Editor’s note: The Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta podcast explores the medical science behind some of life’s mysteries, big and small. You can listen to episodes here.
(CNN) — Thanks to smartphones, all the entertainment and distractions they provide can be in your back pocket or purse, accessible 24/7. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to remember the uncomfortable, mind-numbing, aggravating feeling of boredom.
But if one of your 2025 resolutions is to disconnect more frequently from the cornucopia of information at your fingertips, experiencing boredom may be an unexpected consequence.
Waiting in line at the bank or driving without podcasts or music? Endless! Waiting at the doctor without texting or scrolling through social media? Atrocious! Even sitting on the toilet without an online crossword or news story to pass the minutes can leave you dying a little inside.
Boredom can be as painful as pain and, in some cases, even less preferable: In a famous 2014 research experiment, a high percentage of participants chose the pain of a self-administered electric shock over staying sitting in a room for 15 minutes with only their thoughts.
It turns out that boredom can serve the same purpose as pain.
“Pain is not there to hurt you. The pain is there as a signal to galvanize you into action, to address what caused the injury in the first place. Boredom is the same,” James Danckert, cognitive neuroscientist. ” Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, recently said on his Chasing Life podcast.
“It’s not here to bore you,” said Danckert, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “It’s there to help you move forward, to do something, to get out of this state of boredom.”
You can listen to the full episode of the podcast here.
Danckert, co-author of the book “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom,” turns to a literary giant to define boredom.
“I like, when I give a definition of boredom, to use this quote from Leo Tolstoy, from (his novel) ‘Anna Karenina,’ where he speaks of boredom, or boredom, as ‘the desire for desires,’” he says. said. “Boredom is a state of motivation. You want to do something that matters to you, but you just don’t want what’s currently available to you.
Danckert said he views boredom as that frustrated desire to fully engage with the world around us that is not being satisfied at the moment.
So what can you do to relieve boredom?
“We don’t really have good data on boredom interventions,” Danckert noted. Instead, he offered five, admittedly unscientific, suggestions and thoughts, based on decades of experience and observation, for handling it.
If you are the parent of a child who claims to be bored, or the friend of someone who claims to be bored, don’t offer them a range of options for what they could do instead.
“A pretty consistent and strong finding is that people prone to boredom feel like they don’t have a lot of freedom to act,” Danckert said. “They feel like they don’t really have control over their lives. And if you just give them a list of suggestions, that doesn’t solve the agency’s problem, does it? In a sense, you’re taking away their agency by trying to tell them what to do.
He said offering alternatives might work for some people who experience boredom occasionally, but “it’s definitely not going to work for people who feel it chronically.”
So shut up and let the bored people in your life figure it out for themselves.
Make a list of activities, tasks, and projects that you can turn to when you’re bored.
“For me, the main thing is turning to my guitar,” Danckert said. “But then you should have a second, third or fourth, (so) that when that main thing that usually works doesn’t work, you can turn to those other things on your list.”
It could be as simple as… no! Danckert won’t suggest what to put on your list. (Agency, remember?)
Even as technology puts the world at our fingertips, society is experiencing higher levels of boredom, especially among teenage girls, than a decade or two ago, Danckert said.
“Our phones and social media are not solutions to our boredom. In fact, they can make the situation worse,” he said. “Again, this ties back to agency, because if you’re just mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds, that’s not very agency. …This will make your boredom worse in the long run.
Danckert said he doesn’t want to imply that technology is all bad: engaging in an online fishing community, for example, or finding a YouTube video to learn guitar or knitting can have a positive effect. “It’s that stupid part that probably makes it a negative for your boredom,” he said.
Danckert said a popular idea — one that drives him and other researchers crazy — is that boredom will make you creative. It won’t.
“The evidence for this claim is very weak, and we actually published something quite recently showing that if I’m boring you, you’re actually being bored. less creative,” he said.
“I think if you have (existing) creative outlets” – for example, if you play a musical instrument or make art in some way – “and you have cultivated that outlet, it’s great to turn to when you’re bored,” he says.
“What we can’t hope, and I think this is the popular myth, is that accepting boredom and introducing it into your life will somehow make you more creative. It won’t.
Danckert said people probably instead express the opinion that downtime is good for creativity.
“Disconnecting from the kind of hustle and bustle of life gives you time to think and maybe means you’re thinking creative thoughts and making connections that you wouldn’t otherwise make, and that feels creative. And I have no problem with that,” he said. But boredom isn’t the ingredient that makes someone magically creative, he said.
Boredom has a message for you, so pay attention.
“I don’t think we should accept boredom, but I also don’t think we should try to outgrow it,” Danckert said. “It’s neither good nor bad, so we should just learn to listen to him and understand what he’s telling us at that moment.” We must adapt it and respond to it in a positive way.
He said one answer could be a creative outlet. “But it could be many other things. It could be a running race. And it could potentially take place in front of a Netflix show, if you choose that intentionally.
But if you choose only a passive response, he said, you probably won’t feel like you have much freedom of action.
As for the chestnut, “only boring people are bored,” Danckert said the saying carries a bit of judgment.
“There’s a sanctimonious feeling to it: ‘You’re not trying hard enough, and you should just try harder to engage with the world,'” he said. “But I think the truth is we’re all bored. Some of us are very, very good and very quick to adapt to it and…effective responders are judgmental about the rest of us who don’t necessarily handle it as well.
He said: “We are not boring people. We are simply sensitive to a very common and very normal human experience.
We hope these five tips will help you respond better to boredom. Listen to the full podcast episode here. And join us next week on Chasing Life when we ask: How often should you swim?