The Science of Boredom | James Danckert, PhD

Studies mentioned in this episode, in order mentioned:

Danckert, J., & Eastwood, J. D. (2020). Out of my skull: The psychology of boredom. Harvard University Press.

Danckert, J., & Merrifield, C. (2018). Boredom, sustained attention and the default mode network. Experimental brain research, 236, 2507-2518.

Yeung, R. C., Danckert, J., Van Tilburg, W. A., & Fernandes, M. A. (2024). Disentangling boredom from depression using the phenomenology and content of involuntary autobiographical memories. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 2106.

Isacescu, J., Struk, A. A., & Danckert, J. (2017). Cognitive and affective predictors of boredom proneness. Cognition and emotion, 31(8), 1741-1748.

Malkovsky, E., Merrifield, C., Goldberg, Y. et al. (2012). Exploring the relationship between boredom and sustained attention. Exp Brain Res 221, 59–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-012-3147-z

Golubchik, P., Manor, I., Shoval, G., & Weizman, A. (2020). Levels of proneness to boredom in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder on and off methylphenidate treatment. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, 30(3), 173-176.

Chin, A., Markey, A., Bhargava, S., Kassam, K. S., & Loewenstein, G. (2017). Bored in the USA: Experience sampling and boredom in everyday life. Emotion, 17(2), 359.

Crawford, C. M., Ramlackhan, K., Singh, G., & Fenske, M. J. (2023). Subjective impact of age-related hearing loss is worse for those who routinely experience boredom and failures of attention. Ear and Hearing, 44(1), 199-208.

Weybright, E. H., Schulenberg, J., & Caldwell, L. L. (2020). More bored today than yesterday? National trends in adolescent boredom from 2008 to 2017. Journal of Adolescent Health, 66(3), 360-365.

Yang, X. J., Liu, Q. Q., Lian, S. L., & Zhou, Z. K. (2020). Are bored minds more likely to be addicted? The relationship between boredom proneness and problematic mobile phone use. Addictive behaviors, 108, 106426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2020.106426

Elhai, J. D., Vasquez, J. K., Lustgarten, S. D., Levine, J. C., & Hall, B. J. (2018). Proneness to boredom mediates relationships between problematic smartphone use with depression and anxiety severity. Social Science Computer Review, 36(6), 707-720.

Drody, A. C., Ralph, B. C., Danckert, J., & Smilek, D. (2022). Boredom and media multitasking. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 807667.

Tam, K. Y., & Inzlicht, M. (2024). Fast-forward to boredom: How switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(10), 2409.

[Kris Perry]: Hello and welcome to the Screen Deep podcast, where we go on deep dives with experts in the field to decode young brains and behavior in a digital world. I’m Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens and the host of Screen Deep. 

Today, we’re diving into a topic that we’ve all experienced in ourselves and certainly our children: boredom. What is it, really? Is it just a lack of stimulation or is it something more meaningful that’s happening in the brain? To help us understand this complex state of mind, I’m joined today by Dr. James Danckert, Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo and one of the world’s leading experts on boredom. His research explores what’s actually happening in the brain when we feel bored and what it might tell us about children’s attention, motivation, and role of technology in modern life. 

James, I find your work so interesting because in reading all about the research into boredom, what it means from a psychological and cognitive state, I realize most people, including myself, don’t really know what boredom actually is. I mean, we all recognize it when we’re experiencing it and can see it in others, but it actually ends up being a complex emotion when you dig into it. To start us off, can you define boredom, what it actually is, and is it really a unique thing or is it apathy called by another name?

[Dr. James Danckert]: I think that’s a great question, Kris, and you’re right, people feel like they know what boredom is precisely but as soon as you try to nail it down and define it, it becomes a little bit more slippery. But we define boredom in a fairly simple way, in a functional way. So, I love this quote from Leo Tolstoy that really captures it for me. He describes boredom as, “the desire for desires.” So when we’re bored, we want to be doing something, we want to be engaged with the world around us in things that are meaningful and that feel purposeful to us, but we don’t want the options that are currently available to us. 

And for this podcast, given that we’re focusing on kids, I think the example of very young children, your four, five, six year olds, really highlights this conundrum really well. Most of the parents listening will be familiar with that experience of a child coming to you and saying, “I’m bored.” Right? But what they’re really saying is, “I’m bored and I want you to fix it for me.” And so as the dutiful parent, we trot out options. You know, “Go read a book. Go play with your Lego. Go outside. Go play basketball. Do something with your brother,” whatever we say. And at every turn point, the child says, “Nah, I don’t want to do that. Nah, I don’t want to do that.” What they’re telling us is they’ve seen the options, too, and they just don’t think those options are going to work right now. And that’s the essential conundrum of boredom. Wanting, but failing, to engage with the world. 

And is it unique? Absolutely it’s unique. So, we’ve shown, and others have shown, that it’s quite distinct from things like apathy. I think people sometimes think of boredom as the couch potato, someone sitting around doing nothing all day. And that’s not it, that’s apathy. Boredom is a highly motivated state where you’re wanting that kind of engagement but just not able to get it.

[Kris Perry]: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about boredom?

[Dr. James Danckert]: I think we just touched upon one of the biggest misconceptions that boredom is apathy or boredom is laziness. I think, in part, that comes from that parental response to boredom. It’s like, “There’s a million things out there in the world that you could be doing right now. Just go do one of them.” And if your child is not responding well to that exhortation to just do things, then, you know, maybe it’s quite natural for us to think, “Well, you’re being lazy or you’re not being energetic enough.” But, that really is a misconception because when we’re bored we are sort of in a restless and agitated state because we want something that we can’t get. And so that’s the biggest misconception I think that boredom is associated with laziness.

[Kris Perry]: And those are some of the negative perceptions of boredom. What is the positive side of boredom?

[Dr. James Danckert]: So, my co-author, John Eastwood, and I, we wrote a book in 2020 called Out of My Skull, The Psychology of Boredom. And we really tried to say in that book that that feeling of boredom in the moment is neither good nor bad. It’s not – you can’t really cast it as a good or bad thing. It’s just a signal. And it’s a signal that’s telling you you need to explore your world for something better to do than what you’re doing right now. 

I think people really, really want to believe in this notion that boredom can somehow make you creative. That boredom is a great way to push us to creativity. And the logic just doesn’t work. Creativity is one of the most complex human capacities, and it’s one of the best, too. I enjoy writing songs on guitar. I enjoy drawing and painting. Creativity is the way we get to express ourselves. But it’s extraordinarily complex, and it takes a lot of practice. But for some reason we want to believe that when we’re bored we might magically become creative. It’s actually the other way around. It’s that if you’ve fostered creative outlets, if you can turn to creative outlets when you’re bored, creativity does a great job of eliminating your boredom. But you can’t hope that boredom will somehow make you creative. 

So that’s the most prominent thing that people think of as “the good” of boredom. But my colleague, Andreas Elpidorou, who’s a philosopher, he says the good of boredom is simply that it is that signal to call to action, to get you to go and do something that’s more meaningful.

[Kris Perry]: You’re one of the few people in the world who are looking at boredom from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, and I know some of your work has looked at what’s happening in people’s brains when they are experiencing boredom by using an MRI. What has this told you about what is happening on a cognitive or neural level when someone is bored?

[Dr. James Danckert]: I don’t want to get too heavy on the jargon for your listeners, but we put people in a scanner, an MRI scanner, and looked at their brains when we made them bored. And we did that by having them watch a movie of two guys hanging laundry, which is a pretty efficient way to make people bored. And what we found is that you see a network of brain areas that are activated when you’re bored. And this network has been labelled before as the default mode network. It’s really just a collection of brain areas that is active when there isn’t anything for you to do. And so, when there’s no external task.

Lots of things activate this default network – memories that you have, when you engage memories of your past. Even prospective thinking – so thinking about, “What do I have to do later today? When’s my appointment next week?” These kinds of thoughts activate the default mode network. Even nice things like nostalgia. When you sort of think about some sort of nostalgic part of your life, you’ll activate the default network. 

But you also activate this default mode network when your mind wanders away from the task at hand. So whatever it is that you’re doing – and people might have this common experience. You know, you’re reading a book and you get to the end of the paragraph and you think, “Oh, damn, I’ve got to go back and read that paragraph again because I just don’t even remember what I just read.” That’s because your mind wandered. Your mind went off task. And so that network of brain areas is activated when your mind wanders. And we found that when we made people bored, it was that default network that was most prominently activated, suggesting that people were struggling to focus attention on the movie that we were showing them. So normally, you see the default mode when there’s nothing to do. But the interesting thing for us is that there was something to do: watch this movie. It was just so mind shatteringly dull that you turned to internal thoughts instead.

 And then the other thing that we found that I think is really interesting is one particular part of the brain, a part that’s known as the insular cortex, was down-regulated when we made people bored. Now, this part of the brain is very important for representing things in the external world that are relevant and important to you. And it’s also important for representing internal body states, things like butterflies in the stomach or a racing heartbeat. And so it’s known as part of a network known as the salience network. So it represents things that are relevant to you, whether or not it’s internal body states or external events. And what we found is that, you know, basically when you’re bored, this part of the brain kind of shuts off, sort of suggesting there’s really nothing relevant out there to pay attention to. 

There’s a lot more work that we’re in the process of doing to try and understand the neural brain signature of boredom, but that’s what we’ve found so far.

[Kris Perry]: It’s really fascinating to think about boredom as more of an active state of mind using the default mode network you described because the way it actually feels when you’re experiencing it is more like a lack of something or an emptiness. Am I getting that right?

[Dr. James Danckert]: Well, I think you are. It’s the response to that lack of something, that lack of a meaningful thing to do, that then feels not like a lack of activity, it feels, in fact, like the opposite. It feels like agitation and restlessness. So there’s been a number of studies from other groups that look at what do people say when they describe the state of boredom? What kind of other things do they say when they say that they’re feeling bored? And agitation and restlessness are the two most common. So it really is an absence, an absence of something you want to engage with, but it’s felt acutely as a kind of restless need for something. And so it’s not, again, not a laziness, not an apathy sort of feeling.

[Kris Perry]: This might be a little bit of a chicken-and-the-egg question, but I also—I’ve noticed in myself thoughts that seem to almost tap me on the shoulder and want me to think about them. And it’s almost a recurring distraction. Or my mind will wander to the same thing over and over again versus a wide variety of things. Is there a connection between that feeling of boredom and persistent thoughts or memories that kind of intrude on your focus, your attention?

[Dr. James Danckert]: That’s a great question. We did a study a while back where we looked at what is called “intrusive autobiographical memories.” That is like a memory that pops into your head that you didn’t want to come in there and you didn’t choose to remember it. It just popped in, right? And we looked at this in terms of what is the kind of valence of those memories? Are they positive or are they negative? And how are they related to symptoms of depression and symptoms of boredom? And we found that people who were bored, much like the people who were depressed, but there were some minor differences, but people who were bored, their intrusive autobiographical memories tended to be negative. They tended to have these negative things pop into their mind from their past. Why that is, is anybody’s guess at this point. It’s, I think, a fascinating thing to try and understand. 

But also what you’re describing is what we would refer to as “rumination,” right? So you’re thinking about the same thought over and over again. And we know from a number of other studies that people who are boredom prone do tend, indeed, to ruminate. They tend to think about the same thing over and over again. And if I return just to the child who comes to their parents says, “I’m bored,” their thought process at that time is probably, “I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored.” It’s probably just a loop of that one thing that’s saying, “I’m unhappy because I’m bored,” and that inability to break out of that loop and do something that’s engaging to them. So I think we do have, for people who are bored chronically, people we call “boredom prone,” I think they do tend to have those negatively valenced memories and that tendency to ruminate on things.

[Kris Perry]: And I love the fact that there’s a common denominator around it being autobiographical. I think that’s really fascinating. 

Some of your work has also delved into the differences between people who are highly prone to boredom, as you just mentioned, and those who are not. What have you learned about highly boredom-prone individuals and what kind of co-occurring factors may be involved when someone is highly boredom-prone?

[Dr. James Danckert]: So as I said before, that in-the-moment feeling of boredom is neither good nor bad, but if you’re chronically experiencing it, there’s pretty much nothing good about that, right? So, people who are boredom prone tend to have these elevated rates of depression and anxiety, so their mental health suffers from this elevated experience of boredom. They tend to also struggle with drug and alcohol use. And potentially that as a kind of easy fix to try and eliminate the boredom, but then of course has those longer term negative consequences that we’re all familiar with. 

In terms of the person themselves and the personality, we’ve thought about the boredom-prone person in what we call a “self-regulatory framework,” and I think this is relevant to kids as well, particularly in classroom sort of settings. The primary thing here we’re looking at is self-control, right? So, how well are you able to marshal your thoughts, your actions, and your emotions in the pursuit of goals that matter to you? And we and others have found very, very consistently across a large number of samples that people who are high in boredom proneness tend to be lower in self-control. 

And we’re in the process now of trying to look at that a little bit more deeply and ask the question of what kind of self-control? Your listeners may be familiar with the Marshmallow Test, the classic Marshmallow Test with children. So, you put a marshmallow in front of a child and you say, “You can have that now, or you can wait and get two marshmallows in 10 minutes.” And the idea is that the child that takes the marshmallow right now is exhibiting a lower level of self-control. And there’s all kinds of work showing that there are really long-term benefits—higher academic achievement, higher salaries, higher mental well-being and life satisfaction—among those kids that we measured that were better at that marshmallow test. But that type of self-control is what we call “impulse control.” You want to not reach immediately for the marshmallow, you want to sort of correct yourself and inhibit that impulse so that you can get better options later on. I don’t think that that’s what’s going on for the boredom-prone individual. 

There are two other kinds of self-control that are really important. One is what we’d call “goal initiation.” So how well do you get started? How well do you launch into an action? And I think that’s primarily going to be the biggest problem that boredom prone people experience. They just don’t get launched. And then the third one is what we call “goal persistence.” So how well do you stick with it? Some people call it “stick-to-itiveness,” right? And others might call it “grit,” “conscientiousness.” So how well do you stick with a task at hand? And I think that also will be a problem for people who are boredom-prone. But the primary one I think will be about launching, just getting going.

[Kris Perry]: I love that Marshmallow test, and the video of kids trying so, so hard to delay gratification of, you know, putting off the reward for a better reward and how correlated that is to just simply sometimes age. The brain simply has to develop physically to be able to tolerate that level of delayed gratification. 

You’ve talked a lot about boredom and whether or not it relates to the ability to focus or pay attention through this mechanism of self-control that you’ve been describing. Are there correlations between boredom-prone people and the occurrence of ADHD?

[Dr. James Danckert]: There absolutely is. I mean, one of the primary factors that we find cognitively associated with boredom are struggles with attention. So, if we—I’ll get to ADHD in a second—but if we put ADHD aside for a second, people who are highly boredom-prone tend to have lapses in everyday attention more frequently. So, pouring orange juice on your cereal or getting in your car to drive to the local shop and finding yourself halfway to work, you know. These kinds of lapses of attention happen more so for people who are boredom-prone. And even when we get them to do tasks in the lab that are much more boring, which is an important thing to point out, on those tasks of sustained attention, where you have to sort of maintain attention over a long period of time to try and do infrequent things, people who are boredom-prone make more errors on those kinds of tasks of sustained attention. 

So attention itself is a big component of boredom-proneness, but we and others have shown that it is indeed highly correlated with ADHD. And we showed a while back that it was correlated with both hyperactive and inattentive symptoms. So it’s not just the inattentive side of ADHD that’s associated with boredom proneness. And then there was an interesting study a while back with children who were diagnosed with ADHD by Golubchik and colleagues that measured the kids’ boredom on and off their medication. So, they measured their boredom and then they asked them to be two weeks off of their medication and measured it again, and symptoms of ADHD and boredom-proneness both rose in lockstep with one another when they were off their medications. There’s no causal relation here. No one’s going to suggest boredom causes ADHD. That would be a bit ridiculous to suggest. And I think that anecdotally, certain people who live with ADHD will say that boredom is this kind of signal or trigger that lets them know that they’re not coping well right now in the moment. So I think it’s an interesting corollary of ADHD and certainly something that individuals living with ADHD experience a lot. The key question, I guess, is if we could treat, so-called “treat,” boredom, would that show benefits for people with ADHD? We just don’t know yet. That would be a great thing to try.

[Kris Perry]: Well, when you talked about low grit or low stick-to-itiveness is more common in highly boredom-prone people. Maybe this is a little off-topic, but is there a way to actually improve this quality in yourself or in your children so that someone could become less boredom-prone?

[Dr. James Danckert]: It’s a great question, but we’re not really—in the research sort of field looking at boredom—we’re not really there yet. We haven’t done what we’d call “intervention studies” where we want to sort of have a treatment group and a control group and say, “This is going to be what we try for your boredom and see whether or not you improve.” So we just don’t know. And then I did read something recently about self-control. And so we have that Marshmallow test that everybody’s familiar with, and what that launched was a whole research endeavour to try and help improve people’s self-control, because if so many good things are related with better self-control, then we should try and train people to have better self-control. 

But what this article I was reading was suggesting is that that fails to make the distinction between trait and state. And it turns out that people who have high levels of self-control as an individual trait don’t experience self-control challenges much in their day-to-day life. And so they don’t really—they don’t need any training, that’s for sure. People who are low in trait self-control, you can train them to be a little bit better in the moment, but they kind of revert to their trait fairly consistently. Sort of think about it like intermittent dieting. You might diet for a while and it might get a little bit of weight off, but a lot of people experience that rebound where they put the weight right back on. The same kind of thing can happen in terms of trying to train better self-control. And I imagine it might be true of trying to train better coping with boredom because if your trait, if your personality is such that you are prone to boredom, those training regimes might work very temporarily. And we have to keep our eyes wide open for that as we launch into that kind of research.

[Kris Perry]: I remember raising my twins and they were very different from each other and one was probably more prone to boredom than the other, and one of the benefits of having twins was the child that was more likely to be bored could sort of draft off the child that wasn’t as bored. It was finding things to do. And so it was a lifesaver for me. But I know that lots of parents are so familiar with a child whining about being bored and wanting that parent to kind of rescue them from that feeling and we’ve talked about that already, but are children more likely to be bored than adults? And are there specific ages or developmental stages where boredom is more common and why?

[Dr. James Danckert]: The first thing to say about that is we need a ton more research because we don’t have a lot on, let’s say, four- to six-year-olds or even four- to 10-year-olds. We do have some data on tweens and teens and that tells us a few things that I think is really interesting. That in that sort of age range from 12 to sort of 15 or 16, boredom does rise. Boredom does get worse over that sort of period of time. And for me, I think the idea there is a fairly obvious one that at that stage of development, the 11-, 12-year-old is just getting the most sophisticated human skills coming online. They’re just starting to get there, right? Things like abstract reasoning, complex decision making, impulse control, all of these kinds of things are just starting to come online. 

But at the same time, they’re emotionally volatile. They’re all over the shop with their emotions. And they’re still constrained. Their parents tell them what to do, the school tells them what to do, and so they don’t have a lot of autonomy. So that’s a great recipe for boredom because you’ve got all this stuff that you feel like you should be able to use—all these new skills, new cognitive abilities and all these new emotions that you need to deal with. And you feel like you should be able to use those, and the world is constraining you still to mean that you can’t, you can’t use them. And so it doesn’t surprise me that boredom starts to ramp up at that age. 

It then starts to drop in the late teens and early twenties. And that’s an important neurodevelopmental stage, too, because at that point, the final parts of brain maturation are coming online. So, the brain is not fully mature until about 25 years of age. I love telling my sons that—they’re now 17 and 21. And I love pointing out, particularly to the 21-year-old, that he’s still not quite there yet. And the part of the brain that is coming online in those years is the frontal cortex, that front part of your brain just above your eyes. And this part of the brain is most important for what we call “executive control” or “executive functions.” And that is all those things I’ve just mentioned already. Abstract reasoning, complex decision making, impulse control, planning ahead. Any of your listeners with teenagers know that their capacity for planning is barely existent, probably non-existent. And so it’s not surprising that as those skills get better in late teenage, early twenties, that boredom starts to drop off. 

And then it continues to drop into our sort of middle decades. And that, too, is probably not surprising. We all get jobs, we start families, we have responsibilities. Who has the time for being bored, right? And so it’s not surprising to me that the boredom sort of drops off. It never quite disappears. There’s a great study from Chin and colleagues called “Bored in the USA,” where they did lots and lots of experience sampling across the full age range and across many people in the United States. And boredom was still one of the highest reported experiences even in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. 

And then it starts to rise up again in our later decades in the 60s and 70s, and there it’s commonly associated with social disconnection. So its most common bedfellow in the 60s and 70s is loneliness. And I think we know that this is a challenge for a lot of different reasons and we know that loneliness is associated with poor physical and mental health outcomes. But it makes a lot of sense and on that front, too, one of my colleagues, Mark Fenske, just published some really interesting recent work showing that hearing loss in the elderly is associated with boredom. And it just makes perfect sense to me that as your hearing goes, you struggle to connect in conversation, and you withdraw from those conversations, and you’re lonely and bored. And that makes a lot of sense to me.

[Kris Perry]: Have rates of boredom increased over time?

[Dr. James Danckert]: Yeah, that’s a great question as well, and Elizabeth Weybright and others have shown that the answer to that is yes. So her study, which—what you need to do when you want to answer that question is what we call a “longitudinal study.” We need to follow the same people over time, and that’s exactly what she did. So for a decade from 07 to 2017, I think, she followed teenagers in school and there was this significant, you know, slight but significant increase in reports of boredom over time. And more so for girls. So why that is the case is anybody’s guess,  I think there’s more work that needs to be done there. It might be about a heightened level of social comparison among girls versus boys. It might be that the boys are more likely to do active things outside of social media than girls are, I don’t know, there’s lots of possibilities there. But then there’s been other studies, too, from groups in China and other sort of parts of the world that show that indeed reports of boredom have been on the rise over the last decade or so.

[Kris Perry]: What’s known about the advent of large amounts of screen time and personal device use in the last, say, 10 to 15 years and how that might relate to increased boredom?

[Dr. James Danckert]: Yeah, I get asked that a lot now, and we haven’t done this work but there is a lot of interesting work out there that’s relevant to that. I do always want to preface it with being really careful about not joining the cacophony of people saying “the internet ruined my brain.” You know, and the story I like to tell is that Socrates worried that writing things down would destroy our capacity for memory, and the irony of that is that we only know that because Plato wrote it down. So we’ve always worried about the advent of new technologies, but here we are doing a podcast at different parts of the world on the internet and, you know,  technology does wonderful things for us, and so I always want to start with that caveat. 

But there is some interesting sort of data, and we’re about to publish some ourselves, too, showing that there’s a fairly sort of small but significant correlation between boredom proneness and the number of hours that people spend on social media and their phones in a given week. Others have shown what they call “problematic smartphone use” being associated with boredom. This is kind of an addiction-like description of how people are interacting with their phones. So, problematic smartphone use is that a person will turn to their phone more and more over time, and they’ll feel more and more anxious when they’re away from their phone. Both of those things—you could take phone out of that equation and put alcohol or drugs and it’s very much an addiction-like behaviour. And there’s some studies from John Elhai and others showing that boredom and boredom-proneness are pretty strong drivers of that problematic smartphone use. I should also point out that that represents about, depending on the study that you look at, about four to eight percent of users. So, it’s absolutely worth our attention and something that we should research in more detail, but I don’t think it sort of counts as an epidemic. 

And so, yeah, I do think boredom is a call to action, and how you use social media and how you use the internet will be important in determining whether or not you’ve got a positive or negative relationship with the devices and social media. So the other example I come back to on that front comes from the pandemic. A lot of people we had—my wife included—jumped on the sourdough baking craze during the pandemic. It was a big deal. Everybody thought that this was a wonderful thing. And you know what? It was. She learned how to bake sourdough bread. She continues to do so to this day. I get wonderful bread to eat every week, and it’s a fantastic thing that she would not have learned were it not for YouTube, right? And there’s plenty of other things like that, that people—so, both on the user, so my wife watching these clips and learning something, and on the person posting, you know, creatively sharing their knowledge. These are wonderful uses of the technology and wonderful uses of social media and I think the thing that distinguishes them from bored uses of this is that they’re active, right? You’re actively learning something, you’re actively engaging. If you’re simply scrolling, you’re sort of doom-scrolling through your media, that’s a passive way to use the internet, a passive way to use social media. And it’s that passivity that is more associated with boredom and boredom proneness, and it’s that that we want to get away from.

[Kris Perry]: Exactly. So, when you talk about active or passive use of media, social media, and that can result in problematic smartphone use, are there particular uses of screens that would affect boredom-proneness? Can you give some concrete examples of a way to use media in a positive way when you’re feeling the trigger of boredom?

[Dr. James Danckert]: Yeah, I mean, this is all just my opinion at this point. I don’t have any data to back any of this up because, as I said earlier, we haven’t really done these kinds of intervention studies. But I think the distinction between active and passive is the clear one there, and I sort of might return to creativity. You know, I said the boredom won’t make you creative, but creative uses of technology will probably eliminate your boredom. So, if you if you want to sit down and, you know, record your own podcast, I mean, I know there’s—podcasts are proliferating nowadays, but you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re going to get 100,000 people as an audience, you can just sort of, you know, use it—I was actually on a podcast of someone who said that they started it because they were bored, and so you know this is a creative way to express the things that you’re experiencing to connect with others and so again—but it has that active sort of component, and using you know the the internet for sort of creative purposes as well—my son does a lot of game design. That can be fairly isolating, but there’s also a community that he can connect with and share ideas and they can bounce those things back and forward, and I think that is a good use of these sorts of things. 

The key, I think, whether or not it’s the internet, social media, or the real world, the key to eliminating boredom is that it has to be a choice that you make, it has to come from your own agency. You have to be the one that decides. So if we return to the child that says to their parent, “I’m bored,” and they want you to fix it for them, all of your suggestions to your child fail because they’re not coming from the child, right? The child needs to generate these ideas themselves, and so does the adult. So if you want to interact online in whatever way, you have to do so with intentionality, I think is the key.

[Kris Perry]: You mentioned the parent and the child, and I’m thinking of instances probably where the parent has some issues around their boredom and how to address it, that they might be modeling less ideal ways of coping to the child, just in the environment. The child might not be seeing an adult address their boredom in a more productive way or a healthy way, and that could be, you know, impacting their choices too, and you’ve looked at multitasking and boredom. Can you tell us more about that work and what it might tell us about multitasking with screens and how that interacts with boredom? 

[Dr. James Danckert]: Yeah, so my student, Allison Drody, just recently published something on what we call sort of media multitasking, so doing multiple things online at the same time, and boredom. And it shows sort of fairly obviously, I guess, that the more bored people were, the more likely they were to media multitask. And what we know from decades of research on multitasking—so it doesn’t have to be online, just multitasking in general—humans are bad at it. We’re actually very, very bad at multitasking. So we sometimes like to think that we can do multiple things at once, but it’s really better if we focus on one thing, get it done, and then move on to the next, right? You know, we might be able to juggle a lot of projects at once, but when we get down to it, we have to focus on a single task and get that done. 

And so, boredom and multitasking online is not going to satisfactorily deal with your boredom either, because I think you’re sort of having your attention bounce from one thing to the next. And this was shown recently by Katy Tam and Mickey Inzlicht, they showed that more flicking from one video to the next, and they did some other sorts of experiments, but the easiest one is if you’re flicking from TikToks or YouTube shorts and the more that you did that, the more bored you were. So, it was a sort of vicious cycle that you would turn to these things because you wanted to occupy your mind, but they’re not really that engaging, they’re not really that purposeful or meaningful. And so then you keep doing more of them, and then that makes you bored, and then you keep doing more and then you’re bored. And so it’s a kind of vicious cycle that she showed in her research. And so yeah, I’m not sure if that fully answers your question, but that’s what we know so far.

[Kris Perry]: Well, I mean, thinking more about solutions to that vicious cycle in this kind of hyper-connected age we’re in, there are some people making arguments that parents should encourage kids to be bored. And I’m wondering, does that make sense? Or should we think about it as encouraging open, empty time instead of bored time?

[Dr. James Danckert]: I think you’re 100% correct there that it should be about comfort with downtime. I think downtime is useful and good. Being able to relax and just be with yourself and be with your thoughts is a good thing. That’s not boredom, right? And so, I would never encourage anyone to encourage boredom in their child. The more you encourage boredom, the more likely you are to create a boredom-prone child, and as I said earlier, there’s nothing good associated with being chronically bored. So no, I would never advise a parent to encourage boredom. But as you say, I think encouraging downtime, encouraging sort of recharge time, do something that doesn’t have to have a purpose or a goal necessarily, but that allows you to be more open to possibilities. That kind of thing I think is absolutely useful to children and to adults. 

So, you know, how you encourage that is the next question and I’m not really sure how to answer that for you. Maybe that’s why people are saying we should encourage kids to sit with their boredom. I do think that our own efforts to eliminate their boredom won’t work, so we shouldn’t try and eliminate their boredom for them. I think also this notion of encouraging kids to sit with their boredom comes from another part of parenting of the last couple of decades of over-scheduling our kids and I think we probably should try to avoid that over-scheduling because, in a sense, when we over-schedule our kids, we’re also taking away their autonomy. We’re telling them you’ve got to go to this thing and that thing and you’ve got to do more of it and now you’ve got to come home and do your homework. We never let them have downtime. So I would encourage less scheduling and promotion of downtime and free play of some kind. 

There was a study years and years ago where in a New Zealand school, primary school, where they sort of ripped out all of the structured play equipment, and they just had a playground that was just partly forested, partly open area, and the kids could do whatever they liked. They found that they were more active and then more attentive when they came back to class, right? So I think that kind of open play, open exploratory behaviour is fantastic to encourage, but yeah, I would never encourage boredom.

[Kris Perry]: I think of that as liminal time, right? So where the brain has an opportunity to reorganize and sort of restructure some of the work it’s doing. It tends to happen when you take your attention off of a task for a little while and let it—and just let your brain breathe and come back to something more focused. And you also talked about the connection between boredom and loneliness. Do you find that boredom leads to loneliness or vice versa?

[Dr. James Danckert]: So, the classic thing that we tell our first-year undergraduate students in Psych 101 is that correlation is not causation. And so, what we know at the moment is that boredom and loneliness are correlated, and it’s really hard to do, and probably ethically inappropriate to try and do a causal study there,you know, try and make one group more lonely than another and then see if they get bored more. So, I’m not sure that we’ll ever really get to the bottom of that, but we do know, as I mentioned in the elderly, certainly, that there’s a relationship there. We just don’t know what the arrow is for that, the causal arrow.

[Kris Perry]: Some companies are marketing AI companion chatbots to combat loneliness. Do you think social media use and AI companion chatbots could be affecting boredom or loneliness, and is anyone researching this?

[Dr. James Danckert]: I’m not aware of people researching the connection between AI companions and boredom. It would be a great area for people to look into. It’s so rapidly changing that it’s really hard, you know, researchers like myself sometimes have to play catch up with the advances of technology because it just happens too fast and research is a kind of slow process. 

I would feel like a lot of what we do in this world is what we would say is embodied. We have a physical plant, our bodies. I don’t want a future where we’re interacting more of our time with robots, but I think that the chatbot companions are only gonna go so far because they’re not embodied. The kind of interactions that we want, even though you and I are doing this right now on a screen, right? We’re looking at each other, we can respond to one another, we can see each other’s expressions and emotions, and we can work off of those, use those to sort of guide where the conversation goes next and what we say next. And then our experiences, and just how good we feel about our experiences, not just happening in our brains, which is all a chatbot has, its computational brain, its deep learning brain. Our experiences happen in our bodies, and our bodies interact with our brains, and that’s what makes our experiences good, bad, or otherwise. 

And so, I think that there may be circumstances where chatbots—and certainly the Japanese are a bit more advanced than the rest in actual robot interactions with humans and how people might be engaging with that. There might be circumstances where this is quite useful, so I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. But, ultimately, what I think we need as humans is in the real world, physical interactions with other human beings.

[Kris Perry]: How did you decide to start studying boredom?

[Dr. James Danckert]: There were two things that drove my study of boredom. The first was, I guess, as a younger man, sort of in my late teens and early twenties, I started to experience boredom and really hated it. And I still do to this day. I experience boredom a lot less, but when I do experience it, I hate the experience. And so, part of that then, you know, I think you find that with many psychologists—my wife did a PhD in memory, she has the worst memory of anyone I’ve ever known. And so, you know, psychologists, we study what we’re bad at. So that was one kind of reason why I got into boredom. 

The other was a bit more personal. So when I was about 19, my older brother, who’s 18 months older than me, had a serious motor vehicle crash and he had a very serious brain injury. He was in intensive care for quite a while. He was in inpatient rehab for a couple of months and then outpatient rehab for several months after that. He got back to living independently, maintained a job and had a full life and all that kind of stuff. But during his sort of early recovery, he reported being bored a lot. Like he would just say he was bored with things that normally he really loved. He was a drummer and loved music. And, you know, he had an injury to his wrist that meant that drumming took a while to come back, but even when it came back, he said he was bored of it more than he used to be. So to me, that said that something organic had changed in his brain to reset thresholds for what was engaging, enjoyable, pleasurable. And I wanted to understand that. What was it in his brain that had reset? So those were the two things that got me into boredom research.

[Kris Perry]: Hmm. As you’ve progressed through all your research and work, what’s the one finding or “aha” moment that you would pick out as something that really surprised you or changed your thinking?

[Dr. James Danckert]: I guess one of the things that’s come up recently is this notion of agency, right? So that when we’re bored, that we feel like we are not being very effective agents in the world. And what I mean by agency is the belief that you are in control of your actions and your goal pursuit and all that kind of stuff, you’re the one in the driver’s seat. And so I’m not sure that I call it an “aha” moment, but it really is this thing that kind of ties a lot of the rest of it in together. That when we’re bored, we’re feeling this—not only this desire for desires, this need for something to engage with, but we’re also feeling, fairly acutely, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, that we’re not being very effective. And to me, that speaks—and maybe the “aha” part about that—is that it speaks to what we might call a “Goldilocks zone.” That you have this resource in your head, it’s extraordinary, it’s the most remarkable organ in your body. And if you underutilise that resource, it feels bad and probably that’s one of the instances in which you feel bored. And if you overutilise it, it feels bad and you can be bored at that upper end as well. 

So, what we’re driven to do, and I think this is true of other animals as well, is to use this resource in an optimal way to find the Goldilocks zone of where and how we’re using our brain resources. And so I think that’s the reason why that might be the best candidate for an “aha” moment is because it is so cross-species. All mammals, and probably birds as well, are likely to have that kind of thing. Whatever the amount of resources you have up in your noggin, you want to deploy them on the world in an optimal way. And I think that’s a really key drive that we and other animals share.

[Kris Perry]: I love that answer. You mentioned how fast technology is changing and how research often has to catch up a little bit to understand what it’s doing. What do you think should be researched next about boredom?

[Dr. James Danckert]: Well, as we’ve touched on a couple of times through this conversation, one of the things that really needs to get done is what do we do about it, right? So what are the kinds of interventions, and particularly for things—I’m what we’d call a “blue sky researcher.” I just want to understand things about the human condition, understand the mechanisms that make this brain tick. The other side of this is applied research, and I think we need to do a lot more applied research, particularly in settings like schools, to try and, first of all—what’s the best way to identify when a kid is bored, and then what can we do about it to make them less bored? And there’s lots of ideas floating around that will centre around things like agency, give the child some control. There’s probably a little bit less boredom in Montessori schools than there is in other schools because the children have a lot more freedom to do what they want to do. I think that—I don’t know the research on those schools that well, but you know, I’m not trying to put that up there on the pedestal as a perfect school system at all, but it just highlights that when you do give children autonomy about what they want to do, that you’re less likely to see them be bored. So some of that applied research, and it’s not just going to be schools, you know, in a lot of work settings, boredom at work is a big issue, and one that hurts productivity and hurts the mental health and wellbeing of the workers. So that would be something that we would want to do. 

And then there’s still a lot more to do in terms of trying to understand the brain states that are associated with being bored. I talked a little bit about interoception, this idea of your internal body states. We wanna know, how is it that people use those internal body states to anticipate how things will feel? Because we think that people who are prone to boredom struggle to launch into action because they can’t figure out what’s gonna work best. And maybe it’s because they can’t use those internal body states to anticipate what will work best for them. So that’s the research that we’re gonna pursue in the next little while. But yeah, I think mostly a lot more work on sort of applied settings to try and figure out what do we do about boredom.

[Kris Perry]: What’s one thing you think parents and caregivers should know about boredom that would help their kids lead a healthier life?

[Dr. James Danckert]: The first thing I’d say is it’s not bad. There’s nothing bad about boredom, necessarily. There’s something bad about being chronically bored, but there’s nothing bad about the feeling itself. It’s normal, everybody experiences it, and it’s functional, right? It serves to drive you to do something else. 

And then the second thing I’d say, and this is just an opinion, I don’t know how well it will work, but is to sit down with your young child when they’re not bored and get them to come up with a top five list. A top five list of things that they could do next time they’re bored. It’s not gonna work when they’re in the moment of boredom because they’re not gonna be receptive to it at that point. But if you just think about it, say, “Hey, Tommy, let’s come over here and sit down at the kitchen table. Remember when you were bored yesterday? What are the five things that you think will work best?” And then you post that list up on their wall and they know they can go to it, right? And the important thing about that list is that they’ve chosen it. They’ve determined what the best things would be to do. And then they can go to it. Maybe that will help. Like I say, it’s opinion. I don’t know if that’s gonna work, but my hope is that it might.

[Kris Perry]: Oh, I love that example of you helping scaffold your child’s ability to solve for their own boredom, which can be a really positive thing. 

That’s it for today’s episode of Screen Deep. A big thank you to you, Dr. James Danckert, for helping us rethink boredom, not as something to avoid, but as something to understand. If you found this conversation helpful, please subscribe, leave us a review, and check out the episode notes at www.childrenandscreens.org for more resources. I’m Kris Perry. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.