Feeling Bored? That May Actually Motivate You
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See store or sleepnumber.com for details. Welcome to Chasing Life.

If you listened to last week's episode of the show, you probably know that we are kicking off the new year by doing something a little bit different. Instead of talking about New Year's resolutions and doing more, which a lot of people talk about at the beginning of the year, we're going to talk about the potential health benefits of doing less. Eating less, drinking less, showering less, maybe even the real value of being a little less hard on ourselves.

And today, we're going to talk about a possible side effect of doing less. And that is boredom. Now, take a quick second and think about the last time you were bored. Really, truly bored. Maybe it was in school. Maybe you were watching a boring movie or listening to a dull podcast. Hopefully not this one. How would you describe that feeling of boredom? Does the word pain come to mind?

Listen to this. In 2014, a team of researchers at the University of Virginia asked people to come into a lab and simply sit alone for 15 minutes. They could either sit quietly and let their minds wander, or they could press a button that would give themselves an electric shock. Now get this. Almost half those participants chose to shock themselves. Why would that be?

One takeaway might be that for some people, boredom is so tortuous that it's worse than physical pain. And that raises the question, why? My guest today is Dr. James Dankert. He's a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He's also co-author of the book, Out of My Skull, The Psychology of Boredom. And what he says is that we are probably thinking about boredom the wrong way.

Pain is there as a signal to sort of galvanize you into action to address whatever it is that caused the hurt in the first place. Boredom is the same. That's right. Dankert is saying that boredom is essentially a motivational state. It's not an emotion. So today, we're going to explore that. We're going to embrace boredom. And we're going to learn how we can benefit from it, despite the fact that it can be painful and uncomfortable. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent.

And this is Chasing Life. Is it fair to say that you're a boredom researcher? Or how do you describe it? One of my students came back from a conference that I wasn't at. And she told me that someone had gone past her poster and said, Oh,

That's James Dankett's lab. He's the father of boredom. Not sure I want to be known as that. I don't know. I was immediately intrigued when I knew that I'd get a chance to talk to you because the boredom researcher, there's so much in that. And it's like one of those human traits that we're all very familiar with. And yet it's so probably individualized. How did that happen though for you as a cognitive neuroscientist? When did boredom become interesting to you?

Well, boredom became interesting to me well before I ever got any qualifications as a scientist. In my early 20s, I think I started to experience boredom more than I would have liked. And when I did experience it, I think I fit in the classic definition of boredom of it being a negative sort of experience, one that you don't like, it's not comfortable, was very much for me an agitating, restless kind of experience. And so I didn't like it.

wanted to understand it more in the sort of vain and naive hopes of a 20-year-old that I might be able to sort of cure it or get rid of it somehow, which I no longer believe is even necessary. And then around the same time, my older brother, who was just 18 months older than me, had a very serious motor vehicle accident and had a serious brain injury as a consequence of that. He was in intensive care for a week. He was in inpatient rehab for a good two or three months and then a long sort of rehab outside of that.

During his rehab, he would talk about being bored more. And so to me, this was something organic that had changed in his mind. Something about his brain injury had reset the thresholds for what he would consider to be pleasurable, engaging, enjoyable. And I really wanted to understand what that change was. First of all, I'm sorry to hear that. I have a younger brother and we're very close. And I'm sure it's a very traumatic time, not obviously for him, but for the whole family.

But, you know, you say he was bored sort of going through his rehab and all that. That doesn't surprise me. Right. I mean, because you're not able to do the things you normally do. I feel like I would describe myself as bored if I was going through that sort of thing.

I think it's easy to imagine that rehabilitation programs per se are boring, even if you're rehabilitating a broken knee or some other kind of physical part of your body. It's repetitive movements over and over again. But this was more than that. This was not really just the routine of rehabilitation. It was that things that he previously felt were things that would really be stimulating to him. So he was a drummer and he did injure his wrist in his car accident as well. But by the time the wrist had recovered,

he still didn't feel like he had the motivation and the sort of love of this thing that he knew he had loved before for many, many years. He got back to that a

eventually, but it was in that sort of intense moment. I know I love this. I love drumming. I love music, but I just, it's not doing it for me and it's boring me. And then eventually I trained as a clinical neuropsychologist. And because of my experience with my brother, when I started working in that capacity, I would ask all of the patients I saw, typically young men who'd had injuries to their brains of various kinds. I would ask them, you know, are you more bored now than you were before your injury? And

And to a number, they said yes. And they didn't ever just say yes. They would sort of leap out of their chairs. They were like very excited that someone had bothered to ask them about this really key aspect of their recovery, that they were struggling to engage with things now since their accident. I have so many questions. But just continuing on with the story, though, about your brother, do you think when you put it together just at a top level that there's a connection between boredom and depression?

Well, we know there is. There's a long standing for at least 40 years or more in psychological research, strong correlations. And as you know, and many of your listeners, I'm sure correlation doesn't mean causation. And so the challenge that we have is trying to figure out the chicken and egg of that. Right. Which comes first. Yeah. And at this stage, we don't know. I suspect that

boredom probably represents this chronic disengagement from the world around you or chronic struggle to engage with the world around you.

you. And as that chronic struggle goes on, I think then depression is never going to be far behind, but it's possible that the chicken and egg could go the other way as well. Yeah. I mean, if you lose the capacity for joy in certain things, then you just probably become bored because you don't engage with those things anymore. I mean, I guess that's why the chicken and egg sort of question is such a big one here. What about boredom and curiosity?

Well, so one of the things that I often get asked about with respect to boredom is what are boredom's opposites or what is the opposite of boredom?

There is no singular opposite to boredom, but curiosity is certainly one. You can't be curious about a thing and be bored at the same time. That just doesn't work. There's a great quote that I won't get perfectly right, but from Andy Warhol, it says, you know, you need to let the little things in life that normally bore you suddenly thrill you, right? And so finding joy in just the everyday, I think is a great thing to be able to do. And if you can, you're probably not going to experience boredom much.

Can you give us your best definition of boredom? I like when I give a definition of boredom to resort to this quote from Leo Tolstoy from Anna Karenina, where he talks about ennui or boredom as the desire for desires. So boredom is a motivational state. You want to be doing something that matters to you, but you just don't want anything that's currently available to you. So it's this sort of frustrated motivation, this frustrated desire to be

or fully engaged with the world around you. It's going unsatisfied at the moment. Whatever it is that you think you want, you can't satisfy that desire. And that's how I see boredom.

There's these, you mentioned that quote. I have a few other quotes here. I just, I'm sure you've heard all these given your work, but okay. If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight, then 16, then 32. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all. John Cage, the composer. The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom. Arthur Schopenhauer.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves? Nietzsche. What about this pain and boredom one? The two greatest enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom. Do you agree with that? I like the analogy between pain and boredom. And this comes to me from my friend and colleague, Andreas Alpodoro. He's a philosopher at the University of Louisville.

The idea with the analogy is that pain is not there to make you feel hurt. Pain is there as a signal to sort of galvanize you into action to address whatever it is that caused the hurt in the first place. Boredom is the same. Boredom is a warning signal. That's right. And it's not there to make you feel bored. It's there to get you going, to get you doing something, to get out of that bored state. The Schopenhauer quote, I think, is important to contextualize. He said, pain is the province, according to Schopenhauer, of the poor.

And boredom is the province of the rich and wealthy. You've got so much at your availability that you're bored with everything. It's a luxury to be bored. Right. And I think people see the intuitive appeal of that. Again, my friend Andreas put forward an idea that actually boredom is probably more prevalent among those with

fewer opportunities. And that makes a lot more sense to me because if you don't have either the income or the community resources available for you to have these outlets to engage with the world, then yeah, you're going to be more likely to be bored. And so pain and boredom, the enemies of human happiness, yes, but for sort of very different reasons. And I think that it's

It sort of simplifies things a little bit too much and ignores context a little bit. Yeah. I guess the nature of quotes is that way. Who is most likely to be bored? Is there a demographic of people? In our studies over a number of years now, boredom is sort of fairly, we say, normally distributed, right? So I think it strikes...

Most of us at some point or another, so I don't think it sort of picks on any one demographic, although as I just said, I do think that people in a lower socioeconomic status are more likely to be bored simply because they don't have the same opportunities.

We do know other things about personal individual differences. So people who struggle with self-control and what we mean about when we say self-control is there's a couple of different things. One is sort of impulse control. Am I going to resist having that second slice of cake? But the one that we really think is more important is this ability to

pursue goals in a purposeful way, right? So that's kind of marshalling your thoughts, your emotions, your actions in the pursuit of goals that matter to you. And the people who struggle with those kinds of self-control, self-regulation abilities, they tend to be more prone to boredom and they experience it more frequently and intensely. You know, essentially I have teenage girls, three teenage girls and my parents who are in their 80s now.

I'm not somebody at this stage of life, I should say, who gets bored. I just it's not something that I think, oh, this is going to be a boring day or I'm bored. But my kids whose frontal lobes are still developing and my parents who are retired in their 80s, they do say that to me. Does that surprise you? So young and old, but in middle age, I think less boredom, I think, at least in our experience. Yeah.

There's a great paper, the last author's name is Chin, I don't know their first name, and the title is Bored in the USA. And she's done a massive amount of experience sampling across a broad spectrum of American society. And what

what we'll find is that yes, boredom is going to be highest at the bookends of life, right? In those sort of mid teenage years. And as you point out with the frontal lobes, we found and others have found as you get towards the later teenage years, boredom starts to drop off. And it is that for me, it's correlated with that late stage development and maturation of the frontal part of your brain.

So that end of the spectrum makes a lot of sense. Boredom never really goes away for everybody. You still feel it in your middle decades. But as you sort of point out, I mean, who has the time? You're pursuing your career. You're raising your family. You're doing all these kinds of things that sort of take up your time. You just don't really have space for boredom.

At the other end of life, in our 70s and 80s, one of the key factors that is associated with boredom at that stage of life is loneliness. And it's those individuals in their 70s and 80s that have stronger social connections tend not to be bored. And that really just highlights something from my mind that we are social beasts and we really need that kind of social connection. Is boredom inherently good, bad, or neutral?

Yeah, it's neutral. I think I would say it's just a signal that,

What makes it feel like it might be good or bad is our response to it. What do we do with it? And you can turn to good outlets when you're bored. People love to believe this idea that boredom will make you creative. That logic is deeply flawed, I think. But if you have creative outlets, if you play a musical instrument, if you do some kind of art, whether it be painting or sculpting or whatever, if you have creative outlets, they're fantastic to turn to when you're bored.

You just can't hope that boredom will make you better at that creative outlet. What about just letting your mind wander? Yeah, I think downtime is a great idea, but boredom is not downtime. So I think disconnecting from... So, okay, that's important, I think, note, is that I think...

Boredom doesn't mean you're just sitting there doing nothing. The physical part of it is not boredom. So if you're sitting there seemingly doing nothing, you're not on your phone, you're not watching a movie, you're just letting your mind wander. That's not boredom. Not at all. I think there's been a myth, a fairly prevalent myth that boredom is associated with the couch potato, but-

The couch potato is just the couch potato. It's a person who's apathetic about life. The person is not motivated to get up and do something. Boredom is explicitly a motivational state. You want to be doing something. You just can't figure out what that thing should be. That's really interesting. I feel like I have a really good idea sometimes when that spontaneous mind wandering occurs.

I don't know. It's like all of a sudden something came to me, and it had nothing to do with the task that I'm on, but it actually was quite germane to my life in some way, some problem that I suddenly solved or something like that. But who knows? I guess it's different for everybody, as you say. Well, I think that's the downtime thing. So there is that notion of some people will want to suggest something.

that you should embrace boredom, bring more of it into your life because it'll give you these aha experiences or these creative experiences. And I think that what they're really trying to get at is not bring more boredom into your life because I do think that boredom just basically doesn't feel good. So why would you bring something in that feels bad?

What I really think they're saying is disconnect. So disconnect from, you know, the normal things that are capturing your attention and let your mind wander, as we talked about. And maybe great ideas and interesting thoughts will come to you. But that's not embracing boredom. That's embracing downtime and disconnection. That's interesting. Years ago, I worked on a documentary about creativity and

There was this researcher who I think was overly simplifying to be fair, but sort of had the four B's of creativity. And it was sort of, this is the areas where you're in your life where you're most likely to be creative. And they were the bed,

They were the bath, the bus, and when you were bored. Right. That was the fourth B, which I think has always just stuck in my mind and made the case that there was value in boredom. Yeah. Because it would allow me to just mind wander and maybe come up with something that I was missing.

I do think there's value in boredom. I just think that that connection's got a little bit more nuance to it. So one of the studies people love to cite comes from Sandy Mann and Rebecca Cadman. They had people fill out phone numbers from a phone book. These don't even exist anymore, but they would copy out phone numbers from a phone book. And then they did a task that is often used to test creativity. It's called the alternate users task. You just

present people with a simple everyday object, you know, a polystyrene cup, a feather, a brick, whatever it is. And you say, tell me as many uses as you can think of for this simple item, right? And presumably the more uses you come up with, the more creative you are. And what Sandy Mann and Rebecca Cadman found was that people who reported being more bored by writing out the phone numbers came up with more uses.

But what they also found is that really the people who came up with more uses for that task also reported that they daydreamed more while they were writing out the phone numbers. So you can't tell if that's boredom or daydreaming. And we recently tried to replicate that. And we actually showed the opposite. The more bored people said they were by what we had them do, which was a different task. But the more bored they felt, the less creative they were.

And so I think that boredom, we've already talked about this. I don't think it's good or bad. I think our responses are what make it feel good or bad. I don't think you can expect boredom will make you creative. But if you have that outlet, I think you can turn to it. I mean, I know I do so myself. I turn to my guitar when I'm bored all the time. And I like to say I think about 80% of the time it works. After the break, we're going to talk about how technology is starting to change our relationship to boredom and what we should do about it.

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I'm Anderson Cooper. Grief isn't talked about much, but that's what my podcast is all about.

This is All There Is, Season 3. In the past year, I've listened to about 6,000 voicemail messages you've left for me after Season 2 and most of the ones sent in so far this season. When I listen to your messages, it makes me feel less different and alone. My grief is deep and real and it has brought me to my knees. Listen to All There Is with Anderson Cooper wherever you get your podcasts.

This is going to sound very, again, very simplistic, but I have a list actually on my phone and the list is actually called stuff. That's it. Very, very creative name and stuff could be anything from, you know, like a household task. Like I need to change the light bulbs in the basement. I need to blow the leaves off the patio. Yeah. Um, to I, there's this chapter in this book I really want to read. I like tasks. I like the idea of being able to check a box. You know, I think maybe surgical mentality going through surgical training is

I think in some ways it's a very task oriented profession. You know, you're, you're starting an operation, do the operation, you finish the operation, then you check, you know, sort of check that box. But anyways, everyone I'm sure who is listening to the podcast right now is different, but thinking about your own antidote for, for boredom, again, presupposing that it's not necessarily bad or good to be bored. It's neutral, but how do you, how do you sort of deal with it in the moment?

Me personally? Yeah. Do you just lean into boredom? Can you lean into it and just be bored and be okay with that? For all of the research that I do, I'm not very good at responding to it. It's not something I deal well with. If you had my wife on here, she'd tell you that I'm horrible at it. But yeah, when you talk about the surgical sort of stuff and progress and task orientation and goal orientation and getting things done,

I often like things that are quite menial and trivial. They don't take a lot of brain power or effort, but if you can see progress and you can see the before and after are different, I like that sort of stuff. That's what

It keeps me going back to gardening. I will garden for a couple of hours and not be bored despite the fact that if you actually break down that activity, it's fundamentally monotonous and dull, right? But you do see progress. You see a messy garden at the start and a non-messy garden at the end.

Let me ask you something that may sound like a little bit of a wacky question, but just purely from an evolutionary standpoint, okay? I know you said it was a warning signal in some ways earlier or a sort of inspiring signal to do something, right? But what is the evolutionary benefit of boredom? Yeah, so that signal to do something pushes you to do what? It pushes you to explore, right?

The easy example I think about is that people can relate to, I think, is if you go to a pick your own berry farm, you're picking blueberries. You don't stand in front of one blueberry bush and denude it of every single berry that's on that bush. None of us do that and animals don't do that. You pick the berries that look ripe and juicy that are relatively easy to get and at some point, you move on. So when you're standing in front of that bush, you're exploiting the resource that's in front of you and that's a good thing to do. You need the calories, right? When you decide...

I've got to move on. You're exploring because you're hoping that just around the corner, there's going to be better resources. And boredom is not going to be the only signal that you need to do that. But boredom is going to be a reliable signal that says it's time to explore now. You need to go and do something to see, and it might be exploring for resources is the sort of obvious thing about foraging. But this might be about foraging for engagement, just trying to find something that occupies your mind well.

Again, we've established, I think, talking to you that it's not that boredom is inherently good or bad. It's more that it's neutral. But there was this famous study from 2014. I'm sure every boredom researcher knows this study, but researchers left people alone in a lab and gave them the option to give themselves an electric shock. 67% of men, according to the study, 25% of women chose to shock themselves rather than just sit there quietly.

There was such an apathy toward boredom, if you will. They did not want to be alone with their thoughts. They shocked themselves. What did we take away from that? So I'm going to go on a slight tangent for you. Bear with me. But there's a study by Iwata and colleagues fairly recently that basically did that study, the are you going to shock yourself in an empty room, but with mice.

So they had two groups of mice and they put one group in a cage that had lots of things for the mice to interact with, lots of things for the mice to play around with. And one group that was in an empty room, like the empty room that Timothy Wilson and his colleagues put people in where they shocked themselves. In both rooms, there was a hole in the wall that the mouse could poke their nose through. Mice are curious creatures. They poke their nose through. But when they do that, they get a puff of air to the nose. And to the mouse, that's an aversive stimulus. They don't like it.

So you can think of the puff of air like an electric shock. And it turned out that the mice that were in the empty bland room with nothing to do poked their nose through the hole to get this aversive puff of air to the nose many more times than the mice in the room with stuff to do.

So to me, not only does that replicate in mice what Tim Wilson and his colleagues did in humans, but it shows that not just humans, but most organisms, the default setting is to act in and on the world. We're not meant to do nothing, right? And one of the ways to think about this too is to think about meditative practices. They're hard. To become a good, strong meditator, whatever your meditative practice is, it takes years of practice to get good at it.

Because it takes years of practice to sit and not really do anything. And in fact, you're fighting. I would say you're fighting against something.

the biological imperative to act, to do stuff, right? And probably just for the mere fact that to let this amazing resource in our brains go fallow doesn't feel good. It feels better to use it. And so that's what I think the Timothy Wilson study highlights is they titled that paper Just Think, and they wanted to suggest that just thinking was aversive.

I think it's worth pointing out that some people in those studies said they found it quite pleasant. About a third of the people said that it was nice to sit for 15 minutes and do nothing, right? But

The general default setting that we and other organisms have is to act on the world. And so when we don't get the opportunity to do that, it doesn't feel good. Yeah. And so much so that they shock themselves. They cause themselves pain. That's really interesting. With all these things nowadays, you have, I think you said, two children? Is that right? Yeah. How old are they? 20 and 17. Okay. So we have children around the same age. I have 19, 17, 15. Yeah.

Is being bored more uncomfortable nowadays, do you think, especially for them having grown up in a world of smartphones and social media? It's hard to say whether or not it's more uncomfortable. There's a bit of evidence coming out now. This is from people like Elizabeth Weybright and Sammy Perrone and a few labs in China.

suggesting that boredom is getting worse over the last decade or so that that particularly in teenagers and potentially particularly in teenage girls that that boredom is is on the rise is part of it that you know this thing that we carry with us everywhere we go this phone it's a font of massive amounts of information but is it it doesn't do anything to satisfy that need for agency i don't think it always does i think it can i don't want to be a person who's sort of

decries you know the internet and social media are ruining your brain we've been worrying about that for 30 years now um and i i think that the in the same breath we should say the internet and social media can do wonderful things they can do great things i mean we're not having this conversation now without the advances of the last 20 years but yeah so i think

Boredom is potentially getting worse, potentially that's more so for teenagers. And I think if you don't have intentional engagement with things like social media, if you're just passively letting it come to you, that that boredom might be more prevalent for you. And that might be something that teenagers are struggling with because that we touched upon earlier.

their brains aren't fully developed. And particularly that part of the brain that's really important for goal setting, decision making, good judgment, impulse control, all of these things that you need to be more intentional about how you use the things around you, like social media. That's really interesting. I think I know the answer to this question based on what you've said, but

If you are just doom scrolling, can you be scrolling through your social media feed and be bored at the same time? Or is just the fact that you're doing an action like that to some extent going to be an antidote for boredom? Yeah, I think I'll go to the slot machines. You're not bored when you're at the slot machine because it's occupying your mind. You're not bored when you're scrolling because it's occupying your mind. But what it's not doing is providing a long-term solution to your boredom. It's lacking in meaning.

it's lacking in agency. I mean, you're the one that's physically doing the scrolling, but you're not really pursuing any goals that are important to you. And so when you put the phone down or you move away from the slot machine,

the boredom that you had before you went to those tools is still there. And that need to find something that is meaningful, that allows you to demonstrate your own agency, that need is still there. And it might even be intensified because you've just spent two hours or however long doing something. So you were occupied and weren't bored while you were doing it.

But you were doing something and now you look back on with maybe some shame, some guilt, some disappointment. You feel like you've wasted time. Yeah, that's going to sound familiar to a lot of people, I think, who are listening. We've all been there. How can we help our children tolerate boredom, you think, and learn from it? Yeah, the knee-jerk reaction of the parent is to offer options. You know, why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? I don't think we should do that. I think there's two things I would do over because I had that reaction when my kids were young. The first thing I'd do is if my child says, I'm bored...

As my first response might be to say, oh, well, and just let them live with it. Because to develop that agency, they need to figure it out, figure their way through it. And the other thing maybe is to go back to something you said is to say, take your four-year-old, your five-year-old, six-year-old aside when they're not bored and say, let's make a stuff list. And if you help them make a stuff list like yours, they say, okay, you put it up on their bedroom wall and say, all right, when next time you're bored, don't come to me, go to your stuff list and see what that can do for you.

I mean, as a guy in his mid-50s, I'm just saying it works for me. If there was a pill that could cure boredom, would you be in favor of that? Would we lose anything as a society if that happened? If you asked me when I was 20, I'd say, yeah, give it to me. And you ask me now, I'd say, no, I'd never take it. And I think that the evolution for me is just understanding that it's actually useful. It serves a function. I think if you never have boredom,

then you might never also have risk, right? The thing that we need to do to engage well in our life is to take risks, to try things that might fail, to try things that might make us look silly if we don't do well at them. And if nothing bores you, then nothing potentially interests you and you don't take the risks to try them. So I think it's a natural part of our daily existence. So if the pill instead was a pill that said,

you can respond better, more effectively to boredom, I might be tempted. But if the pill was to eliminate it, I don't think I'd take it. Thank you very much. That was great. I really appreciate your time. It was my pleasure. That was James Dankert, co-author of Out of My Skull, The Psychology of Boredom.

Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Aaron Mathewson, Jennifer Lai, Grace Walker, and Jesse Remedios. Andrea Cain is our medical writer. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom. Amanda Seeley is our showrunner. Dan DeZula is our technical director, and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Liktai.

With support from Jameis Andrest, John D'Onora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, Lainey Steinhardt, Nicole Pesereau, and Lisa Namarow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker and Nadia Kanang of CNN Health and Katie Hinman.

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This week on The Assignment with me, Adi Cornish. The truth is that many of us warned about this. Reverend Gabriel Salguero, pastor of The Gathering Place in Orlando, Florida. What are the kinds of messages you have been getting? I got a call from somebody saying that they're not going to go to church because they're afraid. Many pastors are concerned that it will impinge on our religious liberty to serve immigrant communities and mixed status communities. What does it feel like to be on the front lines of the immigration debates?

Listen to The Assignment with me, Audie Cornish, streaming now on your favorite podcast app.