Why does boredom make you tired?

Boredom makes you tired because it is effortful, not restful. It feels like having nothing to do, but underneath, your attention is straining to latch on to something and failing, and the body registers that strain. That is why an empty afternoon can leave you more drained than a full one, and why bored often arrives with its two companions, sleepy and peckish.

This piece covers what boredom does to the body, as far as the research can say. For what it does inside the head, and why a moderate dose can be good for you, see what boredom does to your brain. This is general information, not medical advice.

Does boredom make you tired?

Yes, and the reason is surprising: the bored body is not simply powered down. In a 2014 study, 72 undergraduates watched film clips chosen to make them bored, sad or neutral while researchers measured their heart rate, skin conductance and cortisol. Compared with sadness, boredom brought a rising heart rate, falling skin conductance and increased cortisol.^[1] The authors read this as a mix of increased arousal and difficulty sustaining attention. In plainer terms, part of you is revved up while another part is drifting off.

That mixed signal matches how psychologists define boredom. The most widely used definition describes it as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.”^[2] Wanting to engage and failing is tiring work. You keep casting about for something to hold on to, and each failed attempt costs a little more.

A later model adds two routes in. Boredom can come from a mismatch between the mental demands of a task and the resources you have, in either direction, so being understimulated or overstimulated both count. It can also come from a task that does not connect to anything you value.^[6] So the flat, heavy feeling of a long meeting and the frazzled, can’t-settle feeling after an hour of scrolling can both be boredom, and both can feel like fatigue.

Does being bored make you sleepy?

Yes, sometimes, though sleepy and bored are not the same thing. When a situation offers little to engage with, drowsiness that was already there has nothing to hold it back, which is why a warm lecture hall after lunch is so dangerous. Many people also yawn when they are bored. Why we yawn is still not fully understood, so we would treat the yawn as a sign that you have disengaged rather than proof that boredom causes sleep.

The useful test is simple. If the sleepiness vanishes the moment something interesting happens, it was probably boredom. If you are sleepy whatever you are doing, it is more likely about sleep itself, and worth raising with a GP if it goes on.

Does boredom make you hungry?

Yes, it can, and the research here is unusually clear about why. In a 2015 paper with three studies, people who kept a food diary ate more calories, fat, carbohydrate and protein on days when they felt more bored, about 100 extra calories, roughly a banana, for each standard deviation rise in boredom. In the lab, bored participants wanted more snacks, and those who were most aware of themselves ate more sweets. They also ate more of an exciting healthy food, cherry tomatoes, but not more plain crackers.^[3] The pull was towards stimulation, not towards any particular food.

A second study pushed the point further. Thirty volunteers each sat through an hour of an engaging documentary and, on another day, an hour of the same short clip on repeat. When bored they ate more M&Ms. In a parallel experiment, bored participants also gave themselves more mild electric shocks.^[4] The researchers concluded that boredom eating is driven mainly by the urge to escape monotony, not by wanting something pleasant. That is worth knowing next time you find yourself at the fridge at four o’clock: the question is less “what do I fancy?” and more “what am I trying to get away from?”

Can boredom kill you?

No, not directly, though the headline has a real study behind it. Researchers followed 7,524 London civil servants from the Whitehall II study, who had been asked in the 1980s how often they had felt bored in the previous four weeks, and tracked deaths up to 2009. Those who reported more boredom were more likely to have died by the end of the period.^[5]

The authors did not conclude that boredom itself is lethal. Speaking about the findings, they suggested that people who are often bored may be more likely to be unhappy and unfulfilled and to take up habits such as smoking or drinking, which do raise the risk of heart disease and stroke.^[5] Boredom, in other words, looks more like a marker for a life that is not quite working than a cause of harm on its own.

Is boredom bad for your health?

No, not in occasional doses. Boredom is an ordinary feeling with a job to do: it tells you that what you are doing is not engaging you or not meaningful to you, and nudges you to change it. The trouble comes when the nudge is always answered the same way, with a snack, a scroll or a drink, because the easy fix never gets to the cause.

A few things tend to help:

• Name it. “I am bored, not hungry” or “I am bored, not tired” is often enough to change what you reach for.
• Match the effort. If you are understimulated, add a small challenge. If you are overloaded, take something away, including the phone.
• Move. A short walk changes your state faster than another tab. Our ideas for things to do without your phone are a good place to start.
• Look underneath. If boredom has become constant, it may be telling you something bigger about work, rest or company. For a clearer picture of what boredom is and what it signals, see what is boredom.

If low mood, hopelessness or tiredness are with you most days, whatever you are doing, please talk to your GP. That is not something to fix with a better afternoon.

Boredom has a bad reputation mostly because we rarely stay with it long enough to find out what it wanted. Learning to sit with it, briefly and on purpose, is what our book How to Be Bored Again is about.