Question 1

Which part of the brain is responsible for boredom?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

There is no one specific brain region that we can point to that is responsible for boredom (and neuroimaging work on boredom is in its infancy).  We have found that a network known as the default mode network is activated when people are bored. This network is normally active when you currently have no task to complete and has been associated with a range of things from mind-wandering and day-dreaming, to nostalgic reverie and planning for the future. In a sense it is an internally focused, self-referential brain network. In another study by Dal Mas and Wittmann, people were made to be bored and were asked how much money they would pay for a music download. Compared to other conditions people said they would pay more money for a music download when they were bored. And just how much money they were willing to pay correlated with rising activity in a particular part of the brain known as the insular. This region is important for representing things in the environment that are behaviourally relevant or salient to us. Interestingly, in our brain imaging work the activity in the insular is down-regulated when people are bored. It’s as though this region shuts off when there’s nothing salient or relevant to attend to or interact with.

Question 2

Does low production of dopamine cause boredom?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

We don’t know the answer to this yet. One might suspect that the answer is yes given that Dopamine is so important for representing value and reward in the brain. But we just don’t know. We’re currently in the process of examining the genetic profile of boredom proneness and will be examining genes that we know are important for the regulation of Dopamine – so stay tuned!

Question 3

I had a supervisor once tell me that boredom is suppressed anxiety. Does the neuroscience agree with this statement?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

Boredom and anxiety are certainly highly correlated. And as a personality trait, those who are high in neuroticism also tend to be high in boredom proneness. There is also a distinction in social psychology between behavioural activation and behavioural inhibition systems. One of my colleagues thinks that boredom is indeed associated with activity in the behavioural inhibition system – that is, a tendency to avoid rather than approach. We would describe boredom as a motivational state – when bored we want to be engaging in something meaningful – but there is also a conundrum here – for the highly boredom prone, they feel that urge to act but somehow fail to launch into action and that is what makes boredom so uncomfortable for them.  That said, boredom is not merely “anxiety-lite”. Many studies have shown boredom to be a distinct emotion both in terms of arousal and valence.

Question 4

Is boredom associated with loneliness?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

There have been a few studies showing that boredom and loneliness are positively associated, particularly in the elderly and particularly in those who have poor social networks. We often say that boredom is an urge to act or a drive to be engaged. As social animals, one of the more common (and most meaningful) ways in which we engage with the world around us is through our social interactions. Interestingly, engaging in social media doesn’t satisfy that need for most of us (but more on that in another answer below).

Question 5

I have a client who has intermittent explosive disorder. He complains of being bored a lot. Is there typically an association between boredom prone and violent behavior?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

We see boredom as a threat to our sense of agency – that is, when we’re bored we feel as though we’re not acting very effectively on the world. Acts of aggression certainly serve to establish our sense of agency, regardless of whether those acts are morally defensible or not. We know that people high in boredom proneness tend to also be high in aggression. But the scale we use to explore that relation breaks aggression into four types – verbal and physical aggression, anger and hostility.  It is hostility that is most strongly associated with boredom proneness as though the feeling of boredom comes with a sense that the world is not enough – that something or someone else is to blame for our failure to engage. Again, this highlights the fact that boredom challenges our need to feel like effective agents.  Does all this translate into physical aggression? There are certainly anecdotes to suggest the answer to that is yes – from London rioters in 2011 claiming boredom as a prompt to joining in and looting, to individuals suggesting boredom drove them to senseless killings (the story of Christopher Lane is a particularly striking one – when police asked his killers why they did it one replied that “We were bored so we decided to kill somebody.”). This highlights something important about the feeling of boredom – it is pushing us to act, but it is not doing the hard work of telling us what that action ought to be. That is up to us. This can be incredibly empowering, but without recognizing boredom’s challenge some of us can lurch into unhealthy actions that work to eliminate boredom in the moment but are ultimately maladaptive.

Question 6

What is it that makes some people more prone to boredom than others?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

There are a range of distinct individual traits that we know are associated with higher levels of boredom proneness. I mentioned neuroticism above. In our work we find that self-control is a prominent factor. People with high levels of self-control tend not to experience boredom quite so much. We’ve also looked at self-esteem and again find that those high in self-esteem tend to have low levels of boredom proneness. Related to self-esteem is the concept of self-efficacy, which again relates to the idea of agency that I mentioned. We have yet to test this directly, but the idea (which actually comes from a theoretical claim made by Robert White in 1959) is that if you believe yourself to be an effective human being – that is, you anticipate that when you take on goals you will have a high likelihood of succeeding – then you’re also less likely to be bored. White suggested that early life experiences that fostered this belief would in turn promote self-esteem. It’s difficult to do longitudinal work, but it’s a fascinating idea – that early in life success in finishing projects that you see as meaningful to you will have long-term, positive consequences, one of which will be to keep boredom at bay.

Question 7

Are people who have the ability to cope with boredom still experiencing boredom? Or do they simply not feel boredom the same way as others?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

This relates to the adage that “Only boring people get bored!”  I don’t think that’s true – I think we all get the boredom signal from time to time but some people just do a lot better in responding to it. In our book we relate a story from Chris Hadfield – a Canadian astronaut. He grew up on a farm and used to plow the fields (which he thought was fine) and also do what’s called “harrowing” – breaking up chunks of mud into smaller chunks of mud. Hadfield found harrowing to be boring. So to keep himself occupied he tried to see how long he could hold his breath for.  Probably not such a great idea when operating large machinery, but the point is, the task he was doing wasn’t stimulating enough, so he added something on top to keep himself occupied mentally and to avoid boredom.  Now Hadfield claims he never gets bored. But that story tells me that he does indeed experience the boredom signal – that push to act. But he very quickly finds things to do that means he only feels it fleetingly. In a more mundane (boring?) sense, when we look at responses on the boredom proneness scale – a questionnaire we use to measure boredom proneness – answers are normally distributed. That is, a small percentage of us rarely experience boredom, a small percentage experience it a lot and the rest of us fall somewhere in the middle.

Question 8

Are there lessons or positives we can take from being bored? Does boredom serve a purpose?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

Boredom’s function is to let us know that what we are doing right now is failing to satisfy us in some important way and we need to explore for other options that will do the trick. I think of this as a kind of homeostatic mechanism. Temperature is a good analogy. We need to maintain our body temperature within an ideal range (the homeostatic set point). Too cold and we start to shiver to warm ourselves up. Too hot and we sweat the excess temperature out. For thinking we have a similar need. We need to be engaged in things that are not too easy or too difficult given our range of skills and talents. Boredom’s function then is to tell us that we are outside our cognitive homeostatic set point – we’re either understimulated or overstimulated and we need to find something else to do because of that. More broadly, boredom is pushing us to be engaged in things that we find meaningful. Spending some time contemplating just what that might be for each of us is a positive thing – something I would suggest that we only do rarely.

Question 9

Is boredom predominantly a result of having low interest in things?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

There is no evidence that boredom is associated with low interest or low levels of curiosity that I know of. The analogy of the bored child might help here.  When a young child complains to their parent of boredom, the parent will often trot out a range of options for things they could do.  At every turn the bored child dismisses those options. We know that in the past, the things we are suggesting they do (go play basketball with your brother, play with your legos, etc.) have been things they would happily engage in. So it’s not that they have no interest per se. There a lots of things they love doing. It’s that they have no interest in those things at this moment.

Question 10

How to turn boredom into a positive when it's accompanied with a sense of futility and apathy?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

First of all, boredom and apathy may show a positive relation (that is, people high in boredom proneness also tend to be higher in apathy) but it is also true to say that they are indeed distinct emotional experiences. So this question is actually one of the most challenging to answer as it seems to suggest a causal direction – if I just change “accompanied” with “leads to” then the suggestion is that a failure to respond to boredom well might eventually lead to feelings of futility and apathy.  We don’t yet know if this is true (we’re in the process of exploring whether boredom leads to depression in a similar sense – but this takes time to collect longitudinal data from the same individuals). The other part of this question – how to turn boredom into a positive – also lacks data. What we would need are intervention studies to determine whether some kind of treatment (e.g., mindfulness meditation) leads to lower levels of boredom. Without that data on hand, I would say that the first thing to do when bored is to take a breath.  In the midst of feelings of boredom we can often feel agitated (and hostile – see my earlier answer) as we cast about for something to do, but fail to find the perfect thing. In the midst of that agitation it is hard to find a positive path forward. The second thing to do when bored is to reflect a little on what it is that makes this particular circumstance boring? Perhaps you can reframe things. There are stories of assembly line workers who challenge themselves to beat their last hour’s performance. The work is mundane, but the reframing makes it challenging enough to keep boredom down. Finally, use the boredom signal to reflect on what matters most to you. To be sure this is not an easy task, and perhaps not one that will lead to an immediate course of action. But is worthwhile to spend time reflecting on who we are and what we want out of life.

Question 11

I've had many clients who identify that they eat to self-soothe boredom. How to help people with this?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

There is some research suggesting that we overeat when we’re bored (as an aside there is one study in mink that shows they do this too). The advice (thin as it is) that I give above would be the same here.  Boredom signals the need to act and there are many quick fixes to that which are ultimately unhealthy for us – from acts of aggression to overeating to hours upon hours on social media. There is a distinction here between thinking and unthinking responses to boredom. If we reach for just one more cookie (or if we lash out at someone or something, or if allow ourselves to dive ever deeper down the social media rabbit hole) we are not choosing our response to boredom very carefully. Again, staying calm and reflecting on why our current circumstance is boring gives us time to pause, time that allows us to consciously choose our next response.

Question 12

Could interoceptive awareness training or attention control training help people to cope more positively with boredom?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

The short answer here would be maybe!  But as I mention above we don’t have the data on boredom interventions yet.  The interoceptive awareness idea is an intriguing one.  In discussing the nascent neuroimaging results I mentioned activity in the insular cortex – this part of the brain is crucial for interoception. But there are many unanswered questions, first among them being, “Are the highly boredom prone hyper- or hypo-aware of interoceptive sensations?” We don’t know that and without first answering this question any interoceptive awareness intervention would be flying blind (we wouldn’t know whether we should be trying to ramp up or damp down the awareness). Attentional control is also intriguing and here we know more. We know that highly boredom prone people also reported a higher instance of lapses in everyday attention (e.g., pouring orange juice on their cereal). We know from in-lab tasks that the highly boredom prone tend to perform poorly on sustained attention tasks. And as I mentioned above, self-control more generally tends to be lower in highly boredom prone individuals. So attentional control training may well prove successful in helping people deal more effectively with boredom.

Question 13

Is mindfulness the good strategy for coping with boredom or can mindfulness lead to boredom?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

This is a great question – again, one that I don’t have data for.  For the previous question I was optimistic that attentional control training might prove helpful. But I am less optimistic that mindfulness training will be helpful – in a sense, one needs attentional control in order to successfully engage in mindfulness meditation.  So asking someone with poor attentional control (the highly boredom prone individual) to engage in a high attentional control activity (mindfulness meditation) is a little like asking a drowning person to swim to shore – they would if they could. Having said all that, attentional control training is also focusing on the domain of cognition that the highly boredom prone struggle most with. Ultimately, either technique may work but I suspect both will require strong commitment to overcome the very thing that makes boredom so difficult for them to deal with – that struggle to focus and sustain attention.  On the last point – could mindfulness lead to boredom, I suspect that for the highly boredom prone it may be more likely to lead to frustration given the point I make above that you would be asking the person to do the very thing they struggle with. In some sense, when bored we feel as though we have unspent energy – either physical or mental (or both). So an alternative approach might be to encourage ways in which those unspent resources can be deployed. Think of those long, boring meetings we’ve all sat through. Cast your eye over your neighbour’s shoulder and you might seem them doodling away on the page – that’s a great example of using unspent mental energy and a great way to ward off boredom.

Question 14

Is IQ linked to boredom?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

As far as I am aware there is no good evidence linking boredom to IQ. We do know that in achievement settings (schools, colleges, universities) that boredom is associated with poorer test scores. But this is not the same thing as IQ. That is because in these studies, performance is measured on single domains or tests (e.g., mathematics or reading fluency) and IQ is a far broader concept encompassing multiple domains of cognition and reasoning. So what these studies show is not that boredom is associated with lower IQ, but rather that when we are bored we’re likely to struggle to learn new material efficiently which says more about the challenges faced by highly boredom prone people in focusing attention.

Question 15

With the internet and social media, have we mostly eradicated boredom? What are the implications of this for humans?

James Danckert · Accepted Answer

The second part of this question presumes that the answer to the first is yes – but the answer is firmly no, the internet and social media have not mostly eradicated boredom at all. In a large experience sampling study from 2017 in which 90,000 data points were collected and analyzed, the researchers showed boredom to be a prominent emotional experience across all ages, measured over a relatively short, two-week time span. In addition, work is beginning to show that boredom can be a strong driver of an unhealthy attachment to the internet, our smartphones and social media. It is as though we turn to these things as a pacifier for boredom. But they are passive forms of engagement that don’t always allow us to demonstrate our own skills and talents – to show ourselves to be effective agents. So while the internet and social media occupy our time, they often fail to satisfy our minds. In studies that have examined what is called “problematic smartphone use” – which is essentially addiction-like behaviours related to our phones – boredom proneness is shown to be a strong driver of unhealthy relationships with technology in anywhere from 4 to 12% of people. So far from solving our boredom, these things are masking it in unhealthy ways for many people.

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