What is boredom?

[Rob Fox]

Hi,

For some research we are doing for a client, I'd love to read your responses to this question....

What is boredom?

Thanks.

Rob
www.engagingideas.co.uk

[David Zinger]

I like the concept of boredeom from FLOW - challenges are much less than the skills. Anxiety is when the challenges exceed the skills. To stay in flow we must keep recalibrating the balance of challenge and skills in our engagement efforts.

[Paul Herr]

Dear David,

Very cool question (what is boredom), and here is my shot at a biology-based answer. As you know from my prior posts, I view emotions as the fundamental forces that move us. Once nature started down the slippery slope of using feelings of pleasure and pain to drive behaviours such as eating, drinking, breathing, reproducing and resting, there was no turning back because behaviors lacking emotional incentives would simply not occur. In other words, why would someone chose a non-rewarding behavior over a rewarding one? The logical implication is that everything, and I mean everything, is motivated by subtle, almost subliminal, emotional incentives.

One of nature's axes of social regulation involves achievement, which I refer to as the skill-deployment appetite in my book, Primal Management. Whenever a human being achieves a goal, like hitting a long drive down the center of the fairway, we get a dose of dopamine that stimulates dopamine 1 & 2 receptors in the basal striatum--the very same receptors stimulated by addictive drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. The resulting achievement-related euphoria is short lived. It decays back to baseline rather rapidly, because nature's message is--do it again, deploy another skill to achieve another goal. This pleasure, I believe, motivates a vast swath of productive human behavior. It motivates human beings to solve math problem, complete home improvement projects, cheer for their favorite sports team, and to achieve workplace goals.

Human beings love this type of reward, especially males. Men, in fact, have dopamine levels that are three times higher than females, which may explain why we are so darned competitive (men also are much more likely to abuse cocaine and methamphetamine than women).

Now, back to your question, "What is boredom." It makes complete survival sense for nature to reward achievement and punish sloth. It is also self evident that human beings experience euphoria after a win, but what happens if we try to rest on our laurels for too long. I suggest that boredom, that irritable uncomfortable feeling we experience if we vegetate in front of the boob tube too long, is nature's way of coaxing us to deploy the next skill and experience the next achievement high. Nature may use the euphoria-of-a-win to reward productive behavior and boredom to penalize inactivity and unproductive behavior. Your thoughts?

[Rob Fox]

Paul and David,

David: Thanks for the reply. So is flow the opposite of boredom for you? Isn't the opposite of feeling flow being stuck?

Paul: Thank you too for your reply and for the depth of thinking. If I read you right, for you boredom nature's way of saying that an individual isn't trying hard enough to accomplish something?

[Ian Buckingham]

Wasn't it one of the protagonists in Catch 22 who cultivated boredom as a strategy for prolonging life? Quite handy in the current economy. LOL!

[Rob Fox]

Nice one; as in never mind the quality feel the length - very "Carry on...."

Best,

R.

[Paul Herr]

Hi Rob,

Sorry that I got the source of the post mixed up. For some reason I thought David Zinger posted the orignal message in this thread.

Anyway, you are right. I think nature/evolution designed emotional incentives into the motivational mechanism to make sure we stay active and productive.

Best,

Paul

[Judy McLeish]

Rob - there are some very clever responses to your question. For me, boredom stems from doing the mundane in excess. This state causes one to lose sight of what is possible, as they are overly focused on the steps associated with specific tasks. This sense of boredom transcends into every aspect of life causing people to question their purpose and their ability to change their current positioning. The result is a sense of despair and a total disengagement in what they are doing.

Judy

[Rob Fox]

I received this reply from a linkedin.com response.

I thought it worth sharing...

Hi Rob,

Boredom is an emotional state experienced during periods of lack of activities or when individuals are uninterested in the activities surrounding them.

It is “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.”

There are times when we are prevented from engaging in something, when we are forced to engage in some unwanted activity, or when we are simply unable, for no apparent reason, to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle.

Therefore I would define it as that state in which one can not do anything .

Hope this helps.

Raj...

[Ian Buckingham]

I believe we all need to slip the mind into second gear every now and then. But sustained boredom is different, as people are pointing out here.
People are undeniably more effective when they can be themselves at work. Occupational Nirvana is when the values of the individual and the organisation merge. We're seldom bored when we're truly engaged in what we're doing. True engagement only comes from willing surrender. There's a big difference between this state and the hypnotic state of unconscious competence that comes from drills and repetition. In my experience, people who are least fulfilled at work tend to have fairly diverse and surprising social lives, full of achievement (however it's rated). If only employers could find increasingly more effective ways to tap into that extra curricular potential!

[Rob Fox]

Hi Ian and Judy,

Interesting responses - as always. Ian for clarification, I think you mean most - and yes, I agree. I guess the intervention is about making the wall between the constructs of "work" and "non-work" rather more porous?

I guess though that these ideas, evocative as they are, are spurious for individuals who press the universal production line button to survive?

[Mike King]

Great question Rob and I love the discussion on this. I think boredom is something not just a state itself from some short time frame but more of a sign about a person's mind health.

Why is a person bored in the first place? Why do some people get bored when doing mundane tasks repetitively and others don't? What does it mean if we are bored.

Personally, I see boredom as a signal that a person isn't challenging themselves or their mind! They are leaving things undone, unexplored and essentially, they have left their imagination in an unstimulated state for too long. I wrote an article a few weeks ago entitled, Boredom is a Sign of An Unchallenged Mind. That is how I interpret boredom.

[Rob Fox]

Hi Mike,

I have just read the article quickly and will go back tomorrow for a second look - I am just off to the pub for a pint with some friends. I really like the thought that boredom is a signal for/of change - am I paraphrasing you right?

Thanks,

Rob
www.engagingideas.co.uk