The thumping of valves. The cacophonous rumbling.

The powerful kick in the back as the

rocket’s engines ignite. The alarmingly realistic possibility that these will be your last precious
moments alive.

By all accounts, the journey into space is a thrilling ride. During the second launch of his career
in 1982, the cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev sensed the rocket swaying to the right and the left,
as if it were losing balance… then finally, he felt himself leave the ground. As the crew soared
into space, they yelled “G-o-o-u” – it’s not entirely clear why.

But though Lebedev’s space adventure began with a hit of adrenaline, this soon wore off – and
just a week into his seven-month mission aboard the space station Salyut 7, he was bored. In
reality, hurtling through low-Earth orbit at around 8 km/s (17,900mph) in a small aluminium can
was not enough to absorb him. As he wrote in his diary “the drab routine has begun”.

We tend to think of boredom as a fairly straightforward response to tedious activities. After all,
it’s rare to find someone who claims to enjoy washing up or doing their taxes – and it’s deeply
suspicious when you do. Except that boredom isn’t quite this clear-cut. Decades of research have
revealed that it’s as mysterious as it is agonising, and there’s a surprising amount of variation in
how much monotony each person can handle. (Learn more about some of the surprising
benefits of boredom.)

“I think everybody gets the boredom signal,” says James Danckert, who heads a boredom lab at
the University of Waterloo, Ontario. “Some people are really, really good at dealing with it
though.”

In 2014, a team of social psychologists from the University of Virginia discovered during a
series of experiments on mind wandering that many participants – around 25% of women and
67% of men – were deliberately electrocuting themselves when they were left alone in a room
for just 15 minutes, purely for something to do. One person shocked themselves nearly 200
times.
A susceptibility to boredom might be built into some people's genetics (Credit: Getty
Images)
And from the man who diligently recreated a Babylonian feast from a recipe on a 3,750-year-old
clay tablet to the woman who resat her school exam paper from seven years ago out of mild
curiosity, the recent lockdowns have revealed that peculiar and desperate strategies for dealing
with boredom are very much not limited to a lab environment.

At the other end of the spectrum, some people actively seek out situations which might normally
be considered tedious. The hermit Christopher Knight, who drove to a forest in Maine in 1986
and didn’t emerge for 27 years, claims he never get bored once – though by his own admission,
for the majority of his time there he was occupied with doing absolutely nothing.

So, why is that?

One of the earliest accounts of boredom dates back to Roman times, when the philosopher
Seneca may have begun the long tradition of moaning about it. During a ponderous exchange of
letters with a friend, he asked “Quo usque eadem” – “How much longer [must we endure] the
same things?”, and followed up with “I do nothing new. I see nothing new. Eventually there’s a
nausea even of this”.

 The surprising benefits of being bored

 Why boredom is bad… and good for you
 The people who find pleasure in feeling bored

Later, there was the medieval preoccupation with “acedia” – from the Greek word for
indifference – which was thought of by Christians as a kind of sinful apathy or slothfulness.

Though the English word “boredom” was invented in the early 19th Century, it wasn’t in the
public consciousness until the author Charles Dickens slipped it into one of his novels.

Fast-forward to today and boredom is apparently everywhere – it’s sometimes described as the
plague of modern society. Back in 2016, a French worker sued his former employer for "bore-
out" – burnout’s less well-known cousin – and won. Meanwhile Generation Z – those born
between the mid-1990s and late 2010s – have already invented a new kind, “phone
boredom”, which involves scrolling aimlessly through your apps and finding nothing that
interests you. Now people are even diagnosing their pets with it.

Defining boredom

Deciphering why some people experience chronic ennui, while others can live without constant
entertainment, has been complicated by the fact that for a long time, psychologists couldn’t agree
on what counts as boredom.
Chris Hadfield has said more than once that “only boring people get bored” (Credit:
Getty Images)
In the 1960s and 1970s, some researchers defined boredom simply as the feeling generated by a
repetitive task. This led to the surprising idea that boredom can actually increase a person’s
level of “arousal” – the ability to hold your attention and respond to the things happening
around you. For example, in one study – which seemed to support this – army volunteers were
asked to push a button when they saw flashes of light emanating from a box, and their resulting
state of high vigilance and arousal was seen as arising from boredom.

Meanwhile, many other early experiments used a more familiar – and, in some ways, exactly
opposite – definition. From 1986, the “boredom proneness scale” was often used to gauge
participants’ boredom levels, by asking them to rate how much they agreed with statements such
as “It is easy for me to concentrate on my activities”. In this case, saying they found it easy to
concentrate would indicate they were not boredom prone.  

Psychologists now know that there are at least five types of boredom, including “calibrating
boredom”, where you have wandering thoughts and a feeling of not knowing what to do;
“reactive boredom”, where you feel aggressive towards your captor – a teacher or workplace, for
instance – and ruminate on the things you would rather be doing; “searching boredom”, where
you feel restless and search for a way out; “indifferent boredom”, where you feel relaxed and
detached from the world around you; and a newly discovered kind, “apathetic boredom”, where
you feel neither good nor bad, but helpless to escape.

Regardless of the type you experience, research has shown that tedium leaves a tell-tale signature
in the brain. In one study, led by Danckert and the psychologist Colleen Merrifield, a group of
unsuspecting volunteers had their brains scanned in a functional MRI machine while they were
lulled into a state of intense boredom by a video of two men hanging their washing, and
occasionally asking each other for clothes pegs.

Intriguingly, the researchers found a link between boredom and activity in the “default mode
network” – a set of interconnected brain regions which are normally associated with mind
wandering. “It’s typically active when there's no external tasks for you to do and nothing going
on around you,” says Danckert.

People have started diagnosing their dogs with boredom, which apparently leads to
destructive behaviours (Credit: Getty Images)
What the boredom signal is really telling you, Danckert explains, is that you are failing to
interact with the world – you have lost control of your surroundings and you aren’t being
effective. Like other negative emotions, such as anger and sadness, it’s possible that boredom
evolved to motivate us. “What we're really looking for is to be cognitively engaged. We want to
be able to use our mental resources for something that we find meaningful.”

If this is the case, it might help to explain why some people can handle years alone, while others
are prepared to electrocute themselves after just 15 minutes of solitude. Certain environments
provide the opportunity to become bored, but only some people allow themselves to become so.
Others recognise that familiar sense of restlessness and find a way to turn things around – they
inject a sense of purpose or meaning.

Take the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. In stark contrast to Lebedev, he apparently never
had a dull moment on his 2012 sojourn to the International Space Station, despite the limited
social company and repetitive chores.  

Hadfield has said publicly more than once that “only boring people get bored”. As if to prove it,
he famously used his spare time to perform a zero-gravity rendition of David Bowie’s song
Space Oddity. “If you talk to him, what you learn is that he does actually get the boredom signal
– he just deals with it super quickly and super effectively,” says Danckert, who wrote about
Hadfield in his book, Out of My Skull: the Psychology of Boredom.

In space, Hadfield found meaning in the most brain-numbing of tasks, such as plumbing. But
even when he was a child, helping out on his parents farm in Southern Ontario, he managed to
keep himself engaged – challenging himself to hold his breath when he was asked to undertake
the harrowing task of literally harrowing (breaking up big clumps of soil into smaller ones).

Following Hadfield’s lead when faced with a boring moment could have other surprising
benefits. As BBC Future has explored in the past, embracing a tedious experience – letting
your mind wander rather than reaching for your phone, for instance – may enhance creativity.

Dull downsides

The bad news for easily bored people, says Danckert, is that the susceptibility has been linked to
a range of other issues, such as impulsive behaviour, substance abuse, gambling
addiction, compulsive mobile phone use, depression, mental trauma that manifests as
physical sensations like pain – the list goes on. Intriguingly, it also seems to be linked to several
personality disorders. 

The astronaut Chris Hadfield used to challenge himself to hold his breath during tedious
tasks on his parents’ farm (Credit: Getty Images)
One is narcissism – not the ordinary kind, in which people have an inflated sense of their own
importance and greatness, characteristic of certain politicians, but “covert narcissism”. This
type involves people feeling like they’re fabulously talented, but they aren’t being given due
credit for it. “They're like ‘If only the world knew’,” says Danckert.
No one knows for sure what explains the link, but an early theory is that, if there’s a gap between
your natural abilities and your goals, you are setting yourself up for failure – and this leads to
feelings of disenchantment and boredom. Another is that once a covert narcissist has received the
empty approval they crave from the people around them, they will lose interest and become
bored.

In fact, boredom is just one of many unpleasant side-effects to keeping narcissism bottled up. For
example, covert narcissists tend to have low psychological wellbeing, while overt narcissists are
relatively happy and have higher self-esteem.

Other personality traits linked to boredom include anger – aggressive drivers tend to be

especially susceptible – and neuroticism, which involves having high levels of anxiety, guilt
and jealousy. In all, being prone to boredom is generally a bad sign – and may be partly caused
by having poor emotional control.

“We need to try and understand the causal nature of these relationships. And we haven't really
done that yet,” says Danckert. “So for example, in the relationship between boredom and
depression, does boredom precede depression – is it a risk factor for depression? I think the
answer to that will be yes.”

The ultimate question is whether the strategies that make some people susceptible are all learned
– or whether boredom can be genetic. This is something Danckert is currently looking into.
“Again, we don’t have the data yet, but my speculative answer is that this is going to be related
to something within certain individuals.”

However, Danckert expects that, as with all emotions, boredom is likely to arise from a
combination of learned and genetic factors. It looks like Hadfield honed his ability to cope with
boredom in childhood – and with the right techniques, even the most agonisingly boredom-prone
might be able to lead richer inner lives.

So the next time you find yourself lamenting how tedious life is, think back to Lebedev and
Hadfield’s differing experiences in space. You might well discover that it’s just a matter of
perspective.

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