What is boredom?

Boredom is the unpleasant feeling of wanting to be engaged and not managing it. That is the short answer, and it is more precise than it sounds. Boredom is not the same as having nothing to do, because people can be bored in a busy office and perfectly content on an empty beach. It is not laziness, and it is not a lack of wanting. It is wanting with nowhere to go.

This page is about what boredom is. If you want to know what it does inside your head, see what boredom does to your brain, and for why it can leave you sleepy or reaching for the biscuits, see why boredom makes you tired.

What is the definition of boredom?

In 2012, psychologists settled on a working definition. After reviewing decades of theory, one research team concluded that boredom is universally understood as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.”^[1] They went further and tied it to attention. On their account, you are bored when you cannot get your attention to settle on the thoughts or surroundings you would need for a satisfying activity, when you notice that you cannot, and when you blame the situation for it.

That third part is interesting. Boredom tends to feel as if it lives out there, in the meeting or the queue or the rainy Sunday. The definition suggests it is at least as much about the fit between you and the situation.

What does bored mean in English?

In everyday English, bored means feeling unhappy because something is not interesting or because you have nothing to do. That is close to the Cambridge Dictionary’s wording, and its learner definition adds a telling word: “feeling tired and unhappy” for the same reasons.^[3] Boredom is simply the state of being bored.

The word is younger than the feeling. The Online Etymology Dictionary records “bore” in the sense of being tiresome or dull from 1768, and “boredom” itself from 1845.^[4] People were plainly bored long before that, but English took a while to give the state its own noun.

Is boredom an emotion?

Yes, in the way most researchers now use the word. Boredom has a distinct feel, flat and restless at once. It changes how you attend, and it pushes you to do something different. A 2018 model published in Psychological Review describes boredom as an emotional signal of “unsuccessful attentional engagement in valued goal-congruent activity.”^[2] In plainer English: the feeling you get when your attention is not properly engaged in something that matters to you.

The same model splits boredom into two ingredients that can each produce it alone:^[2]

• Attention. The task does not fit your mental resources. It can be too easy, which is the classic understimulated kind of boredom, or too demanding and noisy, which is the overstimulated kind many of us now know from an evening of scrolling.
• Meaning. The task does not connect to anything you value, or you have no clear goal at all.

This is why a hard task you care about rarely bores you, and why an easy one you care nothing about almost always does.

Is boredom a choice?

No. The feeling arrives on its own, like hunger or irritation. What is a choice is the response, and the research shows how strong the pull to escape can be. In a 2014 set of studies, people were left alone in a room for 6 to 15 minutes with nothing to do but think, and most did not enjoy it. In one version, where participants could press a button to give themselves a mild electric shock during 15 minutes alone, 67% of men (12 of 18) and 25% of women (6 of 24) shocked themselves at least once, even though they had earlier said they would pay to avoid it.^[5]

The authors’ summary is hard to improve on: most people seem to prefer doing something to doing nothing, “even if that something is negative.”^[5] That is useful to know. The urge to reach for the phone at the first flicker of boredom is not a character flaw. It is a very ordinary human pull, and it can be answered in better ways once you can see it.

What is boredom a sign of?

Most often, a mismatch. Taking the two ingredients above, boredom tends to point at one of these:

• Too little challenge. You need something harder, or a new angle on the same thing.
• Too much noise. You need less input, not more. This is the one people most often get backwards.
• Too little meaning. The task is disconnected from anything you care about. Sometimes you can reconnect it, and sometimes that is information about the task.

Repetition deserves its own mention, because “boredom of repetition” is a common search. Repeating the same thing wears out attention quickly. In one experiment, volunteers watched an hour of a documentary on one day and an hour of a single short clip from it on a loop on another. On the repetitive day they ate more sweets and more readily gave themselves mild electric shocks, which the researchers took as a drive to escape monotony itself.^[6]

Occasional boredom is healthy, and for children in particular it is often the doorway to their own ideas; our piece on how to let your child be bored goes into that. Persistent boredom is different. If it comes with low mood, hopelessness or a loss of interest in things you used to enjoy, please talk to your GP. This page is general information, not medical advice.

What does boredom cause?

Mostly, it causes a search. Boredom is uncomfortable on purpose, and the discomfort is what gets you up and looking for something better. Where that search leads depends on what is nearby. With a phone within reach, it tends to end in the feed. Without one, it has more room to end somewhere more interesting.

That is the case we make, gently and at length, in our book How to Be Bored Again: boredom is not the enemy, it is a message, and it is worth staying long enough to read it.