How Boredom Affects Your Health? Here Are 5 Things to Deal With

Boredom can be as painful as pain, and in some cases, less desirable: In one famous 2014 research experiment, a large percentage of participants chose the pain of an electric shock they themselves received over sitting in a room for 15 minutes with only their thoughts.

As it turns out, boredom may serve the same purpose as pain.

“Pain is not there to make you feel bad,” cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert told Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his Chasing Life podcast recently. “Pain is there as a signal to motivate you to act, to fix whatever caused you pain in the first place. And the same goes for boredom.”

What can you do to relieve boredom?

“We don’t really have any good data on interventions for boredom,” notes Danckert, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Instead, he offers five suggestions and unscientific ideas, based on decades of experience and observation, for dealing with boredom.

• Don't list alternatives.

If you are the parent of a child who is declaring that they are bored, or a friend of someone who is bored, don't offer a bunch of options for what they can do instead.

“The consistent and fairly robust finding is that people who are prone to boredom feel like they don’t have a lot of responsibility,” Danckert said. “They feel like they don’t really have control over their lives. And if you give them a list of suggestions, that doesn’t solve the problem of responsibility, does it? You’re kind of, in a sense, taking away agency from them by trying to tell them what to do.”

He explained that offering alternatives may work for some people who are bored occasionally, but "it certainly won't work for people who are chronically bored." He concluded that the bored people in your life should discover alternatives for themselves.

• Make a list for yourself

Make a list of activities, tasks, and projects that you can turn to when you're bored.

“For me, the first thing I do is go to my guitar, but then I have to have a second, third or fourth guitar, (so) when the main alternative that usually works doesn’t work, you can go to these other things on your list,” Dankert said.

• Stop mindlessly browsing

Danckert noted that although technology has brought the world to our fingertips, society is experiencing higher levels of boredom, especially among teenage girls, than it was a decade or two ago.

“Our phones and social media are not solutions to our boredom,” he said. “In fact, they can make it worse. Again, this is about agency, because if you’re mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds, that’s not about agency. It’s going to make boredom worse in the long run.”

Danckert didn’t want to say that technology is all bad. Engaging in an online fishing community, for example, or finding a YouTube video to learn how to play guitar or knit can have a positive effect. “It’s this unconscious browsing that’s probably negatively affecting your boredom,” he stressed.

• Don't expect boredom to make you creative.

There's a common idea that boredom will make you creative, Danckert said. But that's not true.

"The evidence for this claim is very weak, and we actually published a report recently showing that if you're bored, you're actually less creative," he said.

“I think if you have creative outlets (that exist), for example, if you play an instrument or make art of some kind,” he said, “and you cultivate that outlet, it’s a great outlet to turn to when you’re bored.”

“What we can’t hope for, and I think it’s a common myth, is that embracing boredom and bringing it into your life will somehow make you more creative. It’s not going to happen,” he continued.

People express the view that downtime is good for creativity, Danckert said.

“Being disconnected from the hustle and bustle of life gives you time to think, and maybe it means you have creative ideas and connect things that you wouldn’t have been able to connect otherwise, and that makes you feel creative. I don’t see any problem with that,” he explained.

• Avoid boredom?

Boredom has a message for you, so pay attention. “I don’t think we should accept boredom, but I also don’t think we should try to run away from it,” Danckert said. “It’s neither good nor bad, so we just have to learn to listen to it, and see what it’s telling us in that moment. We need to adapt to it and respond to it in good ways.”

One response might be a creative outlet, he said, but "it could be anything else, like going for a run. It could be relaxing in front of a Netflix show, if you choose to do so intentionally."

But if you only choose a negative response, Danckert says, you probably won't feel like you have much agency.

As for the saying, "Only boring people feel boredom," Danckert found it a bit judgmental.

“There’s a moral to it, you’re not trying hard enough, you should just try harder to connect with the world,” he continued. “I think the truth is that we’re all bored. There are some of us who are very good and very quick to adapt to this and … the effective responders (make) judgments about the rest of us who don’t necessarily handle this so well.”

"We are not boring people," he concluded. "We are just subject to a very common and very normal human experience."

Source: CNN