They may end up understimulated as a result.Įastwood has also found that people with alexithymia, a condition marked by an inability to identify and describe one's own emotions, are more prone to boredom ( Personality and Individual Differences, 2007). At the opposite end of the spectrum, people who are overly sensitive to pain and punishment - such as people with high anxiety - are more likely to withdraw from the world out of self-protection. These sensation seekers - such as the skydivers among us - are particularly likely to find the world moves too slowly. People with a high sensitivity to reward are also at risk of boredom. "When people are bored, they're disengaged from satisfying activity and more likely to become internally focused in a negative, ruminative cycle," he says. More work needs to be done to understand the relationship between these experiences, says Eastwood, but he speculates that boredom may be a risk factor for depression. Together with Eastwood and other colleagues, he surveyed more than 800 people and found that boredom and depression were highly correlated, but were distinct states ( Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2011). James Danckert, PhD, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo, found that people highly prone to boredom perform poorly on tasks that require sustained attention, and are more likely to show increased symptoms of both ADHD and depression ( Experimental Brain Research, 2012).Ĭhronic boredom can look a lot like depression, but "they're not the same emotional experience," Danckert says. Unsurprisingly, given boredom's close connection with attention, people with chronic attention problems such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder have a high propensity for ennui. Some of us are more likely than others to suffer the effects of an unengaged mind. You might pump yourself up to concentrate on a dreary task, then slip back into listlessness as your focus wavers again. Often, he says, boredom oscillates between the two states. In other situations, being bored can lead to an agitated restlessness: think pacing, or constantly tapping your feet. At times, boredom breeds lethargy - you might even have trouble keeping your eyes open. One of the more surprising aspects of Eastwood's definition is that boredom can be associated with both low-arousal and high-arousal states. "In a nutshell, it boiled down to boredom being the unfulfilled desire for satisfying activity," he says. He or she wants to be stimulated, but is unable, for whatever reason, to connect with his or her environment - a state Eastwood describes as an "unengaged mind" ( Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012). A bored person doesn't just have nothing to do. They concluded that boredom is best described in terms of attention. Then they interviewed hundreds of people about what it feels like to experience that tedious state. He and his colleagues scoured the scientific literature for theories of boredom and tried to extract the common elements. Psychologist John Eastwood, PhD, of York University in Toronto, decided that was a good place to start. The results of their research are anything but dull.īoredom is a universal experience, yet until recently researchers didn't have a go-to definition of the condition. Now that's changing, as scientists have begun to take a closer look at this underappreciated emotion. "There hasn't been much research about how it affects people on an everyday basis." "Even though boredom is very common, there is a lack of knowledge about it," says Wijnand van Tilburg, a psychologist at the University of Southampton. These are some of the tedium-inducing tools that psychologists are using to study boredom in the lab. Videos of fish-farm management techniques or men silently hanging laundry probably don't top your Netflix queue.
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