We have all experienced boredom. Sitting in a class where the teacher is
droning on about a topic you don’t care about, you may find yourself
daydreaming or staring at a clock that doesn’t seem to be moving. Waiting for a delayed flight to take off at
the airport, you may search in vain for something to distract you.
Boredom is unpleasant and physically painful. It can make you angry and frustrated. Boredom can also influence your actions in
negative ways. Bored people are prone to
overeat for example,
So how does boredom work?
An interesting paper by John Eastwood, Alexandra Frischen,
Mark Fenske, and Daniel Smilek in the September, 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science.
These authors suggest that attention plays an important role
in creating boredom. In particular,
there are a few conditions that need to be met for people to feel bored. First, people need to have a reasonable level
of psychological energy or arousal to
feel bored. When people have low arousal
and there is not much happening in the world, then they often feel
relaxed. When they have high arousal,
though, they have energy they would like to devote to something, but they
cannot find anything engaging.
Second, boredom typically occurs when people have trouble
focusing their attention and they believe the reason for this difficulty is in
the environment. When sitting in the
airport, for example, there is probably a lot going on. There are people having conversations that
you could listen to. You probably have
something to read. There may be
televisions showing the news. But, the
stress of waiting for a delayed flight often makes it hard to concentrate, and
so your mind jumps from one thing to another.
You assume that this is caused by the environment, and so you feel
boredom.
The authors of this paper point to an interesting study by
Robin Damrad-Frye and James Laird in the August, 1989 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In this study, participants had to listen to
a tape of a person reading a Psychology
Today article. In the next room,
there was a television soundtrack from a soap opera playing. For some groups listening to the article, the
TV was very loud and distracting, for others it was barely noticeable, and for
some it was not playing at all. After
listening to the article, people rated their boredom during the study.
The people who heard the barely noticeable TV rated
themselves as more bored than either the ones who heard the loud TV or heard no
soundtrack. The idea is that both the
loud TV and the soft TV were distracting, but for those who heard the loud TV
it was clear why they were distracted from the article. Thus, they may have been frustrated with the
noise, but they were not bored. Those
who heard the soft soundtrack had difficulty concentrating, but they were not
sure why, and so they attributed the difficulty concentrating to boredom.
This example leads to another key aspect of boredom. As Eastwood, Frischen, Fenske, and Smilek
point out, bored people become aware of their difficulty concentrating. As a result, bored people often try to amuse
themselves by daydreaming and letting their mind wander. Interestingly, while mind wandering helps
people to keep their minds occupied, studies suggest that the more your mind
wanders, the more bored you feel. The
idea is that you recognize that this daydreaming is meant to occupy your mind,
and so you realize that the situation is boring.
One more key element of boredom is control. Boredom often occurs when you have little
control over your situation. Waiting
rooms, lectures, and airline gates are all places where you have little control
over your situation. Normally, we react
to unpleasant situations by changing the situation. If you don’t like a book you are reading, for
example, you close it and do something else.
Boredom happens when you are unable to change the situation.
Finally, a real problem caused by boredom is that it leads
you to dislike the things that are the object of boredom. In my senior year of high school, for example,
I was forced to read Moby Dick. I struggled to get interested in it and spent
long hours staring at the pages trying to lose myself in it. To this day, I really do not like Moby Dick. The negative feelings that came with the
boredom have stuck to the book.
As the authors of the review point out, these negative
feelings can actually impair later performance.
Stress can decrease people’s ability to pay attention and can narrow
people’s working memory capacity. These
effects can be a particular problem in school settings. Students need to be able to work at peak
capacity to get the most out of school.
So, boredom can create long-term difficulties for students.
What can you do about boredom? Obviously, there are times when you are
stuck. If you are listening to a lecture
that you cannot leave, then you just need to find a way to get through it. When you have some control, though, use your
understanding of boredom to help you out.
If you can, try to do a meditation exercise to lower your arousal
level. If you can lower your arousal, it
will help you to feel less bored. Also,
keep some music handy. Music you enjoy
can crowd out distractions in the environment.
It can also influence your mood in positive ways to counteract the pain
of being bored.
