Although boredom is often perceived as having no significance, being only temporary and quickly fixed by a simple changed in the environment, it can also be a chronic and prevalent stressor that may severely impact people’s health.

The state of boredom can be triggered very easily, for example, listening to a long and uninteresting school lecture, driving a long distance alone in the car, or waiting, what seems like forever, for a doctor’s appointment.

You can’t help but stare at the clock and watch how slowly time is passing, but more than anything, you can’t get this thought out of your head: “I’m bored!”

Boredom at work is a very common problem, but it can lead to horrible accidents. In fact, two thirds of supermarket employees claim that the boredom of their job is likely to result in many mistakes.

Other examples of harm resulting from boredom at work include closely monitoring a patient at the hospital or long-haul truck driving, both of which depend on continuous vigilance and can result in people dying if the worker does not pay attention.

However, a study from 2011 indicated that drivers can relieve their boredom by engaging in a secondary task, particularly during the last leg of their trip.

Certain behavioral problems are associated with boredom, including drug and alcohol abuse, problem gambling, and impulse control (leading to overeating and binge eating).

The popular expression “bored to death” actually has some truth behind it. Prior research has found a link between boredom and mortality.

Scientists have known that boredom can cause severe issues. However, boredom itself is still poorly understood and remains an unclear niche of research. There has yet to be a clear scientific definition of boredom, despite how common it is.

In order to gain knowledge on the mental processes that underlie our feelings of boredom, and to develop an accurate definition of boredom that can be applied across a variety of theoretical frameworks, psychological scientist John Eastwood of York University and team at the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo analyzed existing research on attention and boredom.

The experts were able to define boredom after observing research across many areas of psychological science and neuroscience.

They describe it in their article, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” which results from failures in one of attention networks of the brain.

According to the authors, we are bored when:

  • We have a hard time focusing on the internal information (such as thoughts or feelings) or external information (like environmental stimuli) needed to participate in satisfying activity
  • We understand we are having a hard time focusing
  • We blame the environment for our aversive state (for example, “this lecture is boring”)

The scientists believe that by combining the varying fields of cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology, and social psychology they can develop a more thorough understanding of the link between boredom and attention.

Now having an applicable definition of boredom that addresses the fundamental mental processes, the authors emphasize the need for further research.

Eastwood and his team believe they can help discover and create new strategies that can relieve boredom, and hope to address the harm of cognitive errors commonly linked with boredom.

Written by Sarah Glynn