You’re standing in a checkout queue at the grocery store and decide to take out your phone, it doesn’t matter if you’re scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, playing a game, etc. Before you know it, it’s your turn to check out. Or imagine this: you go to a restaurant with your friends or family and as everyone waits for the server the phones come out. Again, before you know it, the server arrives and takes everyone’s food order. When the server leaves everyone starts back up on their phones.

The examples I give above are scenes that play out in our everyday lives. You see it not just at the grocery store or the restaurant but during commutes on the bus or metro. You see it as people are walking (which is a talent I don’t possess). If you have a cellphone, I’m certain you’ve done the same. I know I have. And honestly, what is the harm? It’s boring to wait and do nothing, yes?

In early studies of boredom, psychologists found that there was a complex relationship between boredom and increased levels of arousal. Boredom is normally correlated with feelings of sleepiness and restlessness. As a way to deviate from the discomfort prompted by boredom, one is motivated to seek engagement, thus maintaining homeostatic arousal levels, the body’s internal balancing system (1).

So, one can think of it this way: low arousal leads to boredom, and boredom can lead to increased levels of arousal as the search for stimulation occurs in an attempt to restore homeostatic arousal levels. In essence, this is what happens when we wait around in a queue, for a person, or to get to a destination. Of course, what I’m describing here is more simplified.

Boredom is not dangerous, but its effects are felt throughout our lives and impact our well-being (e.g. depression and unhealthy eating habits), learning, and work performance (2–4). This brings me to two major themes I’m interested in when I think of boredom: boredom’s effects on work and our well-being.

Work

In general, I consider myself an overachiever, a person who likes a challenge and enjoys making myself useful to my superiors. With that said, I’ve found myself many times in work situations where I feel utterly bored. My boredom leads to a lack of motivation and feelings of meaninglessness. I’ve traced this back to several factors: 1. being over- or under-challenged or stimulated, and/or 2. praise from my superior.

Reflecting back on my Ph.D., I found that I was more bored with my work when I was tasked with research from my then principal investigator. It might have been a combination of finding the work overly challenging, but I’m certain it also had to do with the fact that he was not one to give praise for a job well done—or a job done at all. Why sit there and work through difficult calculations? It was like sitting there working through a difficult chess puzzle with no confetti at the end once you’ve figured out the challenge. Why do another one ?

I felt the complete opposite when I was asked by a postdoc in the lab if I could help work on a challenging part of their project. They were quick to give praise for a job done even if there needed to be some corrections.

Often, actually, I found the work given to me by the postdoc to be monotonous but difficult. But when I felt like giving up, I was motivated by the fact that I wanted to help them. This sort of behavior, wanting to do less when there is less praise and more when there is higher praise, is motivated by an emotional state rather than the functional state mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter, another factor of boredom. And I often think about how boredom plays a role in my current position as a postdoc.

Two main coping mechanisms recognized in work boredom are active and passive (5). Active coping can involve starting an argument with a colleague, for example. Passive coping is distancing oneself from the job, e.g. taking longer breaks or leaving work early. When I’m bored at work, I fall into the passive category. I tend to leave work early to do something more stimulating (my search to restore homeostatic arousal), like running errands.

But I also find that feeling boredom from time to time at work is important, as it gives space for solutions and strategies that were there the whole time but overshadowed by other issues at work.

Not all boredom emerges from a lack of stimulation. I find myself wondering whether the opposite problem, constant stimulation, can produce a similar sense of disengagement.

Personally, I think the effects of overstimulation leading to boredom are understudied but becoming increasingly important as technology becomes an integral part of our lives. Overstimulation by technology can drain the meaning out of work and, as a consequence, lead to boredom (6). But overstimulation by technology is more far-reaching than just the workplace.

Well-being

In a time when entertainment is readily available, one would assume that people are less bored, but unfortunately that does not appear to be true. Digital media has been found to increase boredom by reducing a sense of meaning (sound familiar ^^?), dividing attention, and serving as an ineffective boredom coping strategy (7).

Being in a state of boredom has been tied to attention: a feedback loop of attentional shifts between actual engagement versus how engaged one wants to be. As I mentioned before, boredom is important from time to time as it allows intentional space which can be filled with self-reflection, promote social intention, and encourage the search for meaningful engagement, such as hobbies. There can be, and often is, recognition and thus a drive to make changes, train patience, and discern what is interesting.

You can imagine that dysfunction in this regulatory feedback loop in which a person is unable to attain fulfilling engagement prolongs the overall experience of boredom.

I was alarmed when I read that research on global trends indicated that daily screen time across devices such as computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, televisions, and game consoles increased from 9 hours in 2012 to 11 hours in 2019, with predictions that time spent on mobile phones would continue increasing by 2 hours every year (7). This essentially reshapes how we access stimulation (or search for arousal), making it easily and effortlessly accessible from anywhere and at any time.

This goes back to my reflection post, Living in Reality, where I observed many of my fellow passengers on their phones. I imagine they were using their cellphones to access some sort of media in hopes that it would decrease their boredom but unknowingly intensifying it as they searched for something engaging and failed to find it on their phones.

Being on our digital devices disrupts our attention during current activities as we turn away to look at our phones because we are constantly being bombarded with signals and notifications. It also increases media multitasking, where we engage in multiple media activities at once, negatively impacting both our attention and our enjoyment.

Meaning—coming from a sense of coherence that things make sense—is reduced due to the way we receive information on digital media, which is presented in an incoherent, fragmented variety. One paper I read gave the example of an Instagram post about pizza followed by a tweet about space exploration. They challenged how these disconnected posts relate to one’s sense of meaning (7).

And I think this fragmentation does more than disrupt attention; it changes how we experience boredom. Instead of sitting with boredom long enough for reflection or meaningful engagement to emerge, we are constantly offered quick escapes from it.

My experience on the bus ultimately prompted self-reflection and a worry that in our need to find a way out of boredom we turn to escaping it and thwart the potential for boredom to drive us toward meaningful thoughts, positive engagements, full attention, and meaning.

With the analog movement, I’m hopeful that we can allow moments of boredom to redirect us in a meaningful way so that we regain our attention and sense of meaning.

Leaving this thought here for now.

From Paris,

Leti

Citations:

1. Stempfer, L., Stoll, S.E.M., Fries, J., et al. “A systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis of the relationship between boredom and arousal.” Communications Psychology 3, 182 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00358-8

2. Mäkiniemi, J. P., Ahola, S., Nuutinen, S., Laitinen, J., & Oksanen, T. “Factors associated with job burnout, job satisfaction, and work engagement among entrepreneurs: A systematic qualitative review.” Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship 33, 219–247 (2021).

3. Havermans, R. C., Vancleef, L., Kalamatianos, A., & Nederkoorn, C. “Eating and inflicting pain out of boredom.” Appetite 85, 52–57 (2015).

4. Bargdill, R. W. “Habitual boredom and depression: Some qualitative differences.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 59, 294–312 (2019).

5. Spanouli, A., Hofmans, J., & Dalal, R. S. “Coping with daily boredom: Exploring the relationships of job boredom, counterproductive work behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, and cognitive reappraisal.” Motivation and Emotion 47, 810–827 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-023-10017-2

6. Schott, C., & Fischer, C. “How to turn workplace boredom into something positive: A theoretical framework of the ‘bright sides’ of boredom.” Human Resource Management Review 33, no. 2 (2023).

7. Tam, K. Y. Y., & Inzlicht, M. “People are increasingly bored in our digital age.” Communications Psychology 2, 106 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00155-9