Why do we get bored and what can we do about it? As a Boredom Researcher,Psychologist James Danckert is trying to answer those questions. We talk boredom, how to be more interesting, the secret to staying focused and what boredom is doing to your brain. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Boring Things.
James Danckert: 01:14ish
Pointless: 56:13ish
Top 5: 01:11:51ish
nickvinzant@gmail.com (Show Email)
316-530-7719 (Show voicemail)
https://www.jamesdanckert.com (James Danckert Website)
https://twitter.com/jamesdanckert (James Danckert Twitter)
https://www.amazon.com/Out-My-Skull-Psychology-Boredom/dp/0674984676 (Out of My Skull - James Danckert Book
James Danckert: Boredom Researcher Interview
Nick VinZant 0:12
Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, the science of boredom, and the most boring things,
James Danckert 0:22
boredom is this uncomfortable state of wanting, but failing to engage with the world. I don't like to make the judgment is boredom, good or bad? It's what we do with it that makes it good or bad, but the signal itself is useful. It's functional. And what do I mean by that? It's, it's a call to action. When we're bored. There is this tendency for some of us at least to engage in aggressive and harmful behaviors.
Nick VinZant 0:45
I want to thank you so much for joining us, if you get a chance to subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it, it helps out the show. And more than anything, we just like hearing from you. So our first guest studies boredom, why we get bored? Why some people get more bored than others? And what we can do about it? This is boredom researcher, James Danker. Why do we get bored?
James Danckert 1:15
There's lots of different reasons why we might get bored, right? The primary one that most people think about is monotony. If something's just unchanging over and over again, you know, that sort of monotony that repetition, that nothing's changing, that can be very boring. One of the things that a colleague of mine wine and Van Tilburg says to if we find things meaningless, right, so if what you're doing, you know, you feel like you're constrained because you have to do it, you can't get out of it. But you're just looking at it thinking this is pointless, this is just doesn't matter to me. And then I can't see how to make it matter to me, that will make the board as well. There are situations to where, you know, if you find yourself trying to have been challenged to do something, but it's just way outside of your capacities. Maybe before you started, you thought it wasn't going to be maybe you thought you'd be able to cope. But for whatever reason, it's just this is way too complex. You mentioned one of your podcasts with the particle physicist, you know, some of us might sit in a particle physicist lecture and think, Man, I thought this was going to be interesting, but I just can't keep up. That could get you're bored as well. So there's any number of sort of circumstances that will lead us to being bored, I think, monotony and meaning are the two heavy units on that front.
Nick VinZant 2:25
Does it matter? Like how, how engaging the activity is, right? Like I think of Okay, everybody knows that doing taxes can be boring, but like, can people get bored going skydiving, like, if you're just not interested, and you do it all the time? Like is somebody going to be like, alright, jumping out of this plane again.
James Danckert 2:45
I took a couple of jumps out of airplanes when I was a younger person, younger and silly a person and thought it was great fun and thought I might do more of it and ended up not for various sorts of reasons. I don't know if you can get bored jumping out of an airplane. But the first thing you asked was, you know, doesn't matter how engaging it is. And that's absolutely the thing that matters, right? If whatever it is that you're doing, if it's not engaging, you're going to find it boring. And when you bring up the example of someone like a skydiver? Well, typically those guys don't just sort of spend 20 years doing the same jump over and over again, they don't they challenge themselves, they might do team jumps, they might do jumps with 30 people to see what sort of figuration configurations they can do, they might go from jumping from planes to base jumping, always, in some sense, it feels a little bit like an addictive behavior, always upping the adrenaline for some of these people, not for all, but also just changing what the goal is and changing what it is that you're trying to achieve, right. Because I think regardless of what we do, whether it's taxes, or skydiving, if it's the same every time, then we're not challenging ourselves. That sort of brings me to an aspect of boredom. It's really critical. I think that when we're bored, it's sort of made pretty obvious to us that we're not being very effective agents, right, we're not exercising our agency, which is to say, we're not pursuing goals that we've chosen in the way that we want to pursue them. And so you know, you want to change it up. And that will be true for the skydiver as much as it is for the tax accountant.
Nick VinZant 4:15
So can we will ourselves out of this right? I think that anybody who has a job will can relate in the sense that there are things that you just have to do that you have no interest in doing right? Can we just will our way out of this, even if it's just something that I just don't care about this thing? It's gonna be
James Danckert 4:36
tough, right? I mean, I think sometimes that sort of puts the onus right back on the person, which is something that's interesting about boredom, because it really is in you. It's something that you're feeling you're feeling disengaged, you'll want something but you don't know what it is and you can't done or whether or not you're going to be able to satisfy with that sort of job circumstance that you mentioned. Sometimes you feel constrained, you're stuck. You really can't get out of that sort of circumstance. But what that question sparks in May is the old adage that people use many parents have used it on their kids, that only boring people get bored. So we're really sort of casting a moral judgment about being bored with So say, if you're bored, you have to fix it. And there's truth to that, that we do have to be the author of our own way out of boredom. But I think it's probably a little bit unfair to cast that moral judgment, because there are going to be circumstances where you can't just will yourself out of it, right? Those sorts of circumstances where we're constrained, you're stuck at a job that you have to finish this task. This is what you're getting paid for. You know, and there is a couple of I think that were Swedish, but I might be I might be wrong, or Danish authors that talk about bore out which at work, which is the sort of opposite of burnout, if you think, and, you know, these were people that were finding their jobs so miserable, because they were bored with them. And ultimately, it gets to the final sort of decision that you have to make, which is to say, All right, get a different job, right, do something else that does engage you, that is meaningful to you. And it does matter, too. But, but I wouldn't I be cautious about casting that sort of moral judgment too harshly that, you know, only boring people get bored. And it's, it's entirely up to you. I think there's something to be said for, you know, there are circumstances that are outside of our control, that are pretty good. Producers of boredom. You know, I mean, imagine working on an assembly line, you've got to stand there and do the thing that you have to do quality control the widgets that are going past you. So how much of that circumstance? Can you as an individual really be expected to change?
Nick VinZant 6:40
Do we need to be bored, though? Like, is there something in our brains that like, look, boredom? Is boredom, good? In a way?
James Danckert 6:49
That's a great question, and essentially says, you know, what's the purpose of being bored? And that's a question that we asked a lot of affective experiences, what's the purpose? What's the function of being sad or angry, or so on. And some of them seem more obvious than others. But boredom absolutely serves a purpose in our lives, it absolutely has a function that's worthwhile for us. So I don't like to make the judgment is boredom, good or bad? It's what we do with it, that makes it good or bad, but the signal itself is useful, it's functional. And what do I mean by that? It's, it's a call to action. So what boredom is telling us in that moment, when we feel it, it's saying, whatever you're doing right now, is not satisfying you. Maybe not meaningful enough, it's maybe not challenging enough, you need to find something else, you need to explore your environment for something else. And when you suggest that boredom serves a functional sort of purpose in our lives, you're also sort of hinting at the fact that it might indeed have an evolutionary history. If boredom is functional, then presumably it was selected for and if it was selected for evolution, then presumably, we can see it in other animals. And you can, so anyone that's owned a dog knows that dogs get bored, right? You come home, and you've got one of your shoes torn up while the dog was bored. And so we tore up your shoe, we didn't have any malice in it. But scientifically, we've also sort of demonstrated this. So Georgia Mason and Rebecca Miga, did a fantastic study with mink. And they house these mink in two different cages, really boring cages or interesting cages that had things that the mink could do. And at the end of two weeks of being in these different cages, then they showed them different sorts of objects, objects that the mink might normally like to approach, like a toothbrush, apparently, according to this research, mink, and toothbrushes are like cats and laser points, they just love him. And so then they show them objects that were neutral, just a bottle of water. And then they show them things that the animal would normally avoid, like the smell of a predator. And their logic was that if the animals in the bad cages in the boring cages, if they were depressed, or if they were sad, they might just fail to approach the things they normally liked. they'd leave the toothbrush alone, right? Or if they were apathetic, they wouldn't approach anything, they just become the couch potato and lay there. But if they were bored, they'd approach all kinds of things indiscriminately, even the stuff that they don't normally approach. And that's what they found, they found that the animals like, Give me something give me anything to to latch on to here. So yeah, boredom is evident in animals. And it has that evolutionary history to it. And it serves that function. It serves that purpose for us, it pushes us to act.
Nick VinZant 9:26
It kind of sounds like it lets us know what we don't like and then opens us up to trying new things.
James Danckert 9:32
Yeah, you can say it that way. I mean, I think one of the things that sort of frustrating a negative about boredom, when you're feeling it is that when you say it opens us up to new things. It doesn't do the hard work of figuring out what those new things will be that's on you, right? Boredom is not going to say, Oh, look, here's an opportunity. Boredom is just gonna say go find an opportunity. Right? So this is sort of classic. We need it. You know, anyone who's listening who has young children, you know, your child comes to you and they say I'm bored, right? And as any parent knows, then you said have say, Okay, well, why don't you go read a book? Or why don't you go play basketball with your brother? Or why don't you ride your bike and the kid says no to all of those options, they dismiss all of them at once. Because what they're saying is, I thought of all of those options too, and they just don't, I just don't think they're gonna do it for me. So you want something when you're bored, but you're just not sure what it is the quote, I love the most comes from Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, where he describes on we as the desire for desires. So when you're bored, you really know you want something, but you just don't know what it is. So yes, it can open opportunities, but it can't solve itself for you.
Nick VinZant 10:36
Is there something physically happening in our brain, when we get bored, like, you could monitor the brain and like, Oh, I see this, that guy's bored, that girl is bored.
James Danckert 10:49
It's not quite as simple as that, in terms of you're picking up an individual signal that sort of says, that's definitely the signature of being bored. But and we're in the sort of nascent stages of that kind of research, there's a long way to go to try and figure out what the brain correlates are of being bored. But there are a couple of things that we do know. So one of the things about being bored is that you're often disengaged, you're not, you're struggling to focus your attention on the task at hand. And we've shown using EEG or electrical signals from the brain, that there are sort of specific signals that are normally associated with being able to focus attention. And those signals are diminished or lowered when we're bored. Right. So that sort of fits well with this story that when you're bored, you're not poking focusing attention well. And then we've also done some functional MRI. And in that we made use of what's known as a resting state scan. So when you put somebody in an MRI machine, and you just ask them to do nothing but sit there, you get a series of brain areas that are activated, a fairly commonly and this, this network of brain areas is known as the default mode network. And it's sort of activated for a range of different things that can be thought of as internal thought processes. So if you're daydreaming, if your mind wandering, if you're thinking about the past, or even if you're planning for something that you need to do in the future, these internal thoughts that you have these thoughts activate the default mode network. But when we put people in a magnet, and we made them bored, and we did this by having them watch a video of two guys hanging laundry for eight minutes, which, as you can imagine, is pretty boring. We saw activation in the default mode network. And so why that's interesting is because there is something out there in the world for you to attend to this movie. But the movie is so boring, it's so terrible, that you sort of switch off from the movie and go into those internal reveries that activate the default network. So as I say, there's a lot more to be done to try and understand the brain activity associated with being bored. But those are some of the things that we know already.
Nick VinZant 12:49
Is there any indication that I guess, well, you know, we met we talked about the idea of starting with the first question a little bit like, well, what he's bored of?
James Danckert 13:00
Yeah. So boredom is this uncomfortable state of wanting, but failing to engage with the world, you really want to be doing something that matters to you, that's meaningful to you. But you can't figure out what that thing might be. And so one of the things that's most commonly associated with people being bored, when you ask them, How do you feel is that they'll report being restless and agitated. And this is what differentiates boredom from something like apathy. If you're apathetic, you don't care. You don't really need to get up off the couch and do anything meaningful. And that's just not boredom, that's apathy. Whereas when you're bored, you feel uncomfortable, you want to be engaged, but you can't quite manage it, you can't quite figure out what that thing will be. And it is also so that's that, that sort of phenomenology, it feels bad, and you want to be engaged. From a cognitive point of view, it's typically a disengaged state, you're not focusing your attention very well. And from a sort of an existential point of view, it has a lot to do with meaning in your life, right. So when we're bored, we're looking around casting about, and thinking that most of the stuff that's available to us just doesn't seem that meaningful. And so those are the best ways I can sort of describe the experience for you.
Nick VinZant 14:14
How did you get into this?
James Danckert 14:17
Yeah, this sort of to
Nick VinZant 14:18
say, you know, what I want to you know, what I want to research is boredom.
James Danckert 14:22
Yeah, I didn't turn to my parents when I was eight and say, Hey, Mom, Dad, I really want to grow up to be a boredom researcher. There are two things that got me into boredom research. So the first one, and I think this is really common in psychologists, we tend to research what we're bad at. Right? So I experienced boredom a fair bit from my early 20s. I started sort of experiencing it a lot. And then you know, it's diminished now, as it does for most people in later years. But every time I experienced it, I hate it. I really dislike being bored. And so when I got into research and trying to understand the brain a little bit, you know, this felt like a topic that I could I could plumb the depths of and try and understand a little bit better. And the other reason is a little bit more personal. So when I was 19, my older brother had a car crash and suffered a severe traumatic brain injury as a consequence of that car crash. He recovered, and he recovered to the point where, you know, he was living independently and working and so on. But one of the things that he said after he got to that point of recovery is that he felt bored a lot, and a lot more than he did before his car crash. And so that suggested to me that that something organic had changed in his brain, something about the threshold for experiencing pleasure or being engaged, had been raised as a function of his brain injury, because the part of the brain that was damaged in him that is commonly damaged in people who have car accidents, is the orbital frontal cortex is just above your eyes. And that part of the brain is critical for representing value and reward. And so then I went to university and trained as a clinical neuropsychologist and I had the chance to sort of assess people who'd had similar brain injuries to my brother. And I would ask them in the time that we spent together, you know, are you more bored now than you were before your brain injury? And to a number they all said, Yes. And to me, they, it wasn't just that, they said, Yes, they almost leapt out of their seats, and thank God, yes, yes, I'm so bored, you know. And that said to me that, you know, this was an important part of their experience post brain damage, and no one had asked him about it. And no one had thought it was really worthwhile, they thought it was kind of trivial, but to them, it was not trivial. It was a big change, and a consequential change in their lives. So I don't do that clinical work anymore. But we have done some research showing that indeed, people who have had traumatic brain injuries do have higher levels of boredom. And so yeah, that those are the two things that got me interested in that, in this research.
Nick VinZant 16:46
Are certain people more than predisposed certain, like predisposed to becoming bored? Do people get? Does it vary from person to person, like how quickly they get bored? Yeah, so
James Danckert 16:59
we talk about trait boredom proneness. And so some people are high in boredom proneness, and some people are low in it. So there is a wide range of how often people feel it. And there are a range of sort of individual differences that we would talk about that make someone a little bit more prone to boredom, one of the common ones that we've researched a lot is the capacity for self control. And I want to be clear here about what we're sort of talking about. This is not what a lot of people think about in terms of sort of impulse control. So some of your listeners might be familiar with this marshmallow test, you know, you put a marshmallow in front of the kid, and you say, you can have that marshmallow now, or you can wait five minutes and have three, and most kids just stuffed their face with the marshmallow, right, because they don't show the impulse control to wait for the for the for the bigger reward. And there's all kinds of work, some are suggesting that there has long term consequences in their lives, because people who demonstrate lower levels of self control have poor outcomes for mental health and achievement, and so on. And what we find is the boredom prone people are highly border prone, also tend to have lower levels of self control. And so that's a really important individual difference. They tend to also there's sort of different ways in which humans pursue goals. And one of the distinctions that social psychologists will make is between what's sort of colloquially known as a JUST DO IT mode, people who get on with things, people just go from one goal to the next, and they very rapidly transition. And then I sort of do the right thing mode, people who prefer to sort of assess their options, and make sure that they make the choice, that's the best choice and then make sure not to make errors, and so on. And each one of us can adopt these models at different times. It's not as though you're one or the other, right. And each of those modes is good, under different circumstances, it's good sometimes to sort of weigh up your options and make sure you choose the right thing. And it's good sometimes to just get on with it. But what we find is that the bottom prone people tend to be those do the right thing, people that they tend to worry more about the options for action. So they tend then to fail to launch into action because they, they haven't sort of you know, they're not comfortable with the choices that are in front of them. So that's an individual difference in how people perceive goals that is important. There are there are a number of others as well, we find that people who are high in neuroticism, so they tend to have a lot of worry about life, they tend to be higher in boredom proneness as well. And there's even things that like people who are higher in what's known as covert narcissism. So covert narcissism is a person who sort of believes the world has failed to see their talents as failed to see how brilliant they are. And so they're sort of a bit bitter about it, but they're not the arrogant in your face narcissist. They just sort of a bit bitter about the fact that the world hasn't recognized their skills and talents yet, those people tend to also be high in boredom proneness. So those are the kinds of individual differences that we know about so far that are associated with being more likely to experience boredom.
Nick VinZant 20:00
Is it tied to just overall intelligence in any way?
James Danckert 20:04
It's so it's an interesting question that there's not a lot of research to suggest that it's tied to intelligence that more or less intelligent people are more or less likely to be bored. It does have an impact on achievement. So we find that people who are more bored and prone don't tend to do quite so well in school. But it's not a big difference. It's not as though a boredom prone person goes from an ace student to a D student. You know, it's more like a couple of points that are a loss, but sort of fairly consistently. So intelligence, you know, hasn't shown up as a prime factor in boredom. proneness.
Nick VinZant 20:38
Is there, like physical differences in people's brains were like, well, I guess we kind of talked about that already. Or correct me if I'm wrong, right, like a physical difference that this person is just going to be much more prone to boredom than something else. So while we already kind of talk about that,
James Danckert 20:55
well, what we talked about before was sort of functional changes, right? So I was talking about EEG electrical signals in the brain that show that when you're when we're bored, we were sort of not attending very well. And I talked about the default networks. And when we're bored, we tend to have this internal focus instead of focusing on the task in front of us as we should be. Those are functional changes in the brain, when you ask, are there structural differences? And is there something physically different, there's only one study that came out fairly recently, just about six months ago or so which was fascinating to me, where they looked at gray matter volume, so just the size of different parts of the brain. And they did find that highly boredom prone people had reduced gray matter, in some midline structures of the brain, the precuneus, and the posterior cingulate again, this is also big jargon for your listeners, but in the middle of the brain. And the precuneus is, you know, very important for focusing and sustaining attention. And so, it might not be that surprising that individuals who struggle to focus their attention, also struggle with boredom proneness, and that the brain structures necessary for focusing attention are not as the luminous as they are in people who don't have those same struggles. But you know, at the moment, one of the things that's happening in neuroscience is we need a lot larger numbers of people to look at these things and have confidence in these effects. So they ate I think, around 70 people in that study, we need more like 7000. And so we need to do these sort of human connectome kind of projects to confirm data of that kind,
Nick VinZant 22:23
the big questions that I had going into this, right, like, Okay, well, why do we get bored? And then how do we, how do we keep ourselves from getting bored?
James Danckert 22:32
That's the $64,000 question. And I get asked a lot. And the bottom line is that we don't have any really good data about this, you know, one of the trends over the past two decades, I think, is, you know, for people to sort of tout mindfulness training and mindfulness meditation as a kind of solution to everything. I'm highly skeptical of that. And I'm certainly skeptical of it for boredom. Because in order to engage in mindfulness meditation, you need to have your attention, focus on the meditation, whatever it is, whether it's, you know, whatever various kinds of mindfulness meditation styles there are. And so if you get bored, and prime person who struggles to focus their attention, and you say, I know what's going to fix it here, focus your attention, think it's probably not going to work. But we, but we just don't have the data yet. So we'd need to do those kinds of intervention studies, find people who are sort of chronically bored, and engage them with some sort of tricks and strategies or techniques and see whether or not that improved their boredom long term. So the kinds of things that I say, at the moment, when I get asked this question is that there's a sort of triumvirate of things that you can do. When you're in the moment of being bored. I'm not sure how well this helps the chronic bored person. But when you're in that moment, the first thing to do is to take a deep breath. So as I mentioned before, one of the most common things people report when they're bored is that they report feeling agitated, and restless. Well, it's pretty hard to figure out what you want to do next, or what you think would be a meaningful thing to engage with when you're restless when you're agitated when you're pacing around, right? So just to calm down, take a deep breath, and allow that restlessness to dissipate as a first step. The second two steps are really contemplative. And the first one would be to say, Well, why am I bored right now? What is it about the circumstance I'm in? And what that allows you to do is to perhaps reframe it to think about it differently. So you know, people who work on assembly lines are not always bored, because they can sometimes reframe the task. There's evidence that people on assembly lines will say that they tried to beat their personal best on the line every hour, while they've just turned a monotonous and potentially boring task into a personal challenge. And now it's not boring. And so if you find yourself in a moment of boredom, perhaps you can do the same thing. You can reframe the circumstance to be more meaningful to be more purposeful for you and now you won't be bored as much. And the third thing is that the other contemplative aspect of this seems to sort of spend some time considering what your goals are. Right? So boredom is showing us that in this moment, what we're doing is to us not very meaningful, well, what is meaningful to us? Right? We don't spend a lot of time in our lives thinking about that, considering, what are the goals that I have? Am I pursuing them? Well? And if not, can I pursue them better. And when I talk about goals like that, I want to be careful about sort of setting people up for, you know, unrealistic expectations. I'm not talking about grand goals. I'm not saying that, you know, every time you get bored, you should start to ponder why you haven't yet cured cancer, I'm thinking about any type of goal that's personally relevant to you. And they could be big and small. And it could be from anything from, you know, wanting to sort of foster better relationships with your family and friends, or wanting to get something small achieved in a hobby, doesn't really matter what the size or scope of the goal is, what matters is that it matters to you. So those would be the three things that I suggest people could try and do when they're when they're in the moment of being bored. And then the only other thing I suggest, and this, I think would work for kids. And well, I hope it would work for kids. And teenagers. As I say, I'll repeat, we don't have the data.
Although there's one paper I can talk about. One thing you could do preemptively is make a plan. So the one paper I'm thinking about comes from water, shoot and colleagues, and they looked at boredom in the pandemic, which you know, something people got really interested in all of a sudden, when we were shut down in our houses, it's like, Oh, my God, boredom is going to descend. So they did a study where they looked at how well people had coped in the pandemic, and whether or not they coped well with their boredom. And one of the things that stuck in my mind is that they found that if people had a plan to cope with their boredom, they coped better they did well, people without a plan, people hadn't thought ahead, did very poorly, and had, you know, poor outcomes because of it. So if you sit down with your children, your teenagers or if you do it for yourself, because you find that you're experiencing boredom, a lot sit down in a car moment and say, Well, what's my boredom plan, right? And that can be here's the top five things I might go to. And it might also be when those top five fail, here's the next thing I'm going to do, I'll go for a run, or I'll, or I'll tidy my closet or do something, right? It's the backup activity, when the top five things that you list in your boredom plan don't work, because there's no guarantee that they will. I often I like to say that, you know, my best boredom solution personally is like guitar, oh, turn to it whenever I'm bored, and just start playing around. And I might play songs that I know, or songs that I've written, or I might just tinker. And it's about 80% effective. So that means that 20% of the time, I go to it, and I'm still bored, didn't work for whatever reason. So I think you have to have that expectation that whatever you put together in your boredom plan, be ready for a backup to that plan, because your first five things might not work.
Nick VinZant 27:57
Okay, the I don't know if this will be necessarily helpful for the audience or not. But can we kind of self diagnose my boredom if we can. So like, and this is, this is something that kind of fascinates me and was the impetus about learning more about this is like, I love this podcast. I love the people that we talk to, I find it fascinating. But when I go to Edit, and kind of put everything together, there are times that I get so bored. And this is a slog, and I'm like, oh my god, I'm 10 minutes into this 50 minute interview. Oh, this is awful. I guess. I know, this is hard. But like, why would that happen? Even though I'm interested in it? I'm passionate about it. And still, my brain is like, Oh,
James Danckert 28:48
I think that that first the first thing I say about that is totally and utterly normalize it. Right. I've been involved with a few film documentaries, and quite surprised that in both instances, I was probably interviewed for a total of about eight hours, and it wound up it wouldn't have been more than about two minutes in the movie, right? So these are people who have done the eight hours of interviewing me, then they have to go back and do what you just said and edit that eight hours. And they edited it down to minutes, and then try and fit it in with the film where it sort of makes sense for them. That's a slog, right. And also, if I talk about my own work with science, you devise an experiment, you think about the task that you're going to do. It's exciting, you're working with your students, they go and they collect the data, they show you the data. That's the peak excitement point when they're showing you the data. Because now you you learn something new. And now you have to spend the next six months writing it up and convincing a journal to publish it and it might take more than six months. That's the trudge that that's a slow sort of drudgery. You've gone past the excitement phase, and you're into the phase. Well, now I have to do the slog, right. And I think that's just completely and utterly normal. And, and it's so when you say you know, I'm fully interested in it. You're interested in the here and now and it is interactive right now. Humans, we're social beasts, right? But when you get to the stuff of editing it, that's not as interactive. That's just you on your own. And it and you know what's ahead of you. And you've already had the conversation so you know what the conversation content is going to be like. But now you've got to trudge through it and cut it and paste it to make it the product you want it to be.
Nick VinZant 30:21
That makes sense. Is there like, I always think of the idea of like a runner, you know, you get the second wind, right? Can we push past our boredom? And then, you know, like, runners, for people who aren't familiar, you're running, you get tired, he's like, oh, I want to quit, I want to quit. And then you get a second win, and then you get revitalized. And you can keep going. If you're in a task, and you start to get bored with it, like, Does that happen with boredom, where you just you got to break through the wall, and then you're good to go?
James Danckert 30:48
Personally, I haven't experienced that myself. I think that if I get bored, what I need is a complete break of circumstance. But there may well be people out there listening that don't have exactly had that, you know, pushing through the wall using that runners analogy that you're talking about. It's interesting that you bring up the runners analogy. I mean, first of all, I've never seen anybody running on the streets, it looks happy. I don't understand why people do it. But But
Nick VinZant 31:10
I say that to my wife, every time I see somebody running like I don't run, because I've never seen someone who looked like they were enjoying it running.
James Danckert 31:18
Yeah. So clearly, the runners will tell you, they, they enjoyed the high of breaking through the wall, they enjoyed the high of finishing it and being through and at the end. But a colleague of mine, Vanya, Wolf, in Germany, he, he looks at this, you know, willpower is what he looks at, in terms of and boredom and self control, in terms of how to athletes push through this sort of stuff, right? Because if maybe we can learn some lessons about how athletes push through the pain barriers, but also for a runner and training, you know, repetition training in the gym or repetition training of skills for for other sorts of athletes, that repetition is monotonous and boring. How do the athletes push through it? So particularly professional athletes? So he's working on that sort of data? Now, I don't have anything great to report to you. But I suspect the answer will be that with some amount of willpower, whatever willpower is, you might be able to push through an episode of boredom. But personally, I think that the best way out of boredom is to just break the cycle. And so like I say, stay calm, do that contemplation, but maybe then just do a different task for five minutes, right? And you know, you talked about, I get distracted in the middle of a movie, and then I can't get back to the movie. But that sort of distraction, if it's intentional, might allow you to get back to your job with a little bit of renewed vigor or energy. But as I say, we haven't done the studies on this kind of stuff. This is all just my opinion.
Nick VinZant 32:38
You know, I think of always in terms of like opposites, and the only thing that I can compare it to that I've heard about is like the flow state or somebody, usually, it's like extreme athletes are just totally totally completely focused. Can we learn anything? Like does the opposite of boredom teach us anything about boredom?
James Danckert 32:58
Yeah, I think it does. But I think what I would say to you is that there are many opposites of boredom. And flow is only one. And flow is a fickle, fickle beast, I mean, any of your listeners who've experienced it, you know, the thing to contemplate about flow is, have you ever intentionally tried to make it happen? And I think that the answer to that is that it's very, very hard to do. Like you find yourself in flow almost accidentally, at times. And, you know, there are great feelings is very positive feeling. You feel like you're making progress on your goals, and you feel like you just performing beautifully, and the rest of the world has just dropped away and doesn't even need to exist. But it's hard to manufacture. Right? So but the good news is, it's not the only opposite of boredom, there are a heap of things. So being curious, is an opposite of boredom. Because you can't be bored. While you're curious. Same time, if you're curious about something, if you're inquisitive about something that you cannot be bored, at the same time, those two things are sort of antithetical to one another. Just being engaged, right? So you don't need the extreme state of flow. You know, if you've sat through a movie, and you didn't get distracted by your phone, while you're probably engaged by it, that's an opposite of boredom. But you didn't have to be in the flow state, you were just engaged by the movie. And there's any number of things that we can be engaged by. And I think another one that you can engage in meditation, as I talked about before, it's very hard to imagine being bored if you're successfully meditating. Right. And that brings me to the last one that I think it's the opposite of, of boredom that I think is a really interesting case study. And that is relaxation. Right? So when most of us go on holidays, we're not necessarily going gung ho at any particular task. We might be on the beach reading a pop novel of, you know, some detective novel or something that we don't care about. We won't remember once we finished. So we're not really doing anything particularly meaningful. We're not doing anything particularly challenging, and yet we're not bored. But we're sort of engaging in being relaxed Just write because we need that recharge time where we we've sought that recharge time. So there's two things then that I point out as opposites of boredom that I think are key and help us understand boredom a little bit better. So one is that the opposite of boredom in all its many forms is just being engaged. So if you're engaged with the world, either because you're curious or you're relaxing, or you're in flow, then you can't be bored. Right? So that is the sort of opposite of boredom. And the second thing is that it gets back to this notion, I think, of agency. So when you're the one that's in control, when you're the one choosing what you're doing now, I don't think it's I think it's very hard for me to imagine also being bored, right? So you're choosing to relax. You're choosing to meditate, you're choosing to be in Missouri, choosing to be in a flow state, but you're choosing to engage with whatever task is when you're demonstrating to yourself that you're the agent, you're the author of your actions. And in that state when you're successfully expressing your agency. I think it's very hard to be bored.
Nick VinZant 36:03
Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions?
James Danckert 36:06
Fantastic. Yes.
Nick VinZant 36:08
What do you think about the saying only bored people are boring?
James Danckert 36:12
Yeah, the boring people get bored. It's a moral judgment. And I don't think it's right. What I think it says is that people who make that claim just deal with their boredom exceptionally well. So in the book that I wrote with my colleague, John Eastwood, out of my skull, we interviewed we had the good fortune, I had the good fortune of interviewing Chris Hadfield, who was the Canadian astronaut who ran the International Space Station in the 2010s. And Hetfield claims that only boring people get bored, and that he never gets bored. And then you have a conversation with him that goes on for a little while you find out that's not true, he gets bored. So he grew up on a farm in southwestern Ontario. And he describes, you know, plowing the fields, he said, he really enjoyed plowing the fields, you'd see this open field in front of you, and you plowed field behind you. So you could see your progress. And you could understand that, you know, you're achieving a goal and you're doing a good job. But what he really hated was this other job he had to do, which was known as, as harrowing and harrowing. I had no idea what this was, he's apparently plowing a field that's already been plowed. So you're breaking up big chunks of mud and making it into smaller chunks of mud. So in front of you as mud behind you is mud, you can't see your progress, and it's boring. And so he said that whenever he had to do that, he would challenge himself by trying to see how long he could hold his breath for. And I'm like, thinking in the back of my mind, if you want to insult the guy, but you're probably not the greatest idea to be doing something like that, while you have, you know, piloting heavy machinery. But that's alright. The point being that Chris Hadfield indeed gets bored, but when he does, he almost immediately find something to occupy his mind, that puts the boredom aside. And so I think that for the people who say only boring people get bored, what they're really saying is that, you know, when I get bored, I'm really quickly dealing with it. So why aren't you? And one of the things too, that we know from a recent study, again, from from a colleague of mine in the UK, one and Van Tilburg is that there's actually characteristics of boring people that are not about how often they get bored. We called people as being boring if they don't listen to us. So if people who are sort of a bit more narcissistic, and I mean, now the kind of grandiose, overt narcissistic, that commandeer every conversation, and never really listened to what you've got to say, I think of those people as being bores. And so it's just not true that people who experience boredom, boredom, unnecessarily boring themselves, it's just not the case.
Nick VinZant 38:41
Why are some people boring, though, right? Like, some people are just like, God, that person is boring. Is it? Is it them? Or is it me?
James Danckert 38:52
potentially an interaction, right? So that there are, you know, there's someone out there for all of us, right? So, yeah, we find humans with, we're able to sort of partner up and find social groups and make connections for in all sorts of different ways. And that's one of the great things about humanity, I guess. So, you know, people who you might consider ENCODE has been thoroughly boring. Hopefully, they still have a social network of some kind. The thing that that came out in that more recent study was that, yeah, people who just don't listen, you know, if you're in a conversation, and you don't engage the other person, we all want to feel like what we do matters. But if you're the only person talking, and you're the only one that's got anything that you think is relevant than everyone else's, has to sort of take a backseat. And that is not really the best way for social interactions to evolve. And so I think that's one of the main characteristics that makes makes us code other people as being boring.
Nick VinZant 39:47
Is there like, is this a mathematical formula in some way? And maybe this is a great analogy. Maybe this is a terrible analogy, but can you look at certain things and be like, Okay, that is going to be boring too. People, if you make a movie about this, and you put this in it, and you put that in and you put this in it, people are gonna get bored. Like, can you look at things and be like, that's boring? That's not,
James Danckert 40:12
not really because it's it is a kind of what makes something boring or not boring is a little bit like happiness, what makes you happy is sort of idiosyncratic to you, right? I can't sort of tell you, you know what, you should do this, because this makes me happy, I shouldn't do that, and hope that somehow that that's going to work for you. And if the same thing is true of boredom, whatever makes me happy, or whatever makes me bored is unique to me, you know, there's millions of people out there who are philatelists, that spent a lot of their time poring over stamps and looking at stamps, and they get great joy out of it. And many of us might look at that and say, I can't imagine anything more boring. Well, too bad. You don't have to. Because you know, that's that just means it's not for you. So I don't think there's anything that we can point to and say that that's an objectively boring thing.
Nick VinZant 40:57
What is people's reaction? When you tell them you're a boredom researcher,
James Danckert 41:00
I laugh is that the first thing people do is they laugh. I mean, if you go out to a party of, you know, get together with people, and you want to end a conversation, first thing you do is, you know, people say, Well, what are you doing? The first thing you do is you say, I'm a psychologist, that usually ends the conversation, because people are like, Oh, crap, he's, he's analyzing me now. And it's like, if they probe further, you can say, No, I'm not that kind of psychologist, I don't want to know about your relationship with your mother. But then, you know, another way that you can enter conversations, you can say, I'm a professor, and I Okay. And people sort of tend to think, Well, you're a snooty intellectual, and you won't want to talk to anybody who's not also a snooty intellectual, which is not true of most of my colleagues. But I think that's what some people assume. And then the last way to enter conversation fairly rapidly, but not as badly. So So what do you research? Boredom? People tend to laugh, because they think really, that just that doesn't even sound like a thing. Why is that a thing? And then, then you spend the next couple of minutes explaining to them why it's a thing and why it's important. It's consequential. And that's probably we should then talk about sports or something after that.
Nick VinZant 42:07
I guess that's one of the questions that we kind of had. And something that I was wondering is like, I know, there's not a way to like rank this in terms of a scale of one to 10. But how big of a problem is boredom for us? Yeah, like, is it an inconvenience? Or is like, No, this is a real problem for some people.
James Danckert 42:24
Yeah, I love this phrase that someone gave me a journalist actually gave me many years ago, now that she thought that boredom was just part of the furniture of life, you know, seems to be a trivial thing. And I think that people have treated it as a trivial thing as part of the furniture of life. But it's not It's not trivial at all. So it's, it's associated with chronic boredom. So boredom. proneness is associated with higher levels of poor mental health. So increased rates of depression and anxiety. It's associated with problems of addiction. So people who are highly bored and prone tend to be more at risk of alcohol and drug addiction. It's been associated with problem gambling. So people who express Problem Gambling certainly have, particularly people who are addicted to slot machines that will report that they're on there because they're bored. And yet, you know, being stuck on the same slot machine, which seems boring to me is not boring to them. I guess there's lots of bells and whistles on those machines. So it's associated with a lot of the ills of mental health. It's also associated with things that sort of from a societal perspective, we really wouldn't encourage. So there's a strong association between boredom and aggression. There were riots in the in the streets of London in 2011. And when people were interviewed, particularly young males were interviewed afterwards, they said, why did you join in? Why did you join in the looting, I said, it was the end of summer, and I was bored. And there are a number of not just anecdotal, but sort of experimental studies that will show that when we're bored, there is this tendency for some of us at least, to engage in aggressive and harmful behaviors. So it's not inconsequential. And we also know it's not inconsequential, from the point of view of two other domains that I think are worth pointing out. One is education, we know that if you're chronically bored, that you won't do as well in your education. And so it's incumbent upon us to try and make our education as least boring as we possibly can. And I think there are other occupations where boredom could be a real hazard. So if you think about any occupation that has a high requirement for vigilance, you really need to be paying close attention to your job, but it's also monotonous. So think air traffic control, or, you know, there was a disaster in Canada a number of years back in a place called LACMA Quantique, where train got off the rails and burst into flames and caused an enormous amount of damage. Potentially, the failure to to focus your attention in instances like that is the cause of those accidents. And if the job is monotonous, and unchanging, and not particularly meaningful, than I am sort of boring to the person doing that job, then we're at risk of those kinds of accidents happening more frequently. So yeah, it's I can't rank it. You're quite right. There's no rank that puts up there. It's not as bad as you know, some things, I'm sure. But it's also it is quite consequential.
Nick VinZant 45:09
Is there any kind of pattern to boredom in the sense that like, people are most bored at Tuesday at 3pm? Or is there any kind of pattern either throughout our days in the sense that like this time of year, this time of day, this day of the week, or throughout our lives, we're like, you're probably most bored between 10 and 20. Or actually, it's between these ages, is there any patterns to it,
James Danckert 45:37
there is a patent of the lifespan. That's this worth mentioning all of the other sort of domains that you talked about there, I'm not aware of any data that sort of really, you know, says it's mostly, you know, people talk about hump day during the week, you know, I don't think that people get more bored on Wednesdays than they do on any other day during the week. But, you know, maybe they do, I just don't know about data. But over a lifespan, boredom sort of tends to start rising in those early teenage years, we need a lot more data on this, but the data we do have says that it tends to rise, then it starts to sort of peak at age 17, or 18, and then starts to dip. And that's a really important point in our development, because around those late teenage years and the early 20s, that's the final stage of brain maturation. So you start to do what's called myelination, which is essentially this fatty coating that goes around your neurons, and AIDS transmission of information. And so that myelination of your frontal cortex that's happening between 17 and 22, you know, you're not really fully developed until those early 20s years. So around that time, when you're developing the frontal part of your brain that's really critical for self regulation, self control, gold pursued decision, decision making, and so on. Around that time, your boredom starts to drop, and it drops off into the, you know, 20s 30s, and 40s, and 50s. And, in part, some of that is going to be about responsibilities, you know, Who among us has the time to be bored when you're pursuing your career when you're raising your children when you're doing all these other sorts of things. And then it does show there are some instances now where we see a rise into the 60s and beyond. And one of the notions there about that rise at the later stage of our lifespan is that it's sort of strongly associated with loneliness. And so we talk about a social connectedness in that age range. And the people that have a good social network and good social connectedness tend not to be bored in their 60s 70s and beyond. But for those of us who find ourselves not as connected, then boredom can become a real problem.
Nick VinZant 47:34
What social media doing to us,
James Danckert 47:38
technology is ruining my brain. I love this question in some senses, because there's this notion that Socrates said that writing things down was going to ruin our brains, he was worried that if we wrote down all of our knowledge, that that would mean that our faculty for memory would just disappear. And the irony of that is, of course, that we wouldn't have even known that had played or not written down the things that Socrates said. So, you know, we have these sort of notions that every new technology, whether it's the pen and paper, or whether or not it's the internet, or whether or not social media, every new media is going to ruin our brain. So from the outset, I will say, No, it's not right, it's going to do amazing things for us. Right now you and I are on whatever this program is a zoom, you know, it's not zoom. But whatever that is, we're on this internet talking. You're, you're on one side of the continent, I'm on the other, and we can talk with each other about things we're interested in. That's flat out amazing, right? That's fantastic. My family's back in Australia. And in times gone past, I'd have to pen a letter, put it on a boat and wait six months before they are able to read it. Things are better with this new technology. And I think we we need to start from that place that the new technologies have done wonderful things for us. But it is also true to say that for some people, for a handful of people in evidence at the moment is about 4%, our attachment to our phones into social media can become problematic. So we actually talk about the phrase used is problematic smartphone use, and it has characteristics that are very much like addiction. So you continually ramp up your use of the phone or you continually ramp up how often you turn to social media. You feel anxious when you're not with your phone, or you're not on social media, those two characteristics very much the characteristics that you see in addictions to substances. And that work from John Alhaj. And colleagues and from people there's a couple of labs in China that are doing this work shows that boredom is a real driver of this that when we're bored, we turn to our phone because it's an easy occupation thing, right? It occupies your mind very quickly and very easily. It has the bells and whistles like a slot machine. And like advertising, social media has figured out the ways to capture our attention. And so we turn to it and it sort of like dissipates the boredom immediately. But it doesn't do a very good job long term, because we go down the rabbit hole of Twitter and we find that we've spent half an hour or god forbid longer, and then you get off and you think, Well, what did I just do for the last hour? Right? It's not particularly meaningful. And it's not particularly fostering the goals that we want to pursue, right. So I want to say fairly clearly, there's nothing wrong with tech, there's nothing wrong with not nothing wrong. It's we can use social media in positive ways. And we need to be vigilant individually and as a society as to the ways in which we might be misusing or abusing social media and technology more likely, more broadly. But in general, it allows us to do wonderful things.
Nick VinZant 50:35
Does boredom have anything to do with attention span?
James Danckert 50:40
Well, there's a claim that people want to make that our attention span over the past couple of decades has been gradually decreasing. And I don't know what sort of metrics people use to measure that, you know, I guess in the 50s, they used to do advertisements for products that went 50 minutes long, you know, watching an advertisement for a vacuum cleaner on TV and 1950s. That was like a program length. And now, you know, the world's shortest ad is less than a second or something like that. And that that sort of suggests that, yeah, we don't have the attention span that we used to. Again, I think that that's probably an overblown claim that, indeed, you know, we might, you know, in even in things like, the films that we watch, you know, I went back and watched one of my favorite films a while back The Deer Hunter. And, you know, that's a fairly powerful and dramatic movie, but the first half of it is about a Polish wedding. I mean, it's quite long, and it's quite slow. It's quite drawn out. It's quite beautiful, and quite, quite dramatic, but it wasn't. It's not, it's not John Wick, you know, it's not, it's not as fast and as, as, you know, changing from moment to moment as any of those kinds of movies, right. So there's, there's possibly a sense in which our tastes, our predilections for things show, that we prefer to have things move quickly. But I don't know that that really translates into our attention span is poor. When it comes to boredom, boredom is absolutely associated with poor focusing of attention and poor sustained attention. We know people who suffer from ADHD also have high levels of boredom. And so there's there's absolutely a very strong association between struggles with attention, and boredom. But I don't think that that means that as a society, writ large that we have a worse attention span than we used to.
Nick VinZant 52:29
That's pretty much all the questions I got man, is there anything you think that we missed or anything that like, oh, we should be talking about this or anything like that.
James Danckert 52:36
One thing I would say is that we know too, that boredom, proneness is associated with self esteem as well. So people who are high in boredom proneness, don't have very hot, they have lower self esteem. And one of the things about that we're in the process of investigating that further. There's a related concept of self efficacy, it's not quite the same as self esteem, self esteem is about I feel good about who I am. self efficacy is I believe, I can do this, right. I know, I've got the skills I'm capable. And I think that people who are boredom prone will have low self efficacy as well, that they won't feel like they're necessarily capable, to reach the goals that they might set for themselves. And I think if that happens early in life, there's going to be long term consequences. So a lack of a sense of self efficacy as a young person, you know, will carry through into your, into your life in negative ways. And so, you know, we always come up with the problem that these are correlations is individual difference traits, it's very hard to talk about cause. So you know, will, will it be the failure of self efficacy or elevated boredom that causes the problems later on? It's gonna be very, very hard to determine that without longitudinal studies. But But yeah, I do think early on, if you cope better with boredom, when you're a very young person, and into your teenage years, that will probably be associated with much more positive outcomes later.
Nick VinZant 53:59
So I mean, if people want to learn more about this, like, how can they what should they do? I know you've got a book out.
James Danckert 54:06
Yeah. So John Eastwood and I wrote a book that came out in 2020, in the middle of the start of the pandemic, I guess, and and that was out of my skull to psychology of boredom. So you can grab that and read that. We also do a blog on Psychology Today, that blog is called the engaged mind. And so we have we write about various aspects related to boredom.