The Art of Manliness - The Psychology of Boredom

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when we experience

00:00:11.700 boredom we tend to experience it as uncomfortable and agitating seek to banish it with some ready

00:00:16.000 distraction like our smartphone for example or we try to look at boredom sort of piously as

00:00:20.280 something we should learn to sit with because it builds character my guests today would argue

00:00:23.880 that's best to see boredom more neutrally as simply an important signal that we need to change

00:00:27.860 up what we're doing and become more effective and engaged in the world his name is james dankert

00:00:31.900 and he's a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology as well as the co-author of the book

00:00:35.900 out of my skull the psychology of boredom we begin our conversation with how boredom has been thought

00:00:40.400 about in history and philosophy and yet largely ignored by psychologists we then discuss what

00:00:44.160 it really means to be bored and what types of people are more prone to boredom james explains

00:00:48.000 how boredom is related to our sense of agency and the role constraints play in increasing it we then

00:00:52.320 get into how people's propensity towards boredom changes across the lifespan and at what ages you're

00:00:56.540 more and less likely to experience boredom and we enter conversation with the negative effects of

00:01:00.400 being bored prone including the way boredom may increase political extremism then we also talk

00:01:04.820 about the more positive and adaptive ways to deal with being bored as well as what to tell your kid

00:01:09.320 when they say dad i'm bored out of the shows over check out our show notes at aom.is slash boredom

00:01:14.300 james dankert welcome to the show great to be here so you are a psychologist and you are the

00:01:30.680 co-author of a book called out of my skull the psychology of boredom what i think is interesting

00:01:36.120 boredom has been explored by philosophers theologians writers for millennia yet you know in the book you

00:01:43.660 and your co-author note that psychology has pretty much ignored it they've written about it a bit

00:01:48.320 but hasn't really done a deep dive like why do you think psychologists have ignored pretty much this

00:01:54.480 ubiquitous human experience it's hard to answer that really because you know it's a sociological

00:02:00.800 question what makes something a sexy topic in science and and you know there are many factors i guess but

00:02:06.400 one thing that's possible is that we just sort of treat boredom as a kind of trivial experience

00:02:12.200 and so why study it right you can see that in the response that many parents have to their kids when

00:02:16.640 the kid comes to them and says i'm bored you say well get over it go do something you know there's

00:02:22.500 a million things you could be doing so just go and do one of those things what we've learned over the

00:02:27.700 last three or four decades is that you know being prone to boredom so experiencing it a lot actually has

00:02:33.460 a wide range of pretty negative consequences and so i think we're starting to get to it now and treat it

00:02:39.780 more seriously and it's getting the research due that it needs well let's talk about the history

00:02:43.820 of boredom do we have any like written accounts of like boredom from a thousand two thousand years

00:02:49.380 like when do we when do we first see humans talking about being bored well the the word itself doesn't

00:02:55.740 really come into the english language until charles dickens writes about it in his book bleak house but

00:03:00.000 we as you point out we know from other kinds of accounts that boredom has been with us for millennia

00:03:04.740 so one of the stories that we tell it actually comes from a book by peter tui called boredom a

00:03:11.060 lively history that he put out some years back he did a dive into a roman philosopher seneca who you

00:03:18.860 know talks about day following night and night following day and everything being the same and

00:03:24.440 monotonous and routine and that at the end of all of that sort of monotony and routine he feels nauseous

00:03:29.880 and you know it doesn't take much of a stretch to suggest that that's a pretty good description of

00:03:34.220 the outcome of monotony leading to boredom and tui also sort of dug up a story of a roman

00:03:41.580 town that immortalized somebody who saved the entire town from boredom so there's some sort of

00:03:48.020 stone there that says you know general such and such was a great guy because he he saved us from

00:03:52.200 our boredom we have no idea how or what that meant but at least it sort of highlights that yeah the

00:03:58.040 experience has been with us for a long long time and i we suggest also in the book that it's really

00:04:03.680 something that's selected for in our evolutionary past right so you can demonstrate boredom in

00:04:09.000 animals and if animals can experience boredom then it probably serves some sort of function

00:04:13.720 and you know was was selected for for a reason and the other people you highlight in the book that

00:04:19.040 really thought a lot about boredom or what we call boredom were monks they called it it was like

00:04:23.780 actually a sin they called it assidia right yeah assidia so it's sort of neglectfulness in your

00:04:30.500 duties towards god but not just neglectfulness and sort of a neglectfulness with respect to you

00:04:36.360 know being sort of slothful and and not really uh getting up and getting you know into your duties and

00:04:42.900 your your responsibilities to god the interesting sort of take on that too is that assidia was reported

00:04:49.440 by monks in cloistered sort of living arrangements most often when they're doing things like work on math

00:04:55.140 and arithmetic which you know if we jump forward to our present day there's some great work from a guy

00:05:01.960 called reinhardt peckren looking at boredom in schools and math tends to be the subject that most

00:05:07.860 kids report finding boring but yeah it it's sort of the the monks also referred to it not just as

00:05:14.540 assidia but that was the first kind of use of the term the noonday demon which it might be a term that

00:05:19.060 you've heard before that people used to refer to depression but it wasn't first used to refer to

00:05:24.740 depression it was referred but more to sort of boredom and finding yourself in the midst of a day

00:05:30.120 that was the same as any other day with you know things that you had to do so duties that you had in

00:05:34.480 front of you but just no motivation to do them or you know maybe a motivation to do something else

00:05:40.400 and then the other group of philosophers that thought and wrote a lot about boredom were the

00:05:45.040 existentialists the 20th century existentialists like how did they think about boredom and how did

00:05:50.040 that shape our perception of boredom yeah so their take on boredom was is really in the context of the

00:05:57.560 existential philosophy focusing on our search for and our need for meaning in life how do we make

00:06:04.040 sense and and how do we find meaning in our lives and so arthur schopenhauer sort of a progenitor of

00:06:11.420 existentialism sort of said that you know the two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom

00:06:16.400 and he explicitly sort of had these two enemies align up with different socioeconomic strata so

00:06:24.080 you know pain was the the province of the the poor you know because they they had sort of difficult

00:06:29.060 lives that they had to struggle through and boredom was the province of the rich you know they had so much

00:06:33.440 you know available at their fingertips that you know they sort of got bored with everything that they

00:06:38.640 could do because nothing really seemed like it was uh you know novel enough i guess but really what

00:06:44.920 they're doing is they're casting boredom as in the first instance a lack of meaning so things are cast

00:06:51.900 as being boring because they don't mean much to you they're not particularly relevant to you in some way

00:06:57.160 but then also that boredom is a sort of search for meaning when you're bored you don't sort of take it

00:07:03.820 lying down you start looking for ways in which you can overcome the boredom and in their hands that

00:07:09.860 means finding something that is more meaningful in your life gotcha let's talk about so we talk about

00:07:15.680 what philosophers have been talking about boredom but as a psychologist how do you describe boredom i

00:07:21.200 think everyone knows what it feels like to be bored but like how as a psychologist you have to make

00:07:25.420 that very explicit so how are you describing boredom psychologists often refer to a guy called

00:07:31.700 william james who's like the father of psychology and he and the annoying thing about william james is

00:07:36.200 that he rarely did any experiments but he did a lot of writing and got a lot of things right in

00:07:40.740 anyway you know and he's got this quote that sort of starts you know everybody knows what attention

00:07:45.600 is and then he goes on and describes what he thinks that means but you could do the same thing as that

00:07:50.240 you just did you know everybody knows what boredom is until you have to sort of buckle down and define

00:07:55.260 it really tightly right so in the the book john and i describe boredom as an unmet desire to be engaged

00:08:03.220 in something meaningful so the uncomfortable feeling that you get when you want to be engaged in something

00:08:08.860 meaningful but you can't satisfy that desire a quote from leo tolstoy captures it more succinctly

00:08:14.400 it sort of says that boredom is the desire for desires you want something but you don't want anything

00:08:20.040 that's currently in front of you you want something else and you don't know what that something else

00:08:24.100 might be so yeah that's the best way that i can capture boredom and how would you describe it was

00:08:30.680 is boredom an emotion a feeling what is how would you describe it like in that those terms yeah so my

00:08:36.360 co-author john who's a clinical psychologist by training which is not what i am i'm a cognitive

00:08:41.560 neuroscientist he would describe boredom as a fling state so he differentiates that from from an emotion

00:08:50.080 in this way i think when you're bored you're sort of thinking about your own thinking you're thinking

00:08:55.580 about what's going on in your head it is very self-focused kind of feeling state where you're

00:09:00.680 thinking you know i want something but i can't figure out what i want and it feels uncomfortable

00:09:04.280 and i hate it i'm bored and you keep sort of ruminating on those sorts of thoughts so it has

00:09:09.380 an affective component it has an emotional component to it that is that we feel it to be negative it's

00:09:14.820 uncomfortable we don't like it but as a feeling state it's very directly focused on the thoughts

00:09:21.240 that you're having and the desire that you have to find a goal to launch into so it's i mean there's

00:09:28.140 probably a little bit more nuanced than it needs to be but it's both an affective state and a sort of

00:09:33.980 cognitive experience and how would you differentiate boredom from apathy

00:09:38.940 yeah so we published a study a while ago where we statistically differentiated it and that was

00:09:46.020 really just based on what you we sort of call you know questionnaire studies survey studies so

00:09:50.220 you can ask people to respond to an apathy questionnaire a boredom questionnaire and then

00:09:55.100 statistically you can determine how much they overlap and they don't so apathy but but sort of

00:10:01.820 more colloquially sort of apathy is the absence of motivation you don't actually care i mean that's the

00:10:07.580 classic couch potato right you're lying around on the couch and you can't be bothered doing anything

00:10:13.160 the key thing that differentiates boredom from that is that you are bothered you're motivated to do

00:10:18.740 something you just can't satisfy that motivation as easily as you'd like so motivation is the thing

00:10:24.340 that really differentiates those two experiences so okay boredom is the basically it's the desire for

00:10:30.360 desire like you want you're not currently mentally engaged with whatever's in front of you you want to

00:10:34.720 be mentally engaged with something something meaningful but you can't figure out what it is

00:10:39.660 so it's sort of this conundrum like you want something but you don't know what you want like

00:10:43.800 why why do we have that conundrum like why is it that even though cognitively we might know like our kid

00:10:49.360 might know oh i could go read a book it's like well i don't want to do that like why why do we have

00:10:54.820 this this conundrum you call the conundrum of boredom i'd love to have a really clean and quick

00:11:01.840 answer for you but it's one of the things that is part of the ongoing research that we're doing on

00:11:05.820 boredom is to try and figure out why is it that people particularly people who are boredom prone

00:11:11.080 why is it that they fail to launch you know they recognize the signal is telling them that they want

00:11:16.760 something so it's not that they don't understand that signal it's like yes i want to be doing something

00:11:21.320 and i want to be doing something meaningful and it's also not that they can't see potential options

00:11:28.120 like you you raise the example of the you know the bored child you kid comes to you and says that

00:11:34.200 they're bored you know most of us as parents will say well why don't you do this why don't you do that

00:11:37.560 and we give them all kinds of options every one of which they dismiss because they've seen those

00:11:42.860 options too they know that those options are out there they just don't want them right now

00:11:46.440 but that still begs the question of why and so there's a number of possible options one is that

00:11:52.620 you know perhaps people who are prone to boredom are just not willing to

00:11:55.840 exert the effort needed to engage and we have some data that we've collected recently that shows

00:12:01.980 that that might indeed be the case that when you make people bored they tend to take the easy option

00:12:07.360 instead of the the more challenging option which is sort of self-defeating in some ways you know

00:12:11.640 because the easy option is also going to be the more boring option right it could be that people

00:12:17.860 who are prone to boredom just don't recognize or see value in the same way as people who are not

00:12:24.940 prone to boredom so that is that you know the things that are in front of them are sort of

00:12:29.460 tarred with the same gray brush you know they just don't really see them as being viable options of

00:12:34.980 you know then they just don't seem to be rewarding enough and i raise that in part because we've done

00:12:41.020 some work in individuals who've suffered traumatic brain injuries and they tend to report higher levels

00:12:46.960 of boredom and the part of the brain that's typically injured there is known as the orbitofrontal

00:12:51.160 cortex but it's important for representing value and reward and so what i think is happening for

00:12:57.040 those people who've suffered those brain injuries is that their threshold for what counts as enjoyable

00:13:02.660 pleasurable fun has been raised and so now it's harder for them to engage and see value in things

00:13:09.980 because of that raising of the threshold and that could be true for people who are high in boredom

00:13:14.600 prone regardless of whether or not they had a head injury so there's at least those two options and

00:13:20.600 there's potentially lots more that might explain why people when they're bored or the boredom prone

00:13:26.720 individual tend to fail to launch but it's still an open question so you've been mentioning throughout

00:13:31.760 this conversation that some people are more boredom prone than others so you talked about so specific

00:13:36.680 example someone who has a brain injury some part of the brain gets damaged where they can't measure

00:13:40.440 reward or value as well but there's other people who don't have a traumatic brain injury that are

00:13:46.240 also more prone to boredom have we figured that out like what sort of personality types are more prone

00:13:51.000 to boredom there are a range of things that we know are associated with being prone to boredom so

00:13:57.400 one that we've looked at prominently is uh the capacity for self-control so you know and this is the

00:14:03.680 you know your ability to to marshal your thoughts and your emotions and your actions in the pursuit of a

00:14:08.920 goal you know how well do you sort of put that goal in your headlights and go for it and people who

00:14:14.580 struggle with self-control tend to be more boredom prone we've also known that people who are a little

00:14:20.920 bit neurotic so people who have higher levels of of anxiety and concern for for day-to-day life they

00:14:27.600 also tend to be a little bit more boredom prone and when i mentioned earlier that you know boredom is this

00:14:33.440 self-focused experience where you could kind of ruminate on your thoughts that you're having and

00:14:39.200 and you ruminate basically on your failure to engage that's very similar to sort of ruminating on things

00:14:44.740 that make you anxious as well so it's perhaps not a surprise that those two things are related there's

00:14:50.040 a few other relations that i think are interesting but they're not quite as prominent so we know that

00:14:55.320 a certain type of narcissism is associated with being boredom prone as well we talk about two different

00:15:00.920 kinds of narcissism sort of overt narcissism which is you know the person that brags about how wonderful

00:15:05.300 they are and then covert narcissism and covert narcissists are the people who think you know the

00:15:11.080 world is just failing to recognize their brilliance if everything would be better if only people could

00:15:17.820 see how wonderful i am and those are the kind of people who are prone to boredom the overt narcissist

00:15:23.300 is not because they think they're brilliant and they tell everybody they're brilliant and they don't

00:15:28.200 feel boredom but the covert narcissist does so there's some associations like that that we think

00:15:33.680 are interesting also have shown that people who are low in self-esteem tend to be more boredom prone

00:15:39.640 and what we think that's about is that the lower self-esteem is probably related in the first instance

00:15:45.680 to people not believing that they're very effective agents in the world and so what i mean by that is

00:15:51.360 that we have a need to see ourselves as being you know effective actors when we choose to do something

00:15:58.400 it normally works or when we choose to engage with the world we can see and anticipate that the effects

00:16:04.240 are going to be what they're going to be you know we're going to be able to pursue a goal and have it

00:16:09.120 come to fruition and if you don't believe that then you know you don't see yourself as a very effective

00:16:15.260 human being then i think you're more prone to being bored as well and so that's another aspect of

00:16:19.860 the boredom personality that we're pursuing at the moment and so these are all internal factors that

00:16:25.100 contribute to boredom and i think you make this point a really great way as the story you told

00:16:30.060 show that two people can have the same experience and have vastly different boredom responses and the

00:16:36.880 experience you gave was two astronauts in space and one astronaut i think was a russian just talked

00:16:42.640 about how bored he was i think he was like in wasn't he in sky lab he was there forever yeah so he had

00:16:48.480 about 212 days i think valentin lebedev when in the space station and then at that time it was in

00:16:54.500 the 80s i think at that time it was a record yeah so he at first he was kind of excited because you're

00:16:59.740 in outer space and after a while he's like oh it's so boring i just can't take this can't wait to get

00:17:03.740 home what are people doing on earth and then the other one was chris hadfield right is that yes name

00:17:09.220 yeah and he completely like same he was in there up in space for a long time but completely different

00:17:14.360 experience yeah and and you know i think when we talked earlier about the role of meaning in boredom

00:17:22.860 chris hadfield is just able to see meaning in in anything that he was doing while he was up there

00:17:27.960 on the space station so he made youtube videos about how to fix the plumbing on a space toilet

00:17:34.000 and you sort of think he's this highly trained guy with you know huge amounts of qualifications and

00:17:39.320 they've got him fixing a toilet but you can't really call a plumber when you're up there so he

00:17:44.120 made videos about these mundane things that he had to do on the space station but to him they weren't

00:17:48.560 mundane he was able to see value in them and meaning in them and and so on and he also talks about you

00:17:53.840 know at every quiet moment that he had on the space station he would go to the portal and have a look

00:17:58.180 out because he was you know he reveled in the awe that that he felt when he looked out at space

00:18:04.180 to be fair to the russian cosmonaut valentin levadev he too would report feelings of awe and

00:18:11.080 you know he too was engaged by the mission that he was on and so on but he talked a lot about anxieties

00:18:16.300 and a lot about boredom and so something about the differences in their personalities and how they

00:18:20.960 approach their jobs meant that they found the experience to be different and one of the key

00:18:25.780 things about levadev's story that i found interesting is that he often reported those feelings of anxiety

00:18:32.220 and boredom in instances where he felt like he wasn't in control so he talked a lot about you

00:18:38.300 know the ground control people doing these useless tests or getting them to do these useless tests

00:18:43.260 because you know he didn't see any value in them and he talked at some point too about you know being a

00:18:49.420 slave to the instruments you know we were not doing the work the instruments are doing the work and

00:18:53.480 in both of those instances what he's expressing is he's not the master of his own domain he's not the

00:18:59.760 person who's making the choices of what to do next and that was what was causing him to feel a little

00:19:04.480 bit bored we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors

00:19:08.340 and now back to the show okay so we talked about some internal factors that can contribute to feelings

00:19:16.760 of boredom so low self-esteem a lack of agency narcissism neuroticism but have we figured out

00:19:24.540 like external factors like whether you're boredom prone or not are there things in the external world

00:19:30.480 if you if you encounter it will likely lead you to be bored if you encounter that activity or object

00:19:36.300 yeah what makes a person an individual bored is a little bit like asking what makes a person happy

00:19:43.780 right what makes me happy is not the same thing that's going to make you happy and so it is sort of a

00:19:47.940 little bit idiosyncratic but there are nonetheless some factors that that are pretty good

00:19:53.340 producers of boredom when we first started doing psychological work in the early 1900s on boredom

00:19:58.520 it was on the basis of sort of industrialization of work so people were now starting to do these jobs

00:20:05.700 on assembly lines where they had a single thing to do monotonously day after day after day and psychologists

00:20:11.680 decided to measure what the potential negative outcomes of that might be and one of them unsurprisingly

00:20:17.280 was boredom so certainly monotony is a pretty good driver of boredom but one of the other things that

00:20:24.420 is relevant to us in this past 12 months i think is that constraint is a pretty good driver of boredom as

00:20:31.080 well so when you feel like you are unable to be the master of your domain when you feel like you're not

00:20:37.280 freely able to choose what you want to do when you want to do it then that too can be a pretty good driver

00:20:43.520 of boredom we sort of asked people recently about their experiences during the pandemic lockdown and

00:20:49.240 this was data we collected in april and may of last year and people are reporting higher levels of

00:20:55.320 boredom than before the pandemic and the boredom prone were more likely to break the rules of social

00:21:01.740 distancing and what that sort of says to us is that the constraints for those highly boredom prone

00:21:06.940 individuals were just too much to bear pushing them to do things that were not in their self-interest

00:21:11.540 because as you might have guessed as well these were also individuals more likely to contract

00:21:16.500 covid because they broke the rules so i think constraint is a is a huge driver of feelings of

00:21:23.160 boredom so you mentioned earlier that humans aren't the only ones that experience boredom animals like

00:21:29.800 mice can they we can tell if a mouse is bored do we know why like why evolutionarily speaking like why

00:21:35.420 what's the benefit of feeling bored like what yeah how does that help with a survival basically

00:21:41.240 yeah that's right i mean if you're going to claim that that animals can be bored and that boredom has

00:21:46.080 been selected for in our evolutionary past then you start then the next thing you have to do is come

00:21:50.400 up with a functional account of it what's it for and i think that the function of boredom is merely to

00:21:55.900 signal that you need to explore your environment for something else to do and animals need to do this in

00:22:01.680 a range of different ways they need to balance two drives that we call exploration and exploitation

00:22:06.940 if you stay in one drive state for too long that incurs costs and risks that the animal needs to be

00:22:14.480 attending to so you sort of have to balance out how much time you spend exploring your environment for

00:22:19.240 resources and how much time you spend exploiting them so the notion think about an animal finding a

00:22:25.260 berry bush and just standing in one place for too long eating berries from that bush they get to

00:22:30.040 exploit the resources but they make themselves prone to predation as well right so they've got to

00:22:35.400 constantly be on the lookout to to balance out those two things and for us then boredom can signal

00:22:41.600 that now is the time to change you know whatever it is that you're doing isn't satisfying in some way

00:22:47.240 and you need to explore your environment for something else that will satisfy or alternatively you need

00:22:53.580 to double down your efforts and stick out the task that you're doing and try and make it through

00:22:57.820 so that's the function from a human point of view from an animal point of view i think the function is

00:23:03.620 really just to you know manage that balance between exploration and exploitation well i think it's

00:23:09.240 interesting one thing you note is that there's a theory out there that boredom drives creativity

00:23:13.400 right you feel bored and you respond to that by doing something creative something new something novel

00:23:17.640 but when you guys actually did some research on this you found that boredom actually didn't

00:23:22.280 increase creativity that much or it was marginal yeah i think that it's a this is a logic issue it's a

00:23:29.100 logic problem i think you know for people out there who are listening to this who have creative outlets

00:23:33.640 they'll understand that you know to foster those creative outlets takes work we have this notion i

00:23:39.800 think in our society that creativity is just natural you know some people have it and some people don't

00:23:44.220 and because of that we think not only is it natural but it comes easy right so you know people who are

00:23:50.500 really great on guitar or you know people who are fantastic artists and you sort of think wow

00:23:54.900 look at that stuff that they do that i can't do that you know that that just must come naturally to

00:24:00.900 them and it's a lot of bunkum it's crap anybody who has fostered a creative outlet will tell you they

00:24:09.060 had to learn they had to practice they have to continue practicing they have to continue doing 0.96

00:24:14.800 their art doing their creative process of whatever it is right so the problem of logic is that boredom

00:24:22.560 won't make you creative if you are creative in the first instance and you've developed those outlets

00:24:29.700 then you can turn to them when you're bored but you can't hope that boredom will make you creative

00:24:35.140 and that's and creativity is a very difficult thing notoriously difficult thing to measure

00:24:39.640 anyway and so the studies that have been done to measure it are rife with problems and to my knowledge

00:24:45.500 there's nothing that's been done really that would convince me that if i put you into a bored state if i make

00:24:51.400 you feel bored right now that somehow you'll be more creative if you have that as an outlet i play

00:24:57.700 guitar myself and so sometimes when i'm bored i'll go to that and it works you know but i've been

00:25:03.400 playing guitar since i was 12 being bored didn't make me a better guitarist another thing you know

00:25:10.420 throughout the book is that just as everyone has their different ways that they get bored or not bored

00:25:15.000 it's idiosyncratic in that way but even in a single person what makes you bored or not bored can change

00:25:20.900 like boredom actually changes throughout the life cycle can you walk us through the research that

00:25:25.320 you've guys uncovered there yeah so boredom does change over the lifespan we sort of there's we would

00:25:32.020 like a lot more work to be done in younger people right so we have a little bit of data in young

00:25:36.860 people but not much what we do have shows that boredom tends to rise in the teenage years

00:25:42.140 and what i think is happening there is that you know as you get into those teenage years you're

00:25:46.960 starting to develop the skills of adulthood but you haven't quite got there yet and you're also

00:25:52.880 in a situation of constraint your parents constrain what you can do your teachers constrain what you can

00:25:57.840 do society constrains what you can do and so the teenager is seeing themselves developing skills they

00:26:04.940 didn't have before but not able to deploy them and so boredom becomes a big issue there's also a notion

00:26:10.360 that in teens leisure boredom is a problem you know having too much time on their hands the

00:26:14.360 proverbial sort of idle hands being the devil's devil's playground and so you know boredom is

00:26:20.340 sort of rising in those early to mid teenage years we then find that boredom starts to drop

00:26:25.540 in the late teenage early 20s years and that gets back to that part of the brain that i was talking

00:26:30.440 about the frontal cortex your brain doesn't fully mature until your early 20s so you know early to

00:26:37.180 mid 20s and the last part of the brain to fully mature is that frontal cortex which is important

00:26:42.540 for all of our most sophisticated skills it's important for abstract reasoning for decision

00:26:47.300 making for you know the ability to control impulses all this kind of stuff depends on that frontal part

00:26:53.020 of your brain and so as that part becomes fully mature we start to see increases in self-control and

00:26:59.880 decreases in boredom and then that decrease in boredom continues into your 30s 40s and 50s

00:27:05.800 the interesting thing about that though is there was a study by chin and colleagues

00:27:09.880 where they collected an enormous amount of data from across america sort of diary data in a sense

00:27:15.900 they had people you know alerted on their phones to say you know how you're feeling right now how

00:27:19.700 bored are you over a course of about two weeks and even though boredom diminishes into your 30s 40s and

00:27:26.160 50s it's still prevalent it's still one of the top 10 emotions reported over a two-week period

00:27:31.440 and so it's not like it disappears and goes away forever one of the reasons why it probably

00:27:37.520 diminishes is that we all gain a suite of responsibilities as we hit those decades we're

00:27:42.520 raising families pursuing careers you know paying mortgages these kinds of things that just don't

00:27:49.640 leave as much time for for being bored and then we find that and there's a range of studies that

00:27:55.560 have shown that boredom starts to rise again in our sort of sixth seventh and eighth decades and

00:28:00.580 the primary factor there is social networks and social supports so in the elderly who have strong

00:28:08.680 social supports boredom doesn't tend to be a problem but for the elderly who are you know more isolated and

00:28:15.440 they tend to report elevated levels of loneliness as you might expect and elevated boredom probably as a

00:28:21.280 consequence of that loneliness and that lack of social support so we have been talking about what

00:28:27.400 causes boredom what boredom feels like what has the research said about the effects of boredom

00:28:32.460 particularly i mean i think when we think of being bored we think of negative consequences you know

00:28:37.360 like idle hands do the devil's work like you said has that has the research borne that out like are

00:28:41.520 there negative consequences to feeling bored yeah so i should make a distinction here between in the

00:28:47.520 moment feelings of boredom so the state of boredom which john and i claim in the book is you know it's

00:28:52.980 neither good nor bad it's just a signal right how you respond to it is really up to you and you can

00:28:58.040 respond in good ways you can respond with creative outlets for example and so we distinguish between

00:29:03.660 those in the moments feelings of boredom and the individual trait propensity to experience boredom so

00:29:08.720 we call that boredom prone right and we've talked a little bit already about what that personality might be

00:29:13.240 there are no positive associations with being boredom prone it's it's all a fairly bleak sort

00:29:19.980 of picture so people who are boredom prone tend to have you know other mental health problems higher

00:29:25.380 rates of depression and anxiety even things like higher rates of hostility which you know is just a

00:29:30.600 an externally directed hostility you know the world is not enough for me and and that kind of leads to

00:29:36.760 that sort of hostile response to everything we know also that being prone to boredom is associated with

00:29:42.480 elevated drug and alcohol use there's some association between being boredom prone and problem gambling

00:29:49.320 and there's some finally like that some really great work coming out of a lab by a guy called john

00:29:55.720 alhi at the university of toledo and there's a few labs in in china that are doing the same sort of work

00:30:00.300 looking at boredom and our relationship to our smartphones what they find is that for some people

00:30:06.900 and you don't want to catastrophize this the some people is about four to six percent depending on the

00:30:12.340 the study you look at but for some people their relationship to their smartphone and social media

00:30:18.920 becomes a very addictive relationship as a function of being boredom prone they're sort of turning to

00:30:24.100 their phones and turning to social media when they're bored as a kind of pacifier for boredom

00:30:28.380 and then it starts to have many of the features of addiction so they keep ramping up their use of

00:30:33.960 their smartphone like you might ramp up the use of a drug if you become addicted to it

00:30:37.620 they report feelings of anxiety and distress when they're not with their phone if their phone is not

00:30:42.840 on but you know so that those two things start to are very characteristic of an addictive relationship

00:30:49.440 to something so yeah there's not a lot of positive news for being a boredom prone individual

00:30:54.000 so you mentioned or so there's typically like maladaptive responses what would be like an adaptive

00:30:59.620 response to boredom right that if you feel you feel that moment boredom that that that in the moment

00:31:06.100 feeling of boredom what would be like a an adaptive response to that where it actually make you better

00:31:10.640 in the long term ultimately i think there's two potential adaptive responses or two classes at least

00:31:16.880 and so one of them is what we'd sort of call reframing and that is just to say okay think a little bit

00:31:21.900 about why do i think this particular experience i'm having right now why do i think it's boring what is

00:31:27.780 it about it that's boring and then see if you can reframe it you know turn it into something that's not

00:31:32.680 boring the best example i can come up with for that is again to return to assembly line work

00:31:37.960 there are you know most of us if we think about assembly line work particularly if we have never

00:31:42.240 done it before we would think it'd be pretty boring you know you get different kinds of widgets passing

00:31:47.560 you on an assembly line and you do the same action to them you know over and over and over and over and

00:31:52.240 over again but some assembly line workers report that they just use ways to reframe it to make it a sort of

00:31:59.140 personal challenge so they say to themselves all right i'll see if i can better my last hour's

00:32:03.980 performance or if i can better my my personal best for the the week and so now the task is not boring

00:32:10.860 because it's a personal challenge it's been imbued with some sort of meaning so if you can find ways to

00:32:17.560 cognitively reframe what you're doing to make it less boring then that's a that's a good response

00:32:23.160 the other response and that allows you to sort of double down and and continue to focus on the

00:32:28.400 task at hand and try to push through and get it done the other response i think is to to just do

00:32:33.940 something else you know just think about something else that would be more meaningful to you

00:32:38.540 and launch into it and you know don't hesitate try not to spend a lot of time ruminating on what

00:32:45.140 that might be and also in that context you know we've talked a little bit about meaning and that

00:32:50.700 boredom is arises when you're lacking meaning and you start seeking meaning i think that that

00:32:55.960 sometimes pushes us to look for something grand to engage in some big project something that's

00:33:02.480 that somehow we think is important to the world i don't think that that's useful so you know you

00:33:07.620 could launch into something that you know on the face of it seems trivial but it's not trivial to you

00:33:13.420 and so you know that can alleviate your boredom my example on that front is pretty early on in the

00:33:19.540 covid19 pandemic like i found myself a little bit bored so i decided i was going to make a cake that

00:33:25.300 i used to make when i was a kid with my mom so i called her up i got the recipe and baked the cake

00:33:29.240 there's nothing grand about that there's nothing you know really particularly meaningful to anybody else

00:33:35.080 but it was something that in that moment was meaningful to me now that isn't going to work

00:33:40.580 every single day right or every single time that you're bored but you know finding things like that

00:33:47.140 that are doable practical that have outcomes at the end that you can see you can you know you can

00:33:51.780 see the fruits of your labor i think those are good approaches to to being bored the last thing i

00:33:56.720 guess if i was to think of a third thing i don't know i don't i don't think that there's a lot of

00:34:01.880 research out there at this moment but i suspect that people who engage in sort of solitary physical

00:34:07.980 activity you know runners people who cycle you know cyclists um people who go to the gym and do

00:34:13.560 workouts i suspect that that can be an outlet to alleviate boredom um even though i don't do that

00:34:18.960 kind of stuff and when i look at it from the outside i think that would bore me i think running

00:34:22.800 i would find boring but for the people who do it a lot i think that you know they can engage in those

00:34:28.840 kinds of actions when they feel bored and that outlet of using up your physical energy is something

00:34:35.620 that sort of alleviates the boredom because when you're bored there's in part you're feeling like

00:34:40.400 you've got these unspent resources and i've been talking about it in terms of unspent cognitive

00:34:45.340 resources but perhaps you could just have you know some sort of physical outlet that releases that

00:34:51.020 energy as well and so we don't know much about that from a research point of view but i think it's

00:34:54.960 certainly a possibility well to that second point you were talking about so when people have a lack of

00:35:00.400 meaning they try to get meaning in a grand level and you've guys done research that a typical

00:35:05.960 response to that is people go to political extremes where they embrace tribalism and in fact

00:35:12.000 they're trying to soothe boredom they're they feel like what they're doing has no meaning they feel

00:35:16.720 bored and so they're trying to do something grand and great so they can have meaning and not feel

00:35:22.160 bored yeah that's right and adhering to or latching onto a strong identity or a strong ideology is a

00:35:31.480 pretty good way of giving you meaning but if you don't think that carefully about it then you know

00:35:35.700 that won't necessarily always be positive and so that's work that comes out of the uk from a guy

00:35:41.020 called wine and van tilburg that he showed you know he asked people what's your political affiliation

00:35:46.140 you know do you support left progressive or right-wing conservative policies and then he made people

00:35:51.800 bored and he did that by having them write out long lists of concrete references which is just a bit

00:35:58.760 bizarre and then afterwards i said okay what's your political allegiance now and he found that after he'd

00:36:04.400 made people bored they adhered to whatever political extreme they said at the outset they adhered to

00:36:12.280 that even stronger so you know if you said you were left-leaning to begin with then you were more left-leaning

00:36:17.680 after you were bored and then same for the the right-leaning kind of politics and yeah it ultimately

00:36:23.320 it gives you a sense of identity it gives you a sense of purpose too but you know it might also make

00:36:29.260 it sort of a bit challenging to to listen to the other so what do you hope people take away after

00:36:34.200 reading this book like what do you hope like this is written for a popular audience what do you hope

00:36:39.320 they walk away thinking about after they finish out of my school a couple of things i mean i hope that

00:36:43.980 they walk away from understanding that it's not a trivial experience right that it plays a role in

00:36:49.140 our lives plays a function and it has a function in our daily lives and that that function is important

00:36:53.520 and particularly for people like you know parents and maybe educators and other sorts of professions

00:36:58.620 if you can come to that point of thinking about boredom in that way then maybe your responses to

00:37:04.740 to people who are bored will be different as well and then the other thing i guess is that

00:37:09.520 the main point that john and i were pushing in the book is that boredom is this threat to your sense of

00:37:15.000 agency is showing you at this moment that you're not being very effective and if we can understand

00:37:21.240 boredom in that way then we can start to shape our responses to it in a more sort of conscious way

00:37:28.280 we can we can think carefully about how we want to do something to alleviate that boredom rather than

00:37:34.500 just sort of latching on to the first thing that we see or the easiest outlet closest by to us we can

00:37:40.500 think okay what i really want here is something that's meaningful to me that establishes my sense of

00:37:45.600 agency what could that be and so you know those would be the kinds of main messages i hope people

00:37:51.200 would take away from the book right don't turn to your smartphone right away it'll maybe it'll

00:37:54.740 make you it'll pacify you in the short term but in the long term you're just digging yourself

00:37:58.720 into a hole yeah and in that yeah absolutely but in that context i think it's important for me to

00:38:04.080 say too that you know go into your smartphone every once in a while to zone out play candy crush

00:38:09.300 or you know dive down the instagram rabbit hole whatever it is that you want to do there's nothing

00:38:13.160 wrong with that so long as you're consciously choosing it so long as you're sort of saying

00:38:16.700 okay i'm just zoning out for a while here this is what i'm going to do if you if you're not

00:38:21.420 conscious about that then it'll start to become a problem and that's not a great response to boredom

00:38:25.580 and after all your research you're you're also a parent have you figured out the best way to

00:38:30.400 respond when you have a kid that says dad i'm bored like what's the best response

00:38:35.660 so at the moment my kids are too much on screens because of the pandemic and they're sort of the rules

00:38:42.260 that we had pre-pandemic have gone out the window right my eldest says he never gets bored but i think

00:38:47.800 that that's not true i think that he just when he gets bored he goes out for a run or he goes and

00:38:51.340 plays basketball so i think that uh i've not had to deal with it with him what i would say for parents

00:38:57.160 is that if you you you want there to be opportunities for the kid but if they come to you and say that

00:39:04.900 they're bored i think the best response is to say oh well just let them try and figure it out on their

00:39:11.000 own because if you are always solving their boredom for them then you're not allowing them

00:39:17.480 to figure out how to establish agency and that's what they need to learn to do they need to learn

00:39:21.740 to figure out okay i'm actually the one in control here i get to decide what's meaningful what's not

00:39:27.020 and i get to decide what i should launch into the challenge of course is that you can't just let

00:39:31.840 kids run free run you've got to have some you know guidance and supervision over them well james

00:39:37.160 this has been a great conversation is there some place people can go to learn more about the book

00:39:40.340 and your work uh they can go to my website which is just my name you know all no no spaces or anything

00:39:46.420 and nocaps.com and so they can go there and there's they'll see links to some of the other

00:39:51.440 news pieces that i've done but they'll see also links to the actual science and the papers that

00:39:55.400 we've published um and then john and i are also doing a blog about once a month on psychology today

00:40:00.900 so they can go there and see some of them up-to-date thoughts on boredom fantastic well james

00:40:05.040 dankert thanks for your time it's been a pleasure it was my pleasure too my guest it was james

00:40:09.920 dankert he's the co-author of the book out of my skull it's available on amazon.com and bookstores

00:40:14.220 everywhere you find out more information about his work at his website jamesdankert.com also check

00:40:18.900 out our show notes at a1.is slash boredom where you find links to resources and we delve deeper into

00:40:22.860 this topic well that wraps up another edition of the a1 podcast check out our website at artofmanliness.com

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The Art of Manliness - February 22, 2021

The Psychology of Boredom

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