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Key points
- Boredom is a powerful motivator of behavior.
- Even though boredom feels bad, it can drive people to seek out new opportunities.
- Unstructured time over the summer can be a time for individuals to let boredom benefit their lives.
- Three ways to use boredom to one's advantage include learning to be bored, making future plans, and exploring.
Summer…long days, vacations, and time spent with family and friends. Summer is often a time when the demands of daily routine decrease, especially for children and parents. The initial relief of this unstructured time can easily give way to boredom—the hours seem to stretch out without a clear sense of how to fill that time or even the motivation to try. We start to feel the urge to do something, anything, different.
Boredom is easy to ignore because it occurs so frequently, but evidence suggests boredom can be a powerful motivator in part because it is a highly aversive emotion. People would literally rather give themselves painful electric shocks or watch disgusting images than be left alone with their thoughts and bored. Boredom drives us to take action because it feels so bad.
Boredom feels bad to experience, but that does not mean it is harmful. When we feel bored, it creates an urge to explore new and different activities, opportunities, and ways of thinking. Those new experiences can be risky or harmful, such as driving recklessly or using drugs. But they can also be beneficial, such as working on a new project or learning a new language. The research is currently unclear about why people respond to boredom in harmful or beneficial ways, but it is clear that boredom motivates behavior.
Embracing Summer Boredom
The unstructured time of summer can be an excellent opportunity to permit boredom to benefit our lives. There are at least three ways to do this, depending on what fits with your goals and available opportunities. Embracing these ideas ahead of time could prevent us from falling into apathy, when we sit, bored, and nothing sounds interesting at all.
1. Learn to be bored.
Boredom feels bad, and we tend to go out of our way to avoid it. How often do we pull out a cell phone when standing in line to avoid having to just wait? Avoiding boredom robs us of the opportunity to be motivated to explore and try new things. It also can harm our ability to persist on long and challenging tasks, which are often boring, such as completing a degree or learning a new skill.
Gradually working up the ability to experience boredom without reaching for instant stimulation or changing activities can be an incredibly useful skill with benefits for our ability to succeed. Practice relaxing into boredom.
2. Make plans.
Boredom engages areas of the brain associated with planning and thinking about the self and the future. In other words, we are mentally prepared to tackle questions about what we want and create strategies for how to get there. This does not automatically happen when we’re bored. But we can intentionally set time aside to focus on planning, either broadly about life goals or very specifically about how to tackle an issue we’re facing. Times of boredom can be leveraged to think and plan.
3. Harness the urge to explore.
Boredom creates an urge to explore, and that urge can be harnessed in a positive direction. Try something new, something different from a usual routine. Explore a new location or plan a trip.
Once we enter a state of boredom, it can be hard to identify what we want to do exactly. Boredom often comes with a sense of wanting to do something but not knowing what it is we want to do. Having some ideas or plans ahead of time can help with this. Look at the list, pick one, and start doing it. Performing the new and different activity fulfills the motivation created by boredom and should satisfy the urge to explore.
