For most people, boredom is a passing, nearly trivial feeling that lifts as soon as a task is completed or a lecture ends. But boredom has a darker side: Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance.
Part of the boredom puzzle may be individual differences in how much excitement and novelty we require. Men, for example, are generally more bored than women. They also exhibit more risk-taking behaviors, report enjoying more dangerous entertainment and are more likely to say that their environments are dull.
Clues to the underlying causes of boredom have come from patients who suffer traumatic brain injuries (TBI). People with TBI often begin to indulge in riskier activities after their accidents.
Highly bored individuals also tend to lack the ability to entertain themselves. As a result, they may turn to activities like doing drugs. Drug use takes place during downtime when the person would have otherwise been entertaining themselves. This may be especially true during adolescence, a time when they are putting together the skills needed to deal with boredom in adulthood. Boredom therefore becomes a lifelong cue for sensation-seeking behavior. If drug addicts can learn to deal with their doldrums, however, they may be less likely to relapse.
Our culture's obsession with external sources of entertainment—TV, movies, the Internet, video games—may also play a role in increasing boredom. It is possible that the roots of boredom lie in a fundamental breakdown in our understanding of what it is we want to do. Bored people tend to score low on measures of self-awareness. They find it difficult to accurately monitor their own moods and feelings and hence understand what they truly want. These findings fit into the psychodynamic model of boredom, whereby people repress their true wants and desires and therefore cannot locate satisfying activity. The repression part is still debatable, but students who scored high on scales of alexithymia—difficulty in describing or identifying feelings, distinguishing between bodily sensations and feelings, and an inhibited inner emotional and fantasy life—also tended to be bored.
At a more functional level, the ability to focus or engage also plays a significant role in boredom. People with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) are more likely to be bored, as are those who score low on measures of sustained attention. So, too, are individuals who have brain injuries or are prone to flips of attention (such as driving on autopilot or putting the milk in the cupboard).
In fact, direct manipulation of attention can lead to boredom, suggesting that we label tasks as boring when they require a great deal of focused effort to hold our attention. The term "flow psychology" says that great absorption, focus and enjoyment of work results from a balance between our skills and the challenge of the tasks we face.
