We’ve all had that itchy, edgy feeling, that urge to be doing something—anything— other than what we’re doing right now. It’s boredom, and it’s awful.
As ubiquitous as the experience is, only recently have scientists begun to take a close look at the feeling. And they’re finding that while boredom might be unpleasant, it’s bringing a message we would do well to heed.
What boredom is trying to tell us
James Danckert describes boredom as analogous to pain, and not just because boredom makes you feel lousy.
Pain is your body’s way of telling you that something is wrong, and that you need to do something about it. Boredom plays a similar role, says Danckert, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo who studies boredom. “It’s telling you that what you're doing now isn't working. Do something else.”
Specifically, boredom is telling you that what you’re doing is not a good fit for the mental or emotional resources you have at that moment, says Erin Westgate, social psychologist and director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab at Florida State University.
The task at hand may be too easy; it may be too hard. Or maybe it’s just not personally meaningful at the moment. But one way or another, it’s not working for you.
(Learn more about why people often have great ideas in the shower.)
Boredom doesn’t just color the time spent sitting in waiting rooms or watching dull television shows. It can also creep into the larger patterns of our lives, such as our jobs and relationships. And there, too, it brings a message. “We're fairly loathe to change things,” Westgate says. “We’re slow to quit jobs, quit relationships, change where we live, change what we do. Boredom helps us recognize that maybe change is necessary.”
Reduce boredom in the classroom
When educators and parents learn to see boredom as a signal that kids need to do something different, boredom and the restlessness it engenders become a teaching challenge.
Kids report being bored more often than adults do, says Alicia Walf, a neuroscientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who studies stress and classroom engagement.
Kids get bored if the material is too easy, but they also get bored if it’s too hard, she explains. Effective learning requires staying in the “Goldilocks Zone.” Though it can be difficult to achieve in a classroom with multiple students, avoiding boredom requires matching the material to the learner’s level. The best solution is individualized learning, but that’s not always practical, says Westgate.
However, she says that teachers and parents can help by giving students who have mastered the material additional projects to work on while at the same time offering those who are still struggling with the lesson fresh approaches to the material.
Finding personal meaning is also important if you want to keep kids from getting bored. Chris Hulleman, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia, works with educators to improve student engagement and motivation.
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He developed the Utility-Value Intervention, a technique in which educators and parents connect classroom lessons to something the student values.
A budding chef might be bored to tears (or to heights of hyperactivity) by math until you show them how useful fractions are in baking a cake, while a young sports fan might engage with algebra when they see how it’s used in sports statistics. A kid who loves dogs might doze off reading The Graveyard Book, but happily devour The Call of the Wild.
Boredom as a creativity booster
You may have heard that boredom increases creativity, and some research seems to suggest that it does.
But those studies have not been replicated, and more recent research has called the idea into question, says Andreas Elpidorou, a philosopher of the mind at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, and author of Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life. A 2016 study found that boredom probably does not generate creativity. Practice does. In fact, the study found that in many cases, boredom impaired fluency in creative tasks.
However, there may be a connection between boredom and creativity — at least for some people. Elpidorou points out that you can respond to boredom in creative ways.
“In that case,” he says, “I wouldn’t praise the boredom for that; I would praise you.”
And that gets us to what may be the most important fact about boredom: Whether it’s helpful or harmful depends on how you respond to it.
Constructive responses to boredom
The signal boredom sends tells us to do something else, but it doesn’t tell us what to do. That decision can make the difference between whether boredom is a good thing or not.
When that edgy feeling crops us, it’s easy to immediately reach for your phone and start scrolling on social media, or worse. Individuals who are prone to boredom are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, according to some research. On the other hand, boredom can push you toward more meaningful tasks, says Elpidorou. When boredom strikes, you might call a friend you haven’t heard from in a while, go for a walk or to the gym, or pick up your guitar and fiddle with that tune you’ve been working on.
(Endless scrolling through social media can literally make you sick. Learn more.)
The trick, of course, is to pay attention to that boredom alert and make a conscious decision about how to respond. “We need to take a deep breath and say, ‘Okay, I'm bored. It's not going to kill me. Let's figure out why I’m bored, and figure out what’s the best thing to do next,’” says Danckert.
Of course, not everyone has the luxury of constructive options for responding to boredom, Elpidorou points out.
Teachers and parents in underserved communities may not have the time or resources to help bored students engage with their lessons. People in unfulfilling jobs may lack the education, experience, or contacts to get better jobs.
But when we understand what boredom means, and how best to alleviate it, we can make better choices, both as individuals and as a society, about how to heed and respond to that signal.
