Boredom is what every person experiences. This restless, empty feeling has been little studied scientifically. However, some studies shed light on the “ingredients” of boredom and may provide a clue against it.
Here are the top 7 amazing facts about boredom.
7. Boredom is not apathy
Although these terms are often used synonymously, being bored is not the same as being apathetic. “I think that often when people think about boredom, they think about apathetic couch potatoes, but that’s not the case,” says James Dankert, professor of cognitive neurology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “Boredom is an aggressive unsatisfactory feeling in the sense that you have a high level of motivation to do business, but nothing that you do can satisfy this need.”
6. Self-control is closely linked to boredom.
James Dankert studied boredom in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI), including his brother, and found that people who complained of severe boredom were more likely to have a damaged or undeveloped frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. This part of the brain plays a crucial role in self-control. The scientist suggests that due to a failure of self-control, people with NMP begin to behave too impulsively and often acquire many bad habits.
5. Boredom can be literally deadly
In 2010, University College London staff analyzed 7,524 civil servants aged 35 to 55 years. People filled out questionnaires from 1985 to 1988. The study participants, who often reported being bored, had an increased (about 37%) chance of dying by 2009 than those who wrote that they were not bored at all. However, the authors emphasized that boredom is probably associated with higher mortality rates through other problems, such as poor health or depression.
4. It can be boring when difficult
In 2012, in one study, a group of 150 students were given easy and complex puzzles to solve. The researchers then analyzed the subjects' boredom levels. The results showed that easy tasks led to self-focusing boredom (apathy), while complex tasks led to more targeted boredom (feeling “it's tiring”).
3. Boredom may affect treatment for depression
Another incident related to Dankert and his research was included in the ranking of interesting facts about boredom. In 2013, Dankert and several colleagues suggested that boredom could interfere with the treatment of depression in people who had a head injury. Behavioral activation therapy, encouraging patients to participate in activities that will promote pleasure, does not work for patients prone to boredom. After all, these patients are already motivated to participate in any activity, it remains only to find in which one. Instead of fighting the lack of motivation for bored people, it is better to use a therapeutic approach that focuses on finding an activity that will become an “antidepressant”.
2. The connection between high technology and boredom is not clear
People like to argue about the advantages and disadvantages of the modern high-tech world, but there is no way to tell scientifically how boredom is associated with modern technology. Researchers do not have easy access to the control group. They cannot return to 1950, and see if people were more bored because they did not have iPhones. They can only assume that the new high-tech products slightly dispel boredom, attracting the attention of people.
1. You need to think about boredom so that you are not bored
Scientists suggest that thinking about boring tasks can help make them less tiring. For example, a factory worker whose job it is to assemble the same thing on a conveyor belt for several hours in a row can dispel boredom by thinking about how people will use the product they assembled. And learning the technique of meditation can help a person dive deeper into the meaning of a task that seems boring on the surface, and perform it more efficiently.
