Letting yourself be bored can be a good thing, experts say

Learning to deal with boredom

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Being bored can be annoying, but we have to learn to deal with it since it’s a human feeling that we will all experience from time to time. Luckily, there are big benefits to being bored, experts say. But what exactly is this unpleasant state of mind?

A contradiction

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Psychologists James Danckert and John D. Eastwood define it as “the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to do something, but not wanting to do anything”, in their book ‘Out of my skull: the psychology of boredom’.
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Associated with addiction

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Boredom is associated with self-control problems and addiction, including gambling and binge-eating, according to professor Shahram Heshmat, addiction expert.
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Bored teenagers are more prone to addiction

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“This may be especially true during adolescence, a time when
we are developing the skills needed to deal with boredom in adulthood,” writes Heshmat in Psychology Today.
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Benefits of being bored

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However, there are also many benefits that can stem out of being bored, studies have shown. These are some of them:

Boredom can spark productivity and creativity

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A 2019 study published in the journal ‘Academy of Management Discoveries’, found that boredom can spark individual productivity and creativity.

Boredom experiment

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In the study, people who had gone through a boredom-inducing task: methodically sorting a bowl of beans by color, one by one, later performed better on an idea-generating task than peers who first completed an interesting craft activity.

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The task at hand

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The task given to participants was to come up with excuses for being late that wouldn’t make someone look bad.

The previously bored people performed better

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The bored folks outperformed the entertained ones, both in terms of idea quantity and quality, as ranked by objective outsiders who assigned uniqueness scores to each one.

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Boredom motivates the search for novelty

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Without boredom, humans would not have the taste for adventure and novelty-seeking that makes us who we are: intelligent, curious, and constantly seeking out the next thing, argue psychologists Shane Bench and Heather Lench on their paper ‘On the function of boredom’.

Dissatisfaction is what leads to exploration

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Similarly, neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg argues that it’s precisely our dissatisfaction with the status quo what leads to “novelty seeking and a willingness to challenge established ideas and practices”.

A signal that we’re not doing what we want

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“Boredom is an emotional signal that we are not doing what we want to be doing”, writes philosopher Andreas Elpidourus in his paper ‘the bright side of boredom’.
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Boredom motivates the pursuit of new goals

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In that way, boredom can be what motivates us to make a significant change in our lives, for example, quitting a job that is unchallenging or unfulfilling.

Boredom can be good for our mental well-being

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Daydreaming while bored can be “quite a respite” and provide a brief escape from day-to-day life, says psychologist Sandi Mann to Time.

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Stepping away from screens

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Several studies have shown that a lot of screen time and social media can have a strain on our mental health. In this way, stepping away from socials, and screens in general, long enough to get bored, can be beneficial.

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Short-term solutions to boredom can make it worse

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Our usual reaction to boredom is to seek outside stimulations for distraction like scrolling through social media, playing a video game or watching a movie. However, experts qualify these as “short-term solutions” that can serve to strengthen the grip of boredom.

You can’t fight boredom with technology addiction

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“It’s like an addiction where we need more and more intense stimulation to fight boredom. And this may ultimately lead to more boredom in the long run,” writes addiction expert Shahram Heshmat in Psychology Today.

When you have tons of choices but you don’t want any

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Proof of that premise is the fact that despite having plenty of entertainment sources at our disposal, we still get bored from time to time. We have thousands of choices on Netflix and other streaming platforms, yet sometimes we don’t want to watch any of them.
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If Netflix was enough we would all be couch potatoes

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But this might just be a very positive thing, because if movies and social media were enough to satisfy our brain’s desires, maybe we would never find the motivation to get out of the couch and do something meaningful.
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The function of boredom

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“Just as it’s good that we have the capacity for pain, to keep us safe, it’s good that we have the capacity for boredom, because it saves us from the ruin of stagnation,” psychologist John D. Eastwood said to The Guardian.

A better way of engaging

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“Boredom keeps us moving forward and searching for a better way of applying ourselves, for engaging in the world,” Eastwood added.
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