I often tell people I have a low boredom threshold. I can get bored even when I’m trying to avoid it. I will start reading a book, find myself 30 pages in, and then have to start all over again because I recall nothing I have read until that point. If I’m feeling bored and restless I might go on a long bike ride only to find myself riding past miles of boring fields. (At least I addressed the ‘restless’ part of the problem.) Like water through a pile of rocks boredom seems to find a way. There ARE times when I can address it. Ironically the times when I’m best able to navigate it are when undertaking those activities when it seems most inevitable.
I have read articles suggesting boredom is a recent phenomenon; maybe that’s why the word bore can only be traced back to the mid 18th century, and the word boredom to the mid 19th. Apparently we can blame modern technology for making things so easy for us. Until recently there was just too much for us to do to get bored but the industrial revolution has given us more free time. I don’t hold with this notion. If the ancient Sumerians wrote not in Cuneiform but instead used C++ or Python then humanity might have been playing Candy Crush during moments of boredom thousands of years sooner.
The things that we did before technology became our savior can be just as boring – chopping wood can get boring, standing guard can get boring. Boredom is the result of repetitive, unengaging, familiar tasks. It’s a familiar failing for us to think modern humans are a bit more special than our forebears. It’s also an arrogant one. I’m sure the ancient Greeks and Romans got bored. The Latin word, taedium, gives us tedium. Why create a word you would never use? That would be otiose.
Many of us have seen or felt the downside of boredom. I recall being in classes at school when bored classmates would act out through boredom. This prompted the teacher to punish the entire class with detention, meaning ALL of us became bored. Never fear though, scientists have boredom in their sights.
In a study conducted with 47 Irish students two groups were asked to perform a repetitive task, but one group had to spend twice as long doing it. All students were then asked to read an account of an Englishman assaulting an Irishman and to act as judge on the case. The students who had to endure the boring task for longer gave substantially harsher sentences to the Englishman.
The study was reversed, this time where the Irishman performed the assault, and the Englishman was the victim. The more bored students gave more a more lenient sentence to the attacker. The authors posited that the bored students derived greater meaning from identifying with their in-group, and had a stronger reaction against their out-group.
The NPR podcast, Hidden Brain, delivered an episode on boredom in which the author Daniel Pink relayed the story of the Irish students. He wondered what it might mean for trial by jury – being a juror seems a boring way to pass one’s time (depending on the case, and how each of us is wired). The podcast was published in 2016 but as I listen to it now, in 2021, I’m wondering what role the boredom caused by our response to the coronavirus might have played in exacerbating the divisions in American society, culminating in the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6. Until I heard this podcast I had only stumbled across articles on the opportunities our coronavirus-induced boredom was presenting us.
You have to let yourself get so bored that your mind has nothing better to do than tell itself a story – Neil Gaiman
Authors like Agatha Christie, Neil Gaiman, and JK Rowling credit boredom with aiding their creativity. However, it’s not boredom in and of itself that leads to creativity but the actions we take in response to it. If boredom leads to us sitting down with a pen and paper – or in the case of JK Rowling of mentally playing out a story when the “image of a scrawny, bespectacled young boy popped into her head” on a four hour train ride – then boredom feeds creativity. If boredom leads us into to a spiral of torpor and decay, then boredom can be deleterious. So what is it? Is boredom good for us or bad for us? Like a group editing a PowerPoint presentation, everyone is right.
Washington State university looked at the effect of boredom on our brains. A survey was used to assess the experimental subjects’ reaction to boredom. When the participants’ brains were scanned the researchers found nothing to choose between those who usually respond better to boredom from those who did not. The researchers did, however, see a difference in brain activity once the boring activity was underway. Those who were more prone to boredom on a daily basis saw more activity in parts of the brain associated with anxiety; those who were less prone to boredom saw more activity in areas associated with engagement and stimulation. In other words, different people respond differently to the same boring activity.
I enjoy freediving and once dove with a lady who can swim around underwater on a single breath of air for minutes at a time, but if you ask her to simply hold her breath without expending energy (static apnea), which should be easier, she struggled. The only difference is what is going on in her head. Underwater her brain is engaged; doing nothing at the surface is tedious (as the Romans might have said).
When I first tried this static apnea I had the same issues with boredom, and the same struggles with breath hold duration. When I experience boredom like this I feel trapped, my mind craves some form of stimulation, preferably something different, but most of all I crave something I like doing. I’ve found a way to engage my brain for longer static breath holds. The key is activating my curiosity, and crafting variation.
When I close my eyes, and relax as I begin my breath hold, I go through an imaginary dive. Occasionally I will throw in a random imaginary fish or two. I have repeated these imaginary dives hundreds of times, but none of them bore me because in one I will have my friend Dennis join me, and in another I’ll be with Heather. Sometimes I’m diving in the Red Sea, and other times I’m in the Mediterranean. Occasionally I will feel the imaginary chill as my body passes through a thermocline. I have performed the same imaginary dive hundreds of times, and I have never done it the same way twice.
I don’t have boredom nailed. It’s a little like a golf swing – as soon as you think you’ve mastered it you start slicing the ball. I try to remain humble; curiosity comes more easily when we don’t think we already have the answers. The differences that my curiosity uncovers are the keys to my prison of boredom. It helps when I reflect that everything in life is different all the time. Every moment we experience is always gone forever, and every new moment is always unique. Nothing is ever the same as it was. I still describe myself as someone with a low boredom threshold. I still get bored doing some things, but where I can, I cultivate my curiosity and use it to enjoy the differences.
