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Key points
- People dislike boredom and will go to extremes to avoid it.
- Challenging tasks, like working and studying, are critical for success but often dull.
- Exposure therapy offers a method for tolerating boredom.
Boredom is everywhere - it occurs frequently across groups and cultures. One study followed 3,867 people and asked them about their boredom every half hour for 10 days. People were bored in about 3% of reports, and 63% reported boredom at least once. Boredom was especially prevalent when people were doing challenging tasks, such as working and studying.
Boredom seems to be important in people’s lives. Research has found that people want to avoid boredom so badly that it drives them to act in ways counter to their own interests. People even intentionally give themselves electric shocks or look at disgusting images to avoid being unstimulated and bored. People who find boredom especially unpleasant are more likely to take risks, such as using drugs or alcohol, and do worse at work and in school.
Cal Newport, known for his work on fostering deep work, has developed a set of principles for enhancing the ability to focus and master tasks. One of these principles is embracing boredom. The idea is that being able to tolerate boredom is critical for focus and persisting to success.
He advocates training better habits and skills to focus during challenging tasks, such as putting away smartphones and scheduling time for one task without distractions.
However, these habits don’t address the problem that people are uncomfortable when bored and will do anything they can to avoid feeling bored. There is a technique with a long history in treatment for anxiety-based disorders that could provide a path to embracing boredom - exposure treatments.
Tips for Boredom Exposure Treatment
Exposure therapy has a long history of treating anxiety-based disorders and is considered effective. The idea is to pair a feared stimulus with responses that counter a fear response. For example, someone with a phobia of spiders might practice relaxation techniques while gradually approaching a spider. Over time and repeated approaches, the presence of a spider will no longer evoke the same intense fear response. Some treatments even involve eventually holding the spider while practicing calm.
The discomfort caused by boredom is not a phobia or a disorder, but there are tips we can learn from exposure therapy to think about learning to tolerate boredom.
Step 1: Identify the situations that evoke anxiety or discomfort when bored. Create a list of the situations or types of situations that cause you to feel anxiety or discomfort because you are bored. Is it waiting in line? Folding the laundry with no distractions? Opening the books to study for class? Sitting quietly with no screen? The situations will be different for everyone, so creating your own list is important. Once you’ve identified the situations, you rank the intensity of the discomfort you feel in each situation. Your list should go from the least unpleasant to the most unpleasant.
Step 2. Practice relaxation and calming techniques. Anxiety and discomfort are typically accompanied by physiological arousal, often felt as rapid heart rate and breathing. You’ll need to identify a relaxation practice that is effective for reducing these signs. Many of these are available online and in meditation apps. Some of the most common include breathing exercises that intentionally slow the rate of breathing or tighten all muscles and then gradually relax each area of the body while breathing. Practice the technique you’ve chosen multiple times until you feel confident using it to decrease your arousal.
Step 3. Work through your ladder of discomfort. Start working through the rank order list you created of situations where you experience discomfort when bored, with the least unpleasant first. If your situation with the least discomfort was folding the laundry without any music, sound, show, or conversing, then you would intentionally put yourself in that situation. When you start to feel discomfort, you will begin using the relaxation technique you’ve practiced.
If the situation starts to become intolerable, stop and leave it; start doing whatever you would normally do to distract yourself while folding laundry. Keep track of how long you were able to stay in the situation. Then, keep coming back to it until you can stay in it for longer periods of time without intense discomfort. You would then move on to the next most unpleasant situation that you identified and use the same techniques to move through your list.
Why would you want to learn to tolerate boredom? It should make you less driven to turn to meaningless distractions like social media, smartphone apps, and texts. That means you’ll have more time and effort to focus on tasks that matter to you, like succeeding in school and your career.
References
Sundberg, N. D., Latkin, C. A., Farmer, R. F., & Saoud, J. (1991). Boredom in young adults: Gender and cultural comparisons. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 22, 209-223.
Chin, A. Markey, A., Bhargava, S., Kassam, K. S., & Loewenstein, G. (2016). Bored in the USA: Experience sampling and boredom in everyday life. Emotion, 17, 359-368.
Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of a disengaged mind. Science, 345, 75-77.
Bench, S. W., & Lench, H. C. (2019). Boredom as a seeking state: Boredom prompts the pursuit of novel (even negative) experiences. Emotion, 19, 242-254.
