What does boredom do for us… and to us?

Why do we get bored? And what exactly happens to us when we experience boredom?  Like joy and anxiety, boredom is a state of mind. Being bored does not mean you’re lazy and it has little to do with external factors like new cars, gadgets, or experiences.

James Danckert, professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Area at the University of Waterloo, has been studying why we get bored. He studies the reasons behind why boredom occurs, alongside the effects that boredom can have on our minds and the larger purpose that it can serve. Danckert says, “people confuse boredom with the couch potato, some sort of  laziness and inaction, but it can't be further from the truth. When we're bored, we're really quite motivated and we want to be doing something… we just can't figure out what.”

The definition that Danckert feels perfectly captures what boredom is comes from Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy describes boredom as “the desire for desires.”

And regardless of how active or engaged a person is, the feelings of boredom are familiar to most as a “restless, agitated experience.” “The key,” Danckert says, “is to recognize those signs early on, to calm down, and think of some options out of it … You need to let the little things that normally would bore you suddenly thrill you.”

And Danckert says that “boredom is often associated with a lack of meaning.” What we feel is that, “what you're doing is not meaningful, or your life doesn't feel quite meaningful to you and that's going to be a key component of being bored.”

“To ensure that you don't get bored,” Danckert says, “you don't have to start pursuing a cure for cancer, you don't have to do anything grand, you don't have to choose an activity that somehow is momentous — you just have to choose something that matters to you, and that could be big [or] small.”

Kids most often associate boredom with having nothing to do, but Danckert says there is a good deal of work to suggest that “we have over-scheduled our kids and that makes them more anxious than you might imagine.” “Kids need their downtime,” Danckert says. When we overschedule them, we are “taking away their agency.” 

Danckert also suggests that parents do too much: “When kids come to us and they say that they're bored, are we doing the right thing in terms of responding to that? Of course, you don't want to give them full control because they're kids, they'll make big mistakes, and you want to have some safety net around them. But over-scheduling is not a solution to boredom.”

Danckert also highlights the fact that boredom can be the root of many maladaptive behaviors:

“There's lots and lots of instances where aggressive, violent, and abhorrent behaviors are blamed on boredom. But I would suggest that we can't really blame boredom for those kinds of things. I think boredom is a call to action. We have to take ownership of what actions we choose in response to boredom.”  People who are prone to boredom,” Danckert says, “are also a little bit lower in self-control. They don't have great control over their actions and their emotions, and so those people might be more likely to choose those kinds of maladaptive and abhorrent responses.”

“Boredom isn't likely to make you a genius sculptor, painter, or guitar player any more than it's likely to turn you into a killer. So what we do with boredom is really up to us.”   

Ultimately the feeling of boredom is a call to action, it highlights a need to be agentic. What we decide to do when we feel this way is ultimately up to us, but a tip that Danckert offers is to find the little things that matter: “Celebrate those little things and engage with them with intentionality.”

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