![]() Yet, the drive to maximise every last facet of our lives is not only contributing to widespread burnout (which a recent survey from work messaging platform Slack found is on the rise globally) but is also holding us back from fulfilling our full potential.Īs Dr Mann reveals, boredom allows us to enter a state of daydreaming. Such is our aversion to being left alone with our own mind is that one fascinating 2014 study showed that as many as 25% of the female participants preferred to electrically shock themselves in a lab instead. ‘Some people may fear that it triggers negative thinking, tipping them into worry cycle or dark thoughts.’ ‘Somehow in our busy society we have equated it with not feeling useful, valued or important.’Īnd might we also feel ‘safer’ running around in a state of frantic doing? ‘When we’re bored our brains can begin dealing with things, and we in a respect be a bit afraid of what they might uncover or where they go to,’ adds Dr Mann. ‘The negative connotations surrounding boredom can particularly affect women,’ notes Dr Mann. Shouldn’t I be bilingual? In training for a half marathon? Have mid-week dinner plans? Indeed, if we’re socially rewarded for productivity and self-improvement, allowing yourself to be bored can feel like the ultimate failure. ‘The digital age has led us to expect high levels of stimulation' But part of our newfound resistance to the emotion seems to come from the fact that, where once the luxury of downtime was a status symbol, being busy is the new marker of success. This is not to say that people didn’t experience boredom before tech arrived. ‘But in not allowing ourselves to experience boredom, we are becoming less tolerant of it and unable to cope with a slower pace of life. ‘The digital age has led us to expect high levels of stimulation,’ explains Dr Mann. There’s emerging evidence that succumbing to such instant gratification in order to erase boredom is only making us feel more bored, more quickly, in the long run. I’ve caught myself, during the mundane task of sorting invoices, tapping onto WhatsApp on autopilot. Unsurprisingly, research has shown that feelings of boredom at work see us reaching for our smartphones, a bad habit I’m all too familiar with. ‘It’s in our evolutionary interests to want to experience new things, but we can become addicted to the dopamine hit of novelty at our fingertips,’ continues Dr Mann. ![]() ‘We’ve been primed since childhood to view boredom as a negative emotion’ Think Jane Austen writing her literary classics versus our penchant for Wordle. ‘Where before we would have had to do something quite active to get rid of boredom – and have the leisure time and money to be able to do that – now there’s the ability to swipe and scroll it away in a passive manner,’ she notes. ‘We’ve been primed since childhood to view boredom as a negative emotion and something we should get rid of.’īut its absence in our adult lives is also because of the digital age we now live in. But how did we get here? ‘Boredom is when our brain neurons are searching for an optimal level of stimulation and don't find it,’ explains Dr Mann. Elsewhere, it can arguably be detected to some degree in the phenomenon of ‘quiet quitting’ at work and how we now consume entertainment, like the return of TV episodes dropped weekly rather than binged. More recently, there has been the social media-driven ‘slow living’ movement and increased conversations surrounding burnout (see clinical psychology researcher Katina Bajaj on TikTok). Its presence can be seen in the rise over the past few years of digital detoxing and the trend for ‘ dopamine fasting’. One 2019 study found that boredom can boost productivity and creativity, while another paper published the same year indicated how it can improve wellbeing by giving our overloaded brains an opportunity to relax and destress.įast forward to 2023, and the world of wellness has been slowly but surely entering its boredom era. This is a reality which the newest science has increasingly been backing up. I’ve realised, since then, that every time I lean into my boredom I tend to come up with my best ideas and swiftest solutions. I suddenly remembered that I needed to send a friend some flowers, devised a clever method for fixing the bathroom loo seat with superglue and conjured up a way to make a feature idea I was writing more timely. ![]() Then, the unexpected happened, as my swirling thoughts magically coalesced into fully-formed ideas. ![]() It didn’t take long for me to zone out into a daydream of the kind that my busy schedule rarely permits. In a moment of resignation, I turned to my right and gazed out the window at the fluffy white clouds and blue sky for miles. ![]() 'My swirling thoughts magically coalesced into fully-formed ideas' ![]()
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