With Gallup surveys routinely showing that employee engagement is at incredibly low levels, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that boredom is something we should strive to avoid at work. If we’re not fully on it at all times, that’s a bad thing.
That might now actually be the case, however, and restricting boredom may also be preventing us from gaining the benefits boredom can bring us at work. Indeed, research from the University of Notre Dame suggests that the very act of trying to stifle boredom can actually result in it being prolonged.
Paying attention
The researchers argue that boredom provides us with a strong signal that we’re engaged in the wrong thing, and that we should look to do something more engaging. As such, it can be useful, providing we pay attention to the signal our body is giving us.
The team wanted to see if feeling bored now could make it harder to focus and be productive later. They ran three studies looking at how boredom affects our ability to switch between tasks.
The first study looked at data from people with two jobs across different fields. By getting them to fill out surveys multiple times a day, the team could see how boredom, attention, and productivity were linked over time. Later studies used different methods to include more people and focused on how doing meaningful tasks can help reduce the long-term effects of boredom.
A nuisance emotion
The researchers highlight that we often treat boredom like it’s something of a nuisance, and that with a bit of willpower it should be possible to subdue it and get back to being happy and productive individuals again.
It’s increasingly well understood, however, that boredom can also help us in terms of creativity. This is because when we’re bored, we’re more prone to the kind of mind wandering that can often facilitate creativity.
This was highlighted by research from the Australian National University. The researchers found that when people were given a boring task to do, they were much better at generating ideas afterwards than those who were given a more interesting task to perform. What’s more, those who were bored before being asked to generate ideas also came up with ideas that were generally rated as more creative.
Restless individuals
The researchers are at pains to point out, however, that this creative boost only tended to emerge among people who had cognitive drive, openness to new experiences, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to learn new things. If you find people with such traits, however, they argue that invoking, or at least permitting, a degree of boredom could help to encourage creativity.
In other words, when we limit the ability of people to seek new experiences and intellectual adventure, they respond by doing things that innately involve novelty and variety. When we try to either limit boredom or power through it, it seems we’re not only less likely to limit the negative effects of boredom but we also limit the positive consequences.
“Like whack-a-mole, downplaying boredom on one task results in attention and productivity deficits that bubble up during subsequent tasks,” the Notre Dame researchers explain. “Paradoxically, then, trying to suppress boredom gives its harmful effects a longer shelf life.”
Unhealthy suppression
Research from the University of Bath highlights one of the most pernicious ways of suppressing boredom in the workplace. They found that social media is often the first port of call whenever we’re feeling bored by a particular task. The panoply of videos, songs, memes, and so on to “entertain” us is just a click away.
Sadly, this doesn’t really help. Indeed, it can often invoke what the researchers refer to as superficial boredom as we mindlessly click from one piece of content to the next. This kind of boredom has all of the downsides of boredom with none of the upside. Instead, it’s the more profound boredom that gets our creative juices flowing.
“Profound boredom may sound like an overwhelmingly negative concept but, in fact, it can be intensely positive if people are given the chance for undistracted thinking and development,” the researchers explain. “We must recognize that the pandemic was a tragic, destructive, consuming experience for thousands of less fortunate people, but we are all familiar with the stories of those in lockdown who found new hobbies, careers or directions in life.”
Unfortunately, superficial boredom is far more commonplace than profound boredom, which tends to emerge only when we have an abundance of uninterrupted time, usually spent in relative solitude. It’s this that tends to prompt us to question things, including our sense of self, which can also trigger our creativity.
“The problem we observed was that social media can alleviate superficial boredom but that distraction sucks up time and energy, and may prevent people progressing to a state of profound boredom, where they might discover new passions,” the researchers conclude.
So instead of constantly trying to distract ourselves with social media or other things, it might be better to sit with our boredom for a bit. Who knows, it might lead us to some really cool ideas or new directions in our work.
