{"id":77384,"date":"2014-12-26T13:08:12","date_gmt":"2014-12-26T13:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=77384"},"modified":"2014-12-26T11:58:29","modified_gmt":"2014-12-26T11:58:29","slug":"boredom-bad-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2014\/12\/boredom-bad-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Why boredom is bad… and good for you"},"content":{"rendered":"
Being bored could hinder our lives in ways we don\u2019t realise \u2013 but it may also have helped shape one of our most productive characteristics, says David Robson.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve met lots of people with a talent to bore in my time, but Sandi Mann is one of the few to have honed it as a craft. Eager volunteers visiting her lab may be asked to carry out less-than-thrilling chores like copying out lengthy lists of telephone numbers. They mostly tolerate the task politely, she says, but their shuffling bottoms and regular yawns prove they are hardly relishing the experience.<\/p>\n
Their agony is science\u2019s gain, though, since Mann wants to understand the profound effect that boredom may have on our lives. So far, she is one of the few psychologists to have forayed into such mind-numbing territories. \u201cIt\u2019s the Cinderella of psychology,\u201d she says. After all, admitting that you study boredom might itself sound a bit, well, boring \u2013 but that is far from the truth. Boredom, it turns out, can be a dangerous and disruptive state of mind that damages your health \u2013 and even cuts years off your lifespan. If that sounds negative, Mann\u2019s research would also suggest that without boredom we couldn\u2019t achieve our creative feats.<\/p>\n
Bored to death<\/strong><\/p>\n Boredom is such a large part of day-to-day existence that it is somewhat surprising the word only entered the language with Charles Dickens\u2019 Bleak House in 1852. Dickens study of Lady Deadlock\u2019s suffering \u2013 she is \u201cbored to death\u201d by her marriage \u2013 would end up pre-empting many of the latest findings. But perhaps because of its prevalence in our lives, scientists had been slow to explore the sensation. \u201cWhen you are swimming in something, maybe you don\u2019t think of it as being noteworthy,\u201d says John Eastwood at York University in Canada, who was one of the first scholars to take an interest.<\/p>\n One of the most common misconceptions is that \u201conly boring people get bored\u201d. Yet as Eastwood set about exploring the reasons for boredom, he found that there are two distinct types of personality that tend to suffer from ennui, and neither are particularly dull themselves.<\/p>\n Boredom often goes with a naturally impulsive mindset among people who are constantly looking for new experiences. For these people, the steady path of life just isn\u2019t enough of a rollercoaster to hold their attention. \u201cThe world is chronically under-stimulating,\u201d says Eastwood.<\/p>\n The second kind of bored people have almost exactly the opposite problem; the world is a fearful place, and so they shut themselves away and try not to step outside their comfort zone. \u201cOut of their high-sensitivity to pain, they withdraw.\u201d While this retreat might offer some comfort, they are not always satisfied with the safety it offers \u2013 and chronic boredom results.<\/p>\n Almost from the very beginning, it became clear that either of these states could push people to harm themselves; a proneness to boredom was linked to a tendency to smoke, drink too much, and take drugs. Indeed, in one study boredom was the single biggest predictor of alcohol, cigarette and cannabis use among a group of South African teenagers.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to mention more mundane but equally unhealthy behaviours, such as comfort-eating your way through tedium. \u201cBoredom at work is propping up the confectionary industry,\u201d says Mann, who is based at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. The overall effect of boredom on your life expectancy could be drastic, too. When researchers in the famous Whitehall study followed the lives of middle-aged civil servants in the UK, they found that the people who are most likely to get bored were30% more likely to have died over the next three years.<\/p>\n That is something of a puzzle for evolutionary psychologists. Emotions should evolve for our benefit \u2013 not to push us to self-destruction. \u201cThe very fact that boredom is a daily experience suggests it should be doing something useful,\u201d says Heather Lench at Texas A&M University. Feelings like fear help us avoid danger, after all, while sadness might help prevent future mistakes. So, if true, what does boredom achieve?<\/p>\n Reviewing the evidence so far, Lench suspects that it lies behind one of our most important traits \u2013 curiosity. Boredom, she says, stops us ploughing the same old furrow, and pushes us to try to seek new goals or explore new territories or ideas. That search for an escape could sometimes push us to take risks that eventually hurt us. One team simply left subjects by themselves in a room for 15 minutes with a button that allowed them to give themselves an electric shock on the ankle; many did indeed elect to give themself the brief buzz of pain, seemingly because it was the only way to break up the tedium. Perhaps the same search for an escape explains why bored people turn to unhealthy behaviours \u2013 but the upside is that it can also increase innovation.<\/p>\n Returning to those people mindlessly copying out telephone numbers, Mann has found that their ennui boosted their performance standard tests of creativity \u2013 such as finding innovative uses for everyday objects. She suspects the tedium encouraged their minds to wander, which leads to more associative and creative ways of thinking. \u201cIf we don\u2019t find stimulation externally, we look internally \u2013 going to different places in our minds,\u201d she says. \u201cIt allows us to make leaps of imagination. We can get out of the box and think in different ways.\u201d Without the capacity for boredom, then, we humans may have never achieved our artistic and technological heights.<\/p>\n Embracing tedium<\/strong><\/p>\n Given this benefit, Mann thinks we should try not to fear boredom when it hits us. \u201cWe should embrace it,\u201d she says \u2013 a philosophy that she has now taken into her own life. \u201cInstead of saying I\u2019m bored when I\u2019m stuck in traffic, I\u2019ll put music on and allow my mind to wander \u2013 knowing that it\u2019s good for me. And I let my kids be bored too \u2013 because it\u2019s good for their creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n Eastwood is less enthusiastic about boredom\u2019s benefits, but admits we should be cautious about looking for an immediate escape. \u201cThe feeling is so aversive that people rush to eliminate it,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m not going to join that war on boredom and come up with a cure, because we need to listen to the emotion and ask what it is trying to tell us to do.\u201d<\/p>\n