In 1990, when James Danckert was 18 years old, his older brother Paul was involved in an accident when he crashed his car into a tree. He was pulled out of the crumpled body with numerous fractures and bruises. Unfortunately, there was also a traumatic brain injury.
The rehabilitation period was very long and difficult. Before the accident, Paul was a drummer and loved music. However, even after his broken wrist healed, he had absolutely no desire to pick up the sticks and start playing. This activity no longer brought him pleasure.
Over and over again, Paul complained to his brother that he was incredibly bored. And it wasn’t a matter of bouts of post-traumatic depression. It’s just that now the things that he used to love with all his soul did not evoke absolutely any emotions in him except deep disappointment.
A few years later, James began training to become a clinical neuropsychologist. During his training, he examined about twenty people who had suffered traumatic brain injuries. Thinking about his brother, Dankert asked them if they felt bored. All twenty people who took part in the study responded positively.
This experience greatly helped Danckert in his future career. He currently works as a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada. This place is famous because it was here that scientists first began to seriously study boredom.
What is boredom and why does it happen?
Photo: Pexels.com
When an obsessive feeling arises that you have become bored with life, this is already an alarming signal. This means that your psyche has a need for change, but at this very moment you may lack resources, money, experience, time or knowledge. There is a feeling that you are stuck in a swamp; life seems gray and monotonous.
Boredom can be a result of fatigue or routine. You are doing something you don’t like, you are mired in everyday life, family life and children cease to bring pleasure. Very often we do not set aside time for ourselves, to lie down and relax, to walk alone in the park, to meet with friends in a cafe. It is because of this that boredom arises, which makes life unbearable.
A thought ripens in your subconscious: “It would be great to move, change jobs, send the children to kindergarten, take care of yourself or your favorite hobby, start having fun, and so on.” But at the same time, you do not take any steps to change anything in your life.
Prison of time
Time during boredom is subjectively experienced as a viscous substance. This is probably why children experience it especially painfully, because their subjective sense of time is more blurred, it flows more slowly, and therefore the boredom is more vast. Her childhood boredom is involuntarily recalled when looking at the painting “Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya” - she herself recalled that she felt a little strange, sitting for hours on the table in an uncomfortable position, with constantly numb legs:
Portrait of Varia Adoratskaya. Nikolay Feshin. 1914
However, the passage of time gradually accelerates - this concept of “proportional theory” was put forward in 1897 by Paul Janet. When we are 4 weeks old, a week is a quarter of our life, but by the end of the first year it is only a fiftieth of it. If we are lucky enough to live to be fifty, then a whole year will be the fiftieth part of our life. You can clearly see at what speed time passes in different periods of our lives, for example, here.
Increasing the concentration level of the past is in our memory. If it is true that “life is measured not by the number of inhalations and exhalations, but by the moments when you take your breath away,” then with age the density of bright moments in time decreases. Our experiences are less and less intense, and in order to experience the “first feelings” we need more and more effort. Every year, such temporary anesthesia becomes more and more noticeable: the density of events is lower, and the speed of time is faster:
... Of course, at the age of fifty, it seems as if each year flies by faster, and because it constitutes a smaller part of my expanded reserves of existence ...
Vladimir Nabokov. "Hell, or the Joy of Passion"
It is no coincidence that boredom plunges us into nostalgia and thoughts about the past - such a mechanism makes it possible to reflect on experience and fill the future with new meaning.
Boredom is from the past
Photo: Pexels.com
Boredom can be a fairly long-term phenomenon if the cause lies in the past. Try to remember what a strong mental shock you have experienced in the last few years: divorce, a quarrel with your best friend, something happened to your family, something you couldn’t overcome. The root of the problem should be looked for in the past, because you may not have fully emerged from this internal crisis and conflict. And all this pain developed into boredom, apathy and lack of interest in life.
There may be another reason for boredom. If for many years you have been living for others and not for yourself: you have forgotten about your desires, you don’t understand where to move, you don’t realize your worth, you don’t have your own interests. Sometimes a situation arises when tea and coffee are placed in front of a person, and he becomes hysterical because he cannot make a choice. This is because a person no longer knows what he loves, but at the same time he remembers what socks the husband wears and what time the child has a mug. Your desires have been forgotten, and this can be the cause of boredom.
Another option is when you live from a “should” position. You work to pay off the mortgage, you don’t move because your husband has relatives living nearby. Or all achievements are made for mom and dad: they wanted you to become a lawyer, and now you have a career, but life seems so boring that it becomes unbearable. Familiar feeling?
The most boring video in the world
In psychology, for many years, one of the most effective ways to create a certain mood in a person is considered to be watching thematic videos. There are special videos that stimulate a person’s emotions such as joy, anger, sadness, and sympathy. That's why Colleen Merrifield, while writing her dissertation, decided to create a video that would be so boring that it would make people cry.
What happens in the video is that two men are in a completely white room with no windows. Without saying a single word, they take clothes from a huge pile and hang them on the lines - jackets, shirts, sweaters, socks. The seconds are ticking: 15, 20, 45, 60. The men are hanging up their clothes. Eighty seconds. One of the men takes a clothespin. One hundred seconds. The men continue to hang up their clothes. Two hundred seconds. Three hundred seconds. And again, no change - the men are hanging up their clothes. The video is looped in such a way that nothing else happens. Its total duration is 5.5 minutes.
Not surprisingly, the people Merrifield showed the video to found it incredibly boring. Then she decided to try to study how boredom affects the ability to concentrate and focus.
Merrifield asked participants to perform a classic attention task: watching spots of light appear and disappear on a monitor. All this took an incredibly long time on purpose. The result exceeded expectations: this task turned out to be many times more boring than the most boring video. More than half of the subjects were unable to cope with it.
This was not a surprise. In many past studies, scientists also asked participants to perform monotonous activities instead of watching videos. In order for a person to begin to get bored, he was asked, for example, to fill out identical forms, unscrew or tighten nuts. Comparing the results of different studies was quite problematic because there was no single standardized approach to methods of stimulating boredom. It was impossible to find out whose results were correct and whose were not.
In 2014, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, published a paper that attempted to begin the standardization process. They identified three groups of activities that most often cause boredom in people:
- repetitive physical tasks;
- simple thinking tasks;
- viewing and listening to special video and audio recordings.
The researchers used Eastwood's Multidimensional Boredom Scale to determine how much each task they performed made subjects feel bored and whether it aroused other emotions in them. There were six unusually dull problems in total. The most boring thing was to endlessly click the mouse, turning the icon on the screen half a turn clockwise. After this, it was decided to no longer show special videos to induce boredom in people, but to use ordinary behavioral tasks instead.
Why is this condition dangerous?
Photo: Pexels.com
People can have different reactions to boredom. Someone in this state begins to behave inappropriately, become irritated, and angry. Others may fall into a kind of hibernation, when they don’t want to move or do anything. Obviously, during this period you cannot do quality work or try to change something in life - in this case, boredom acts as a kind of excuse for inaction.
It is important to understand that this feeling is a teacher, a phantom from the past. Once upon a time, you used boredom to escape reality and problem solving. But now a critical mass has simply accumulated, and this feeling is emerging again from the past.
What is the complexity of this reaction? The fact is that it turns into apathy, which can develop into clinical depression. And then it will be very difficult to cope with it without medications and professional psychotherapeutic help.
Therefore, if you are bored, try to solve this problem as quickly as possible. Push yourself to try new things, take different routes, learn new skills or find an interesting hobby. And if at first you have to do it through force, then after a week, month or even a year and a half, interest in life will definitely return. You will feel more energetic in the morning, new acquaintances, knowledge, skills and interests will appear.
History of the study of boredom
The study of boredom began in 1885, when the British polymath Francis Galton published a short report on how restless and inattentive listeners at a scientific meeting behaved.
Quite a lot of time has passed since then, and relatively few people are interested in the topic of boredom. John Eastwood, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, is convinced that this happens because boredom seems to everyone to be a rather trivial thing that is not worth paying close attention to.
Things began to change when, in 1986, Norman Sundberg and Richard Farmer of the University of Oregon showed the world a way to measure boredom. They invented a special scale that could be used to determine the level of boredom without asking the subjects the question “Are you bored?”
Instead, the following statements needed to be confirmed or refuted: “Does time seem to pass too slowly?” “Do you feel that you are not using your full potential when you work?” and “Are you easily distracted?” They were formulated by Sandberg and Farmer based on surveys and interviews in which people talked about how they felt when they were bored. After the respondents gave their answers, each was given a score, according to which the degree of susceptibility to boredom was determined.
Sandberg and Farmer's Boredom Proneness Scale became the starting point for a new round of research. It served as a prototype for other types of scales, and has also become incredibly useful in other applied sciences, helping to link boredom to things like mental health and academic performance.
However, the proposed boredom scale also had significant drawbacks. According to Eastwood, this indicator directly depends on a person’s self-esteem and is therefore very subjective, which spoils the purity of the experiment. In addition, the scale only measures the level of susceptibility to boredom, not the intensity of this feeling. The imprecision of concepts and definitions still creates some confusion among scientists.
Work on improving the boredom scale is still underway. In 2013, Eastwood began developing the Multidimensional Boredom Scale, which includes 29 statements about various sensations. Unlike the Sandberg and Farmer scale, the Eastwood scale measures the state of the respondent at the current moment in time. With its help, you can determine what a person is feeling right now.
However, before measuring the level of boredom, the researchers had to make sure that the participants in the experiment actually experienced it. And this is a completely different task.
How to get rid of boredom
Photo: Pexels.com
The first thing you can do to get rid of boredom is to introduce meditation into your life for relaxation and peace. Turn them on, lie back and allow the tension points in your head and throughout your body to unravel and release. To combat this negative condition, try to get enough sleep and rest regularly. Find time to walk, turn off your phone for a while and just enjoy the opportunity to be alone with yourself. Initiate meetings with friends and organize your own leisure time.
Add these items to your to-do list and just start doing them.
Find positive things in your environment and life. Try to record your successes and achievements. For example, if at work you have to do something you don’t like, try to perform your duties even better so that you can be proud of your success.
Add time to exercise in your daily routine. This could be table tennis, brisk walking - you don’t need to exhaust yourself too much.
The state of boredom can last from three months to six months, but then recovery will begin, your psyche will calm down, and you will feel better.
Summary
Boredom and idleness are not as bad as they seem. They increase productivity, creativity, determination and self-awareness. It is important to be able to identify different types of boredom. Indifferent boredom will help your brain recharge, while apathetic boredom indicates a tendency towards depression.
To get the most out of doing nothing, follow these rules:
- To relieve boredom, choose activities that do not require a lot of mental energy.
- Eliminate distractions such as the Internet.
- Plan in your schedule for times when you might get bored.
But remember that it is important not to overdo it with both boredom and work. Find a balance for yourself and try to maintain it. We wish you to comprehend this unique skill - to benefit from vigorous activity and benefit from boredom. Good luck!
We also recommend reading:
- Storytelling
- How music affects a person: 7 beneficial psychological effects
- 7 simple ways to upgrade your brain
- 7 Scientific Ways to Take Effective Breaks
- Curiosity
- BRAIN digest
- 7 Real Ways to Improve Creativity
- Lessons of wisdom from Arthur Schopenhauer
- 5 Ways to Make Deadlines Less Stressful and More Productive
- How to study boring subjects
- Psychology of color
Key words:1Self-knowledge
How to treat chronic boredom
There is no need to despair. If boredom is deep-rooted and arose due to the shocks of the past ten years of such a life, then there is still a way out.
The first thing to do is to take care of your values and desires, giving them the same attention as you give to other people. And do it with the same enthusiasm.
Answer the questions for yourself: what do you love, what do you want to get? Test, try new things. Remember what you like, even if we are talking about your favorite color, weather, favorite treat. As children, many had questionnaires in notebooks in which we answered the questions: “What is your name, what boy’s name do you like, what’s the girl’s name?” This is roughly how you need to regress into your little self and start collecting bits and pieces of information about yourself: what you liked, what you loved.
Photo: Pexels.com
Then try adding gamification to your usual everyday activities: throw ingredients into soup with an ominous laugh, jump around the apartment on one leg, throw out trash backwards. Have you always drank tea from a cup? Pour into a jar. Such unusual actions lead the brain off its usual route. And this is the first step you can take.
Over time, when the motivation for change awakens within you and you really start to change something, the boredom will pass.
Boredom is not an event, but your perception of reality. It leads to dissatisfaction with life, with yourself and with the people around you. Without paying enough attention to this problem, you risk becoming dependent: on food, changing pictures (when you feel good only when traveling, but not at home) or an endless series of partners. There is a way out, but first it is important to realize your feelings, acknowledge them and begin to influence your own body and life.
You may also like these materials:
How to increase self-esteem and stop comparing yourself to others: a psychologist says
How to stop being afraid: 10 effective methods for dealing with fear and anxiety
Is it possible to eliminate boredom forever?
Most of us mistakenly believe that the phenomenon we are studying is boredom, it is a natural, everyday thing. Without it, human existence is simply impossible. From time to time she is ready to overtake anyone, even the funniest clown in the world. And of course, we think that it is impossible to get rid of it under any circumstances, except to dispel it for a while.
And so every time, I got bored - I was distracted by something, time passed and I got bored again. But doctors say the exact opposite: boredom is a personality flaw. And if you work on your qualities, you can eliminate this unpleasant phenomenon once and for all.
Are none of our readers familiar with people who manage their time and emotions well? They are never bored, but always find something to do to their liking. Even at rest they are never bored. They listen to their favorite music, eat their favorite food and feel very comfortable at the same time. They do not look for simple, primitive ways to have fun - they do not drink alcohol, do not smoke, and especially do not use drugs. They do not need company to feel happy, to feel pleasure. They just know how to be alone with themselves and do not feel discomfort.
For whom boredom is motivation?
Yes, in order to escape from it, we start doing something. Therefore, most argue that it is a motivation for more active activity. But that's not true! If you don’t believe me, then let’s draw an analogy with drug addicts.
Imagine a person who lived a normal life and made ends meet. But at one point, he was hooked on drugs. From now on, his need to get the next dose becomes more important than air. That is, he needs to look for a more profitable position so that he can buy drugs. Moreover, you need to work even harder, with responsibility, otherwise you will be kicked out without a second thought.
Do we really need to be grateful for the existence of drugs, since they motivate people to look for better jobs and work harder at them? No! It’s just that the drug addict’s life before that was quite satisfactory, either because of laziness, or because of unpretentiousness and low ambitions.
What is the danger?
Boredom is a state of mind that is extremely dangerous. What troubles can this feeling cause if it becomes chronic?
- The person will begin to constantly experience nervous tension.
- There is a high probability of addiction - alcohol or drugs.
- Long trips, vacations, meetings - all this will begin to cause torment, from which only work can help you get rid of it.
- You won't be able to concentrate.
- Chronic fatigue will appear, which will interfere with relaxation.
- There will be a painful craving for various and useless purchases.
- The brain will simply become clogged with information garbage and numerous tasks.
- There will be a feeling of anxiety and apathy all the time.
This list looks quite impressive. Few people view boredom as the main source of evil, so this set of problems can be surprising.
So why is boredom so dangerous? After all, at first glance, it is a completely ordinary condition that occurs in the absence of activity. Something like hunger or thirst. However, boredom is not only a feeling or a quality of nature, but also a serious personality flaw. Therefore it must be eliminated.
Will new sensations help?
Search for new sensations and impressions. It seems that constant travel at first glance is a harmless way to get rid of boredom. However, it requires an almost bottomless wallet and a huge amount of time. In addition, over time, such entertainment will get boring. The same can be said about changing sexual partners. Boredom seems to disappear, but then it appears again. And the more often the change occurs, the shorter the period of time spent without this sensation.
