Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Boredom as a Motivational State

From WWSG exclusive speaker, Dr. Sanjay Gupta:
I have always thought of boredom as an emotion — a painful one I think most of us actively try to avoid.
And now, thanks to smart phones and social media, there’s an easy distraction at our fingertips.
But if you’re trying to turn away more from distractions like social media in the new year, boredom may be something we have to face head on.
And you can start by thinking of boredom not as an emotion, but a motivational state, cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert told me on a recent episode of Chasing Life.
“I like, when I give a definition of boredom, to resort to this quote from Leo Tolstoy, from [his novel] ‘Anna Karenina,’ where he talks about ennui, or boredom, as ‘the desire for desires,’ ” he said. “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 how should you deal with boredom?
- Create a list: The list I have on my phone is actually just called “stuff.” The purpose of this is to have a list of activities, tasks or projects that you can turn to when you’re bored. Remember, boredom is trying to tell you to get out there and do something.
- Stop scrolling: No matter how good it feels in the moment, Danckert warns that it can actually make boredom worse because you’re not giving yourself a sense of agency. “If you’re just sort of mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds, that’s not being very agentic. … It’s going to make your boredom worse in the long run,” he said.
- Don’t expect boredom to make you creative: This is a popular notion that drive Danckert “nuts.” “The evidence for that claim is very weak, and we actually published something fairly recently showing that if I make you bored, you’re actually less creative,” he said. Downtime on the other hand, can be good for creativity.
- Don’t try and avoid boredom: You don’t have to embrace it but don’t try to outrun boredom, Danckert says. “It’s neither good nor bad, so we should just learn to listen to it and figure out what it tells us in that moment. We need to adapt it and respond to it in good ways.”
So the next time you’re bored, don’t get frustrated, get motivated.