard to get out of your default mode network. Right.

And so no surprise, boredom can be. a part of ADHD too. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we're talking about some of the positives that can also be a negative thing because we talked about risk-taking and risky behavior just to do something different. They definitely tied boredom to like, you know, gambling, substance abuse and stuff like that, like the promise and of a stimulation that you're seeking because your bored can sometimes be like a really bad thing. Agreed. You can turn. You can turn. to, we've been picking on smartphones and sorry to everybody who's like, you guys are too preachy these days.

That was definitely very preachy. But it is a pretty good example. It's not the only one. People take up drugs, literally take up drugs because they're bored with life. They start drinking sometimes. Studies show that people who are bored consistently go to lower quality or low nutrition snacks over, you know, something better for them when they have the olives. option. Like, you can just, you go in a place where you're going to find some sort of stimulation.

And, yeah, so there are a lot of risk behaviors associated with boredom. That you're going to do something because you've got to get rid of that arousal state that's unpleasant, which is boredom, but it's not necessarily going to be going and volunteering at the cancer ward at your local hospital. It might be, I'll go see what cracks all about. Man, you're so preachy. Some people do you find, we get that from time to time. Yeah, but you're sitting there encouraging people to like engage with the world and to go volunteer for cancer and not to do crack. Like, get off your high horse.

I think that some people don't like being told what to do no matter what it is. I know. Yeah. And I get that. I don't, I feel like also, I think it's our age too. we're just lucky that we're not like the kind who like tell everybody how stupid they are too you know yeah i mean i hope people know it's always take it or leave it like you know you don't have to be the way we're saying to be but i love the advice of engaging with the world or volunteering for

you know sick children in a hospital rather than doing crack i'm i'll stand i'll die on that hill and i think also though chuck it's really important that we pointed out that you know there's there's not some ideal thing you should go do. No. That it's all based on what you find meaningful, and that's the point. Not what we're saying you should go to, but what you think you should go do, the point is to just do something that's going to help you in the long run more than, you know, turning to pot. Right.

Procrastination is another thing. I know we've talked about that before, but it is definitely a response to boredom. proneness to boredom increases someone's tendency to procrastinate generally, which is interesting because it's, you know, doing that thing would solve the boredom problem, like the thing you're putting off a lot of times. I think they're equating it with, like, looking at your smartphone, you're not actually doing anything.

You're just lowering your brain standards for input. I guess that makes sense. And we talked about some stuff with managing boredom, like, you know, identifying. ahead of time things that you could go do. Like you said, don't just try to solve it immediately for kids. Let them kind of figure it out on their own. I also saw there was a study where researchers presented kids with a big bag of toys

and they found that the kids played with each one a little bit and then just stopped eventually. And that if they gave kids just like one toy, the kid engaged with that one toy much longer. So that's part of it too, I guess, is robbing children of any sort of choice. in life, I think is the lesson there. I really, what really hit home was when you, like, to do something meaningful for you, I really like that you said that, because that could be going to, you know, working in your garden or whatever. It could be drawing something.

It could be writing something. Could be taking a walk. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be some, like, grand meaningful gesture to other people. Right. That's what I was trying to say. That there's not some level that your activities have to rise to to be considered meaningful. If they're meaningful for you, bam.

And do not say that looking at Instagram is meaningful for you. You're lying. You're lying to yourself. You're lying to Chuck. You're lying to me. You're lying to everybody. I agree with that. I think that's it for boredom for now, huh?

Yeah. It was a good one. I like this one. I did too. And I think since this is the end of boredom, it's time then for listener menu. That's right. This is short and sweet. Hey, guys, longtime listener, first-time writer.

This is about the irony episode from Nick. I once had a debate about the song ironic that you guys talked about from Alanis Morissette. Yeah. An English teacher I worked with. I argued that it is a purely ironic song because it's called ironic and contains no irony. An irony is flipping expectations to a certain degree on a meta level. I really think the song is pure irony. Never really thought about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the great content, guys. I used to have playlist for my AP students to listen to for interest. introducing subjects and for review and they enjoyed it, and it helped lay the foundation for their studies. And that is Nick. Thanks a lot, Nick. That was just an all-around great email.

It's not very often that our minds are just completely blown, but I'm pretty sure you just did it for both of us. Yes. If you want to be like Nick and blow our minds, please do. You can send it an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio. visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome to Decoding Women's Health. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Pointer, chair of Women's Health

and Gynecology at the Atria Health Institute in New York City. I'll be talking to top researchers and clinicians and bringing vital information about midlife women's health directly to you. A hundred percent of women go through menopause. Even if it's natural, why should we suffer through it? Listen to Decoding Women's Health with Dr. Elizabeth Pointer. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image.

Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Immanuel Jochi. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Michael Imperioly.

I want to tell you about my new podcast, Underground Zero. We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the other families. It's about the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. What's in the tunnels? Gold bars, Silver Ingech. It could be worth half a billion. Starring Steve Sharipa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperioly. How far you're prepared to go?

Depends how far you are. Listen to Underground Zero on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.