Boredom

Abstract

Boredom is an aversive emotion, classified by MeSH under the emotions, in which a person wants to be engaged but cannot connect their attention to any satisfying activity. Long dismissed as a trivial mood, it is now the subject of a focused experimental literature in cognitive psychology. The dominant account defines boredom not by its content but by a failure of attention, while competing accounts hold that it also signals a lack of meaning, tracks a mismatch between a task's demands and a person's resources, or follows from low perceived control and value. This article covers how boredom is defined, theorized, and measured as both a passing state and a stable trait, and why a reliably unpleasant emotion may still be functional. Interactive demos let the reader vary attention, arousal, control, and value and watch predicted boredom change.

Keywords: boredom, attention, meaning

Everyone knows what it is to be bored, yet boredom is surprisingly hard to pin down. It is not simply the absence of something to do — a person can be idle and content, or frantically busy and bored out of their mind. It is not mere tiredness, though it feels draining, nor simple dislike, though it is unpleasant. What marks boredom is a peculiar combination: the desire to be engaged together with the inability to find anything that engages. For most of the twentieth century psychology left this state to the philosophers and the essayists, but over the past two decades it has become the subject of a focused experimental literature that treats boredom as a window onto attention, motivation, and the regulation of meaning (Eastwood et al., 2012; Westgate & Wilson, 2018).

What Boredom Is

The most influential definition of boredom in contemporary psychology is deliberately a definition in terms of mental process rather than situation. Synthesizing older psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive accounts, boredom has been characterized as 'the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,' and that experience is then mapped onto attention: boredom is the aversive state that arises when a person cannot successfully engage attention with the internal or external information a satisfying activity requires, becomes focused on that failure to engage, and attributes the cause to the environment (Eastwood et al., 2012). On this account boredom is not caused by monotony as such but by the breakdown of attentional engagement, which is why a dull lecture and an over-stimulating crowd can both be boring and why a person can be bored by their own wandering thoughts.

Defining boredom through the unengaged mind does three things at once. It explains the phenomenology — the restlessness, the sense that time is crawling, the hunt for stimulation — as the felt signature of attention that is trying and failing to lock on. It brings older theories into dialogue, because arousal accounts (boredom as under- or over-arousal), existential accounts (boredom as meaninglessness), and cognitive accounts (boredom as a mismatch of demands and resources) can each be read as describing a different way attentional engagement can fail. And it distinguishes boredom from neighboring states: unlike mental fatigue, in which the capacity to engage is depleted, the bored person retains the capacity and the desire but cannot find purchase; unlike depression, boredom is tied to the present situation and lifts when a genuinely engaging activity appears. Experimental work confirms that boredom is experientially distinct from other negative states such as sadness, anger, and frustration, carrying its own signature of feeling unchallenged while judging the situation and one's actions to be meaningless (van Tilburg & Igou, 2012).

Theories of Boredom

If boredom is a failure of engagement, the natural next question is what, precisely, fails. Three families of theory answer differently, and the most developed contemporary model combines them. The arousal tradition, the oldest, treats boredom as a problem of stimulation level: too little stimulation leaves the system under-aroused and restless, too much leaves it unable to settle, and boredom sits at both ends of the curve rather than only at the low one. The meaning tradition, drawing on existential thought, treats boredom as a signal that an activity is empty of personal significance; on this view the bored person is not merely under-stimulated but is failing to find anything worth doing, and boredom functions as part of a wider system of meaning regulation (van Tilburg & Igou, 2012).

The Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model unifies these strands by describing boredom as an affective indicator of unsuccessful attentional engagement in valued, goal-congruent activity, with two independent causes. The first is an attentional component: a mismatch between the cognitive demands of an activity and the mental resources available for it — a demand too low (understimulation) or too high (overstimulation) both break engagement. The second is a meaning component: a mismatch between the activity and a person's valued goals, or the absence of any valued goal to pursue. Crucially the model predicts that deficits in attention and in meaning each produce boredom independently of the other, that different combinations yield recognizably different profiles of boredom, and — because the account is about engagement rather than external tasks — that people can become bored not only with activities in the world but with their own thoughts (Westgate & Wilson, 2018). Table 1 sets the three traditions side by side.

The attentional and arousal strands meet in the prediction that boredom is worst when the fit between a task's demands and a person's capacity is poor at either extreme. A task far below a person's capacity gives attention nothing to grip; a task far above it defeats attention and drives it away. Between the two lies the zone of engagement in which attention locks on and boredom recedes — the same inverted-U relationship that older arousal theories drew between stimulation and performance. The demo below lets this fit be varied directly.

Measuring Boredom

Boredom is studied in two forms, and the distinction is methodological as much as conceptual. State boredom is the momentary experience — how bored a person is, right now, in a particular situation — and is typically induced in the laboratory (with a monotonous task or a dull video) and measured with brief self-report. Trait boredom, or boredom proneness, is the stable disposition to become bored easily and often across many situations, and is measured with questionnaires. The two are related but separable: a person high in boredom proneness will tend to report more state boredom, but any person can be made bored by a sufficiently disengaging situation.

The standard trait instrument for a generation was the Boredom Proneness Scale, the first full-scale self-report measure of the disposition. Its development established that boredom proneness could be measured with acceptable internal consistency and test-retest reliability, and that it correlated in expected ways with depression, hopelessness, loneliness, and an amotivational orientation, while relating negatively to life satisfaction and autonomy (Farmer & Sundberg, 1986). A review of a quarter-century of boredom measurement concluded that the Boredom Proneness Scale was, for most of that period, the only full-scale measure of the construct, and examined its psychometric properties alongside the narrower job-boredom and boredom-coping scales (Vodanovich, 2003). That history matters for reading the older literature: much of what was known about 'boredom' was really known about scores on one trait scale, and the more recent turn toward defining and inducing state boredom was in part a response to that narrowness.

Causes and Correlates

Because boredom is a failure of engagement, its causes are anything that breaks engagement — and these sort into features of the situation, of the person, and of the fit between them. Early industrial research sought the cause in the task alone, in monotony and repetition, but that approach could not explain boredom on any but the simplest jobs. A broader analysis of workplace boredom located its causes jointly in attributes of the task, the environment, the person, and the person-environment fit, and noted that the same conditions produce different degrees of boredom in different people and that boredom can be reduced by goal-setting and by how a person chooses to respond to it (Fisher, 1993). The lesson generalizes beyond work: no single feature of a situation is reliably boring, because boredom depends on the interaction between what a situation offers and what a person brings.

In achievement settings this interaction has been formalized by control-value theory, which treats boredom as one of a family of achievement emotions driven by two appraisals: how much control a person feels they have over an activity and its outcomes, and how much they value it. The theory predicts, and a series of studies across North American and German samples confirmed, that low perceived control and low value together predict boredom, and that achievement boredom in turn predicts attention problems and lower intrinsic motivation, effort, self-regulated learning, and subsequent performance (Pekrun et al., 2010). The 2×2 of control and value makes the prediction vivid: boredom is concentrated in the cell where both are low, and any route that raises control or value should move a person out of it.

At the level of the brain, state boredom has been tied to the machinery of sustained attention. When healthy participants were scanned during a boredom induction, a sustained-attention task, an interest induction, and rest, the boredom and sustained-attention conditions were distinguished from rest by anticorrelated activity between the posterior default mode network and the anterior insula, a pattern read as a failure to engage executive-control networks when a task demands engagement but is too monotonous to sustain it (Danckert & Merrifield, 2018). This neural picture fits the attentional definition closely: boredom appears where the brain is trying to mount sustained attention to a dull task and the networks that would support engagement fail to lock in.

Functions and Consequences

Boredom's correlates are overwhelmingly negative. Trait boredom is associated with depression, loneliness, and low life satisfaction (Farmer & Sundberg, 1986); achievement boredom predicts worse motivation and performance (Pekrun et al., 2010); and across the literature boredom keeps company with aggression, impulsivity, and a range of poor outcomes. Taken alone this might suggest that boredom is simply a problem to be eliminated. A functional analysis argues the opposite. On this view boredom is a regulatory state, uncomfortable by design, whose discomfort is the point: it signals that the current situation is failing to satisfy and motivates a person to seek something more engaging or more meaningful, and so has the capacity to promote well-being by driving personal growth and the pursuit of a meaningful life (Elpidorou, 2018).

The functional view reconciles boredom's unpleasantness with its ubiquity. An emotion that felt good would not do the work boredom does; it is aversive precisely so that it is hard to ignore and pushes toward change. This mirrors the meaning account directly — if boredom partly signals a lack of meaning, then the response it motivates is the restoration of meaning, whether by re-engaging with the present activity or by abandoning it for a more valued one (van Tilburg & Igou, 2012; Elpidorou, 2018). Whether boredom's push is adaptive in any given case depends on where it leads: the same signal that moves one person to a more meaningful project moves another to a merely more stimulating distraction. Boredom tells a person that something must change; it does not tell them what.

Worked Example

Control-value theory makes a quantitative prediction that can be laid out explicitly. Let perceived control over an activity be C and the value placed on it be V, each on a 0-to-1 scale, and model the resulting boredom as B = (1 − C)(1 − V), a simple index that is high only when both control and value are low and falls toward zero as either rises. The multiplicative form captures the theory's central claim — that boredom lives in the cell where control and value are both low — rather than treating the two appraisals as independent additive contributions.

Consider three students in the same statistics class. The first finds the material baffling and sees no point in it: C = 0.2, V = 0.2, giving B = (0.8)(0.8) = 0.64 — deep boredom, because the activity is neither manageable nor worthwhile to them. The second understands the material well but still sees no point in it: C = 0.8, V = 0.2, giving B = (0.2)(0.8) = 0.16. The third finds it hard but cares about it: C = 0.2, V = 0.8, giving B = (0.8)(0.2) = 0.16. The two single-deficit students land at the same modest boredom, far below the first, and a fourth student with C = 0.8 and V = 0.8 reaches B = (0.2)(0.2) = 0.04, effectively not bored.

The arithmetic makes the theory's practical content concrete. Raising either appraisal sharply cuts boredom — moving the first student's control from 0.2 to 0.8 drops B from 0.64 to 0.16, a change of 0.48, as does raising their value by the same amount — so an intervention has two independent levers, making a task feel more manageable or making it feel more worthwhile, and either can pull a learner out of the high-boredom corner. The model is an illustration of the logic of control-value theory, not a measurement instrument; real appraisals are not read off a formula and the scale is arbitrary. What the numbers show is the shape of the dependence: boredom as a product, concentrated where both appraisals fail and relieved by raising either one.

Discussion

Reading boredom as a failure of attentional engagement rather than as a property of dull situations ties it to the rest of cognitive psychology instead of leaving it an isolated mood. If boredom is what engagement feels like when it fails, then the three older theories are not rivals but descriptions of different failure modes, and the MAC model's two components — an attentional mismatch and a meaning mismatch — are a principled way to enumerate them (Eastwood et al., 2012; Westgate & Wilson, 2018). The control-value account can be read in the same frame: low control is one way the attentional fit fails, and low value is one way meaning fails, so a theory built for achievement settings and a theory built for the general case converge on the same two levers (Pekrun et al., 2010).

This convergence also clarifies what boredom is good for. The functional analysis and the meaning account agree that boredom is a signal and a goad — unpleasant so that it compels a response, and pointed at the restoration of engagement or meaning (Elpidorou, 2018; van Tilburg & Igou, 2012). Whether that makes boredom a help or a hazard is not settled by the emotion itself but by what follows it, which is why the same state is linked both to creativity and self-reflection and to impulsivity and distraction. The open questions concern the mechanism: how the attentional and meaning components interact, how the neural signature of disengaged attention relates to the subjective report, and whether boredom proneness is a single trait or a family of distinct vulnerabilities (Danckert & Merrifield, 2018; Vodanovich, 2003).

Current Directions

The study of boredom has shifted from arguing that it deserves attention to building and testing mechanistic models of it. The MAC model's prediction that attention and meaning are independent routes into boredom has reframed the empirical agenda around dissociating the two, and around the model's more surprising claim that people can be bored by their own thoughts, which connects boredom research to work on mind-wandering and the wandering, disengaged mind (Westgate & Wilson, 2018). A second front is neural: treating boredom as a state of failed sustained attention and asking how the interplay of the default mode network and attentional-control networks distinguishes boredom from engagement, and whether that signature predicts who becomes bored and when (Danckert & Merrifield, 2018). A third is functional and applied — testing whether the push boredom provides can be channeled toward growth rather than distraction, and whether control- and value-raising interventions reduce the achievement boredom that predicts disengagement from learning (Pekrun et al., 2010; Elpidorou, 2018). Across all three the direction of travel is the same: away from boredom as a single dull feeling and toward boredom as a family of engagement failures with distinct causes, signatures, and uses.

Common Misconceptions

Boredom is just having nothing to do.

A person can have nothing to do and be perfectly content, or be surrounded by things to do and still be bored. Boredom is a failure to engage attention in something satisfying, not an empty schedule, and it can arise amid plenty of available activity (Eastwood et al., 2012).

Boredom is caused by monotony and repetition alone.

Industrial research that sought the cause of boredom in monotony could not explain it on any but the simplest tasks. Boredom depends on the fit between a situation and the person, so the same task bores some people and not others, and overstimulation can be as boring as understimulation (Fisher, 1993; Westgate & Wilson, 2018).

Boredom is the same thing as tiredness or depression.

Boredom is experientially distinct from other negative states, carrying its own signature of feeling unchallenged and that the situation is meaningless. Unlike fatigue, the bored person still wants to engage; unlike depression, boredom is tied to the present situation and lifts when something genuinely engaging appears (van Tilburg & Igou, 2012).

Boredom is purely bad and should always be eliminated.

Boredom is reliably unpleasant and correlates with poor outcomes, but a functional view holds that its discomfort is useful: it signals an unsatisfying situation and motivates a person to seek something more engaging or meaningful. Its value depends on where that push leads (Elpidorou, 2018).

Glossary

Attentional component.

In the MAC model, boredom caused by a mismatch between an activity's cognitive demands and the mental resources available — either understimulation or overstimulation.

Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS).

The first full-scale self-report measure of trait boredom, long the standard instrument for assessing the disposition.

Boredom proneness.

The stable trait disposition to become bored easily and often across many situations, as distinct from momentary state boredom.

Boredom.

The aversive state of wanting to engage in satisfying activity and being unable to, understood in cognitive psychology as a failure of attentional engagement.

Control-value theory.

An account of achievement emotions holding that boredom arises when perceived control over an activity and the value placed on it are both low.

Default mode network.

A set of brain regions active during rest and internally directed thought, whose interplay with attentional-control networks is altered during boredom.

MAC model.

The Meaning and Attentional Components model, which describes boredom as arising independently from an attentional mismatch and from a meaning mismatch.

Meaning component.

In the MAC model, boredom caused by a mismatch between an activity and a person's valued goals, or by the absence of any valued goal.

Meaning regulation.

The system by which people monitor and restore a sense of meaning; on the meaning account, boredom is a signal within it that an activity has become meaningless.

Overstimulation.

A state in which a task's demands exceed a person's capacity, defeating attention and, in the MAC model, producing boredom as surely as understimulation does.

State boredom.

The momentary experience of boredom in a particular situation, typically induced and measured directly in the laboratory.

Sustained attention.

The capacity to maintain attentional focus on a task over time, whose failure is closely tied to state boredom.

Trait boredom.

The enduring tendency to experience boredom, measured by questionnaire and related to but separable from state boredom.

Understimulation.

A state in which a task's demands fall far below a person's capacity, giving attention too little to engage and producing boredom.

Key Researchers

James Danckert

. Professor of cognitive neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo; studies boredom as a failure of sustained attention and its default-mode-network signature, and co-wrote a general-audience book on the psychology of boredom.

John D. Eastwood

. Associate Professor of Psychology at York University in Toronto and director of the Boredom Lab; co-authored the influential attentional definition of boredom as the unengaged mind and co-wrote a general-audience account of the psychology of boredom.

Reinhard Pekrun

. Professor of psychology affiliated with the University of Essex and Australian Catholic University and emeritus at the University of Munich; applied control-value theory to academic boredom, linking low perceived control and low value to boredom and to weaker achievement.

Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg

. Reader in Psychology at the University of Essex; showed with Eric Igou that boredom is experientially distinct from other negative emotions in its signature of low challenge and low meaning, and developed the meaning-regulation account of boredom.

Erin C. Westgate

. Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida; co-developed the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) model, which explains boredom as unsuccessful attentional engagement in valued, goal-congruent activity. ORCID

Frequently Asked Questions

What is boredom?

Boredom is the aversive state of wanting to engage in a satisfying activity and being unable to. Cognitive psychology defines it in terms of attention: the bored mind is trying to engage and failing, and experiences that failure as restlessness and the sense that time is dragging (Eastwood et al., 2012).

Is boredom caused by having nothing to do?

Not necessarily. A person can be idle and content or busy and bored. What produces boredom is the failure to engage attention in something satisfying, which depends on the fit between a situation and the person, not simply on how much there is to do (Fisher, 1993).

What is the difference between state and trait boredom?

State boredom is how bored a person is in a particular moment and situation; trait boredom, or boredom proneness, is the stable tendency to become bored easily across many situations. The two are related but separable, and they are measured differently (Farmer & Sundberg, 1986; Vodanovich, 2003).

What is the MAC model of boredom?

The Meaning and Attentional Components model describes boredom as arising from two independent causes: a mismatch between a task's cognitive demands and a person's mental resources (the attentional component) and a mismatch between an activity and a person's valued goals (the meaning component). Either alone can produce boredom (Westgate & Wilson, 2018).

Why do students get bored in class?

Control-value theory explains academic boredom as the product of low perceived control over the material and low value placed on it. Such boredom predicts attention problems, reduced motivation and effort, and worse performance, and is relieved by raising either appraisal (Pekrun et al., 2010).

What happens in the brain during boredom?

During a boredom induction, the posterior default mode network and the anterior insula show anticorrelated activity, a pattern also seen in a demanding sustained-attention task. This is read as a failure to engage executive-control networks when a task demands engagement but is too monotonous to sustain it (Danckert & Merrifield, 2018).

Is boredom different from other negative emotions?

Yes. Experimental work shows boredom is experientially distinct from sadness, anger, and frustration, carrying its own signature of feeling unchallenged while judging the situation and one's actions to be meaningless (van Tilburg & Igou, 2012).

Is boredom ever beneficial?

A functional view argues that boredom's discomfort is useful. By signaling that a situation is unsatisfying and pushing a person to seek something more engaging or meaningful, boredom can promote personal growth and the pursuit of a meaningful life, though whether it helps depends on where the push leads (Elpidorou, 2018).

References