What Is Boredom For?

In a series of studies published in 2014, Timothy Wilson and colleagues at the University of Virginia and Harvard asked people to do something that sounds easy. Sit alone in a plain room for somewhere between 6 and 15 minutes, with no phone, no book and nothing to do, and entertain yourself with your own thoughts.

Most people did not enjoy it. Across the first six laboratory studies, 57.5% rated concentrating as at least moderately hard, 89% reported at least a moderate amount of mind-wandering, and almost half rated their enjoyment at or below the midpoint of the scale. When participants did the same exercise at home, 32% admitted they had cheated by checking their phone, listening to music or getting up.

Then came the experiment that made headlines. Participants first felt a brief electric shock and many said they would pay money not to feel it again. Then they were left alone to think for 15 minutes, with the option of pressing a button to shock themselves. Among those who had said they would pay to avoid it, 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women gave themselves at least one shock. One man pressed it 190 times.

The authors' summary was blunt: most people seem to prefer doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is unpleasant.

What boredom actually is

Boredom sounds like the simplest emotion there is, but psychologists only recently agreed on a working definition. In 2012, John Eastwood and colleagues reviewed decades of theories and proposed that boredom is 'the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity'.

They broke this down in terms of attention. You are bored when you cannot get your attention to settle on something, inside your head or outside it, that would let you do something satisfying. You notice that you cannot, and you tend to blame your surroundings: this meeting, this queue, this town.

That last part is important. Boredom is not the same as having nothing to do. You can be bored in a busy job, and perfectly content doing nothing on a beach. What matters is whether your mind can engage.

Why your own mind can be boring

In 2018, Erin Westgate and Timothy Wilson proposed a model with two ingredients. The first is attention: boredom arises when the demands of an activity do not match your mental resources. That mismatch can go either way. A task can be too easy, but it can also be too hard or too overwhelming, and both leave you unable to engage. The second ingredient is meaning: an activity that does not connect to anything you value feels boring even if it holds your attention.

This helps explain the thinking experiment. Entertaining yourself with your thoughts is harder than it sounds. Your mind has to supply both the attention and the meaning, with no help from the outside world.

Was this just an American quirk? In 2019, Nicholas Buttrick and colleagues repeated the comparison with 2,557 participants at 12 sites in 11 countries. In every country, people randomly assigned to do an ordinary solitary activity, such as reading, enjoyed themselves more than people asked to think for pleasure. Countries differed in how much people enjoyed thinking, and those differences were explained by individual traits: need for cognition, openness to experience, meditation experience and positive mood went with more enjoyment, and heavier phone use went with less.

What boredom is for

If boredom is so unpleasant, why do we have it? A growing view is that it works like a signal. Shane Bench and Heather Lench argued in 2013 that boredom pushes us to pursue new goals when the current one has stopped being worthwhile. It lowers attention to the present task, feels uncomfortable, and raises arousal, which makes it easier to switch to something else.

In their 2020 book Out of My Skull, James Danckert and John Eastwood develop this idea: boredom indicates that psychological needs are going unmet, and so it can motivate people to change what is not working in their lives.

The catch is that the signal says change something, but not what to change. That is where things can go wrong. In a 2016 study, Chantal Nederkoorn and colleagues had 69 people watch a monotonous, sad or neutral film clip while they could give themselves electric shocks. People watching the monotonous clip gave themselves more shocks, and stronger ones, than those in the other groups. Sadness made no difference. The researchers concluded that the shocks served to break the monotony, not to deal with bad feelings in general. Any stimulation, it seems, can feel better than none.

What this does and does not mean

These are striking results, but they need context. The shock studies used small groups, and most participants were university students. Being briefly bored in a laboratory is not the same as long-term boredom in real life. The cross-cultural findings on phone use and enjoyment are correlations, so they do not show that phones make thinking less enjoyable.

What the research does suggest is that boredom is not a character flaw or a sign of an empty mind. It is information. If you feel bored almost all the time, or if boredom comes with a persistent low mood or a loss of interest in things you used to enjoy, it is worth talking to a doctor or mental health professional.

What this means for you

A few practical ideas follow from the evidence.

• Read the signal before you silence it. Reaching for your phone ends the discomfort but ignores the message. Ask what is missing: challenge, meaning, or rest.
• Check for mismatch. If a task bores you, it may be too easy or too hard. Adjusting the difficulty can work better than forcing yourself through it.
• Add meaning. Connecting a dull task to something you care about is one of the two levers in the attention and meaning model.
• Practise thinking for pleasure. In the cross-cultural data, people with meditation experience enjoyed their own thoughts more. Planning something you are looking forward to can give your mind something to hold.

To see how boredom works for you, our boredom test measures how prone you are to it, the sensation-seeking test looks at how much stimulation you crave, and the curiosity type test explores what kinds of interest keep your mind engaged.