The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


The Psychology of Boredom


Episode Stats


Summary

When we experience boredom, we tend to experience it as uncomfortable and agitating. We seek to banish it with some ready distraction like our smartphone, for example, or we try to look at boredom sort of piously as something we should learn to sit with because it builds character. My guests today would argue that s best to see boredom more neutrally as simply an important signal that we need to change up what we re doing and become more effective and engaged in the world.


Transcript

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
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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