KEditor’s note: The podcast Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life’s big and small mysteries. You can listen to episodes. Here.
(CNN) — Thanks to smartphones, all the entertainment and distractions they offer can be in your back pocket or purse, accessible 24/7. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to remember the uncomfortable, mind-numbing, growing feeling of boredom.
But if one of your resolutions for 2025 is to disconnect more often from the cornucopia of information at your fingertips, experiencing boredom may be an unintended consequence.
In line at the bank or driving through without a podcast or music? Endless! Waiting at the doctor’s office without texting or scrolling through social media? Excruciating! Even sitting on the toilet without an online crossword puzzle or news story minutes away can make you die a little inside.
Boredom can be as painful as pain and, in some cases, even less preferable: i A famous research experiment of 2014a large number of participants opted for self-administered electric shock pain over sitting in a room with only their thoughts for 15 minutes.
As it turns out, boredom can serve the same purpose as pain.
“Pain isn’t meant to hurt you. Pain is there as a signal to get you moving, to deal with whatever it is that’s causing the pain in the first place. Boredom is the same. ,” cognitive neuroscientist James Denkert CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, recently told his Chasing Life podcast.
“It’s not meant to make you feel bored,” said Dankert, a professor in the psychology department. University of Waterloo In Ontario “It’s to take you, to do something, to get out of that boring state.”
You can listen to the entire podcast episode. Here.
Dankert, author of the book “Out of my skull: The psychology of boredomOne turns to a literary giant to explain boredom.
“I like to refer to this quote from Leo Tolstoy, from (his novel) ‘Anna Karenina,’ when I define boredom, where he talks about ennui, or boredom, as that’Desire of desires,'” he said. “Boredom is a motivational state. You want to do something that is important to you, but you don’t just want something that is currently available to you.
Dankert said that he sees boredom as a desperate desire to fully engage with the world around us that is currently unsatisfied.
So, what can you do to reduce boredom?
“We don’t really have good data on the intervention of boredom,” Dankert noted. Instead, he offered five admittedly unscientific propositions and ideas, based on decades of experience and observation, to organize it.
If you’re the parent of a child who proclaims to be bored, or the friend of someone who claims ennui, don’t offer an array of options for what they can do instead.
“A fairly consistent and robust finding is that people who are bored feel they don’t have a lot of agency,” Denkert said. “They feel like they’re not really in control of their lives. And if you just give them a list of suggestions, that doesn’t solve the agency problem, right? You kind of, somehow In a sense, you’re taking agency (away) from them by trying to tell them what to do.”
Offering alternatives may work for some people who experience occasional boredom, but “it certainly won’t work for people who experience it chronically,” he said.
So, zip it up and let the bored people in your life figure it out for themselves.
Make a list of activities, tasks, and projects that you can switch to when you’re bored.
“For me, the main thing is that I’m going to turn to my guitar,” Dankert said. “But then you have to have a second or a third or a fourth, (so that) when the primary thing that usually works doesn’t work, you can turn to those other things on your list.”
It can be as simple as not! Dankert won’t suggest what to put on your list. (Agency, remember?)
Despite technology bringing the world to our fingertips, society continues to face high levels of boredom. Especially in teenage girlsDankert said he did a decade or two ago.
“Our phones and social media are not the solution to our boredom. In fact, they can make it worse,” he said. “Again, it has to do with agency, because if you’re just mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds, that’s not much agency. … It’s going to make your boredom worse in the long run.
Dankert said he doesn’t want to imply that technology is all bad — joining an online fishing community, for example, or finding a YouTube video to learn guitar or knitting can have a positive effect. “It’s the mindless part that probably makes it negative for your boredom,” he said.
Dankert said a popular notion — one that drives him and other researchers “nuts” — is that boredom will make you creative. It won’t happen..
“The evidence for this claim is very weak, and we actually Published something quite recently It shows that if I’m boring you, you actually are. less Creative,” he said.
“I think if you have (existing) creative outlets” — for example, if you play a musical instrument or make some kind of art — “and you’ve developed that outlet, when you It’s great to turn to when you’re bored,” he said.
“What we can’t hope for, and what I think is a popular myth, is that embracing boredom and bringing it into your life will somehow make you more creative. It won’t.”
Dankert said people may be expressing the idea that downtime is good for creativity.
“Being disconnected from the hustle and bustle of life gives you time to think and maybe that means you have ideas that are creative and make connections that you wouldn’t otherwise make, and that feels creative. And I don’t have a problem with that,” he said. But boredom is not the ingredient that magically makes someone creative, he said.
Boredom is a message for you, so pay attention.
“I don’t think we should embrace boredom, but I also don’t think we should try to outrun it,” Dankert said. “It’s neither good nor bad, so we just have to learn to listen to it and know what it’s telling us in the moment. We need to embrace it and respond in good ways.
One answer may be a creative outlet, he said. “But it could be any number of other things. It could be going for a run. And it could possibly be wagging in front of a Netflix show, if you choose to be intentional about it.
But if you just choose a passive response, he said, then you might not feel like you have much agency.
As for chestnuts, “only boring people are boring,” Dankert said, adding that the adage is a bit judgmental.
“It has a moral sense of, ‘You’re not trying hard enough, and you should try harder to engage with the world,'” she said. “But I think the truth is that we all get bored. There are some of us who adapt very well and very quickly and … the effective responders are judging the rest of us. There are those who don’t necessarily deal with it well.
“We’re not boring people. We’re just sensitive to a very common, very common human experience,” he said.
We hope these five tips will help you better respond to boredom. Listen to the entire podcast episode. Here. And join us next week on Chasing Life when we ask: How often should you shower?
