When completed they would be the tallest buildings in the world. In a city forever trying to touch the sky, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center would top them all. And ever since he had read about them in a magazine in France, Philippe Petit had had a dream. He would rig a wire between the towers and walk on it for the entertainment of those below—his coup.
He spent six years in the planning, noting security guard movements in the unfinished towers, obtaining aerial photographs, scouting for anchor points, making clandestine excursions to the top to run through every detail. He even went to the extreme of constructing a miniature version of the towers to work through any potential problems. And he practiced for hours upon hours, walking a rope only meters above the ground in preparation for doing it all 400 meters above the chaos of New York’s streets.
The walk would last forty-five minutes. It was not simply a one-way walk across the wire. Petit intended to traverse the sixty-one meters eight times. He would hop from one foot to the other while holding his twenty-six-meter balancing pole, lie down on the wire, and wave to the gathering crowd.
Did Petit have a death wish? Was he a thrill seeker? On the contrary, on many occasions he has asserted that fear has no place on the wire, and while he acknowledged that the wire flaunts death, it was not death but life he sought. So if he had no death wish and the walk did not thrill him in a conventional sense, why would he do something so audacious? Perhaps for art’s sake, but perhaps also to experience the extreme sensation of flow—extraordinary concentration, an imperviousness to distraction (Petit once claimed that on the wire you could hit him in the head with a plank of wood and he would not move!), and a sense that his actions were one with the world.
Alex Honnold is a preeminent mountain climber, specializing in what is known as “free-soloing”—climbing mountains like El Capitan in Yosemite National Park—3,000 feet of sheer granite, without the assistance of any ropes.1 Most of us would see Honnold’s climb as crazy, like Petit’s walk on the wire, or maybe even providing evidence of a death wish. But that’s not how either one of them describes the experience. Planning is paramount, fear has no place in the endeavor, and far from a death wish, the activity makes them feel more alive than ever. In some sense, for Honnold or Petit to succeed in what they do, they must reach a level of hyperintense engagement.
Given our description of boredom as restlessness born of the failure to engage, then maybe the state Honnold strives for represents a kind of opposite to boredom. But is hyperengagement, deeply intense concentration, the only opposite of boredom, or are there others? By examining states and feelings that represent, in some form, the opposite of boredom, we can deepen our understanding and ultimately be better equipped to respond effectively to the signal when it does arise.
There are a plethora of possibilities for what constitutes boredom’s opposite. It might be excitement: the thrill of a rollercoaster ride, the anticipation of your team’s impending playoff victory, that moment before you go on stage to perform. Turn the dial down a little and perhaps interest is boredom’s opposite: engrossed in a novel, immersed in a complicated movie plot, even absorbed with a 1,000-piece puzzle. And what of pleasure? A four-course meal, an exhilarating concert, a night of passionate lovemaking? If not pleasure, relaxation? Resting poolside, walking through the park on a spring afternoon, “vegging out” in front of the TV at the end of a hard day’s work? Might any or all of these be the opposite of boredom? Quite simply, yes. What is common across excitement, pleasure, interest, curiosity, and even relaxation is that when we experience such things, our mind is occupied and we want to be doing what we are doing—we are satisfactorily engaged with the world. Below we explore some of these potential opposites of boredom through the lens of engagement, starting with perhaps the most prominent candidate, one that Honnold and Petit likely feel when we presume they should be in the throes of great terror—the experience of flow.
Almost fifty years ago, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi began developing a novel theory and methodology to address the “how” of human happiness.2 Like boredom, what makes us happy is ultimately idiosyncratic. Collectors can pore over the objects of their passion for hours on end, content to explore minutiae others can’t appreciate or even bear to think about. The content of what we do is less important than how we connect with it. This was Csikszentmihalyi’s insight. The methodology he introduced is known as “experience sampling.” Using diaries (that nowadays involve smartphone prompts), direct interviews, or more recently interruptions of ongoing tasks, Csikszentmihalyi simply asked people about their subjective experiences of the everyday.3 From rock climbers like Honnold, to factory workers, to surgeons, to performing artists, the message was clear—people were most fulfilled when so mentally engaged that the rest of the world seemed to fall away. Csikszentmihalyi’s participants often referred to this phenomenon as “flow.”4
Although they do not always parse them in exactly the same way, researchers have consistently identified a number of necessary characteristics for flow:
Some of these characteristics are arguably preconditions for flow while others can be thought of as the outcomes of achieving flow.5 Regardless, they are all important aspects of the flow experience and when present, they may protect us from boredom.
A key precondition for flow is a balance between what the moment demands of us and our ability to skillfully meet those demands (much like the other “Goldilocks” requirements we’ve already discussed). According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow occurs when that sweet spot is achieved—moments when we are in harmony with the situation. If we miss the mark on one side, discovering that we are not capable of meeting the demands of the task, we feel anxious. If we miss the mark on the other side, when a task is too simple for our skill set, we feel bored. Boredom pushes us to seek out bigger challenges, whereas anxiety warns us of the need to enhance our skill set. Together, these negative feelings point us toward flow.
A climb that each of us could make at the local gym, such as a 5.4, a low rating for a climb, would be facile for someone with the skill of Alex Honnold. It wouldn’t even be effective as a warm-up. He would likely skip straight to a 5.9 or 5.10 (challenging for a novice but a mere warm-up for him). If we think instead about the novice climber, a 5.9 climb may seem more of an insurmountable challenge than a warm-up. In either situation there is a clear mismatch between the individual’s skills and the demands of the task. We seek a Goldilocks zone where the match between the challenge level and our own skill set is “just right” to push our limits and lead us away from boredom and toward flow.
Recall our experimental demonstration of this need to fit challenge and skill to avoid boredom from Chapter 2: if we artificially let people win at the game rock, paper, scissors all the time, the task lacked any challenge. Far from getting in the zone, people found the experience to be mind-numbingly dull. As we’ve explained, however, this wasn’t the end of the story. People who lost all the time against the computer opponent first felt frustration before becoming bored.6
In another study, also first discussed in Chapter 2, we had two groups watch different twenty-minute videos. In one, the ridiculous mime plodded slowly and repetitively through a rudimentary English vocabulary lesson, and in the other, the mathematician taught advanced computer graphics via impossibly complex math and charts. No matter which video people watched, they wanted to poke their eyes out by the end. They were equally bored when under- or overchallenged.7 Counter to Csikszentmihalyi’s model of flow, boredom occurs not only when we are underchallenged. Instead, boredom arises at both ends of a challenge / skill mismatch—when things are either too easy or too hard. This fact has been realized for some time in the education world. Reinhard Pekrun, research chair at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, has shown that when school tasks far exceed students’ ability, they disengage from the task and experience it as boring because it can’t hold their attention.8
A second condition for flow is the sense that we are in control. If we think again of Alex Honnold free soloing a cliff face, we might imagine that to be terrifying. But that expected sense of terror arises from our own self-awareness that in such a circumstance we would be well and truly out of our element. The opposite is true for Honnold. To be sure, when he dangles from his fingertips hundreds of meters above the ground there is a chance he could fall to his death. But he doesn’t feel that sense of impending danger while in the midst of the climb. Instead, he has the sense that every move has been well planned and that he is in control of his own actions. To him that’s what makes climbing so absorbing and compelling. In a state of flow, there is a sense that any eventuality can be handled and that at each moment we determine what will happen next. In other words, we feel a profound sense of agency, a key factor that makes it a peak experience.
In contrast, boredom thwarts our agency. When we are bored, we have a diminished sense of control. The world happens to us, and we can’t change it. As we’ve seen in Chapter 2, boredom cuts us down before we even get started, making us unable to say what we want to do, yet imposing upon us the need to do something. If flow is characterized by peak agency, then boredom is surely the valley.
In a follow-up to our rock-paper-scissors study we deceived people in a different way. This time we had them play against a computer opponent that played each option equally often—meaning you could only ever win 33 percent of the time. We told one group the truth—your opponent is playing uniformly and randomly so there’s no way you can win more than one-third of the time. For this group there was no way they could exert control in the game, making continued play monotonous and boring. The second group we lied to, telling them their opponent employed an exploitable strategy, and if they could figure it out, they would win more often. This group was not bored at all, despite never winning more than a paltry 33 percent of the time. The mere prospect of gaining control—even when never realized—was enough to stave off boredom.
We’ve already mentioned that for Honnold to make a successful free solo climb he must plan it out in meticulous detail, just as Petit spent years planning his walk between the Twin Towers. The climb must challenge him to push his limits, but at the same time it needs to be planned so that each move is predictable, rehearsed. He must make just the right move, without even registering an intention to do so, and sense feedback from his body and the rock that will set up the next move. For flow to happen, the demands of the situation must be predictable and success just within reach. It has to be a stretch goal or that elusive match between skill and challenge is lost. Honnold won’t get into a state of flow during a climb that is super easy for him. Complete control is boring, as our initial rock-paper-scissors study showed. One hundred percent assurance of an outcome robs us of the chance to be the one to make it happen. Boredom and flow, on opposite ends of the control spectrum, are very differently affected by the degree of agency. An increase in agency leads to less boredom and more flow. Total predictability and assurance of an outcome, however, makes us irrelevant, and we disengage.
We need clear goals and unambiguous feedback for flow to arise. Flow simply won’t happen if we are uncertain about what we want to achieve or if we cannot gauge how far we are from our goal. To avoid boredom, we must be able to effectively articulate our goals, or at the very least, to choose from among available options the goal we want to pursue. Procrastination is perhaps the most obvious symptom of difficulty in deciding on a goal, one that may contribute to feeling “stuck” in the moment when bored. Indeed, those prone to experiencing boredom are also more likely to procrastinate. In particular, highly boredom-prone people engage in a specific form of procrastination best described as “talking yourself out of it”—a kind of indecision when deciding whether or not to start something.9 It is the coupling of the desire to engage and the failure to launch that is at the heart of what is so aversive about being bored. The fact that flow is accompanied by clearly delineated goals does little to explain how successful goal setting can be achieved or why it goes wrong when we’re bored. However, we do not have to be engaging in goal-directed behavior with clear feedback to avoid boredom. Daydreaming is a case in point. Arguably without a clearly specified goal and lacking in any form of feedback, daydreaming can nonetheless be absorbing.
Flow dissolves when we succumb to distraction. For Honnold or Petit, any lapse in concentration would be catastrophic. Time and time again, research has shown that boredom is accompanied by failures of concentration, whether lapses in everyday tasks (e.g., pouring orange juice on your cereal) or poor performance on laboratory tasks.10 But are there states in which concentration is not required and yet boredom can be kept at bay? In other words, do you need to concentrate in order to avoid boredom? Relaxing on a beach seems to require very little concentration. And most of us would say it is not boring. Just the same, we can recall times when we struggled to relax amid the sun and sand, restless and wanting to do something else. Relaxation has become boredom. So while concentration is critical to flow, and failures of attention or concentration are common to the experience of boredom, it does not follow that the absence of concentration necessarily leads to boredom. Our minds must be occupied, but they do not need to be intensely focused on error-free performance in order to sidestep boredom.
In a state of flow, all awareness of the self dissipates. Flow, in this sense, is close to the opposite of anxiety. Writ large, anxiety represents our concern for ourselves in the face of threat—real or perceived.11 When so intensely occupied by an activity that distraction is eliminated, our everyday fears and concerns recede into the background. Here again rock climbers provide a good example. Far from seeking thrills or tempting death, what brings these athletes back time and again to a challenge many of us would see as terrifying is the sense of complete calm that accompanies the climb. Indeed, many of Csikszentmihalyi’s respondents highlight the fact that they are seeking out the feeling of flow, and once in the midst of it, they feel no fear, no anxiety whatsoever. Honnold claims, “I generally climb hard routes in the absence of fear.”12 In contrast, boredom is strongly associated with self-awareness. The bored person is painfully aware that they have been unable to lose themselves in activity. With respect to self-focus, boredom is indeed the antithesis of flow. Similar patterns play out for those who often feel bored, with strong associations with self-focus, anxiety, and neuroticism.13 In this light, boredom and flow represent opposing ends of a continuum of focus on the self.
From his extensive interviews, particularly with those involved in extreme sports like rock climbing, Csikszentmihalyi suggests that for flow to exist, whatever we are engaged in must feel effortless. This does not mean the absence of complex physical or mental skill, just an ability to let those skills flow with ease and grace. Anyone who saw Honnold complete the first free-solo climb of El Capitan would not doubt that substantial physical and mental skill was required.14 Honnold himself notes, “I’m not thinking about anything when I’m climbing, which is part of the appeal.”15 Clearly the placement of his hands and feet requires precision and a great deal of preparation, skill, and practice. But in execution it feels effortless.
For Honnold, rock climbing is its own reward. Being a star of the climbing world no doubt has other perks, but we doubt that is why he climbs. People fortunate enough to experience flow have found activities that are intrinsically rewarding. The activity is pursued purely for the pleasure and reward that comes from being fully immersed and optimally challenged. Here too, flow is the opposite of boredom. When bored, we are unable to find anything that we want to do, let alone something that we want to do simply for its own sake. Intrinsically rewarding activities easily capture and hold our attention; we never have to force ourselves to do them. Intrinsically rewarding activities and boredom are like oil and water—they simply don’t mix.
The last of the core components of flow involves distortion of time. Csikszentmihalyi points out that while this is commonly a compression of time—hours feeling as though they pass by in minutes—this is not always the case. Intense attention to detail, to the here and now of an experience, can also make time feel as though it is standing still.
In either case, the person in a state of flow feels liberated from time. The distortion of time associated with flow—whether compression or expansion—is linked with the intensity of concentration that is a key part of the enjoyment of the state. This contrasts with boredom, where time drags on.16 Our perennial example is waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles for your number to be called, nothing to do but pass the time. Time that moves at glacial speeds is a component of boredom and is also prominent in those who chronically experience it. Time crawls when we’re bored because we are not mentally engaged,17 and the slow march of time is one of the central reasons we find boredom to be so unpleasant.
|
Flow |
Boredom |
|||
|
Skill-challenge balance |
“Just right” |
Too easy / too hard |
||
|
Control |
Optimal zone |
Too much / too little |
||
|
Goal setting |
Clear objectives |
Failure to launch |
||
|
Concentration |
Intense focus |
Lapses in attention |
||
|
Sense of self |
Self “dissipates” |
Self-focused |
||
|
Effort |
Effortless |
Effortful |
||
|
Motivation |
Intrinsic |
Ineffectual |
||
|
Time |
Distorted (condensed or expanded) |
Drags on |
||
From Table 9.1 we can see that in many ways boredom and flow do seem to occupy the opposite ends of spectra that describe the two states. But to suggest that flow is the opposite of boredom is not the same thing as saying that boredom can only be averted by entering a state of flow. Flow represents a kind of particularly intense engagement, and such a level of intensity may not be necessary to avoid boredom. What is critical about flow as boredom’s opposite is not the intensity of the experience but that it represents successful engagement with the world and successful deployment of our skills and talents.
If flow is not the only avenue of relief from boredom, what else might qualify?
Being interested in something is by definition characterized by enhanced engagement, evident in persistence and concentration; and, as such, seems like another plausible opposite to boredom.18 Clearly, if we feel interest while doing something it would make no sense to say we are also bored. We’ve argued that something is boring if it does not correspond with our desires and fails to occupy our minds. But what makes something interesting? Are certain objects or activities inherently interesting? Exploring these questions can clarify the ways in which interest is, and is not, the inverse of boredom.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett highlights this problem of what makes something interesting in what he calls Darwin’s “strange inversion of logic.”19 It is a counterintuitive claim that reframes how we think about interest and engagement. Honey offers a good example. Dennett’s claim is that, contrary to what common sense might suggest, we do not like honey because it is sweet. Instead, honey is sweet because we like it. The logic goes something like this: what is important about honey is its glucose content, and as Dennett points out, endless examination of glucose molecules will tell you nothing about why it’s sweet. However, over evolutionary history it has been important for our ancestors to seek sources of glucose for our energy needs. When we found a good source, we associated the taste of that source with pleasure, to reinforce its important function—keeping us alive. Eventually, this sense of “liking honey” is translated as a preference for sweetness. Thus, evolutionary forces shaped us to feel the pleasure of sweetness—to enjoy the feeling of glucose molecules on our tongue—as a way of ensuring we eat honey whenever we find it.
The same inversion of logic can be directed at cute, sexy, and funny things. Babies are not inherently cute but are perceived so because it is adaptive for us to care for them. Certain body shapes are considered sexy because it is adaptive for us to procreate. Unexpected conclusions to jokes are funny because it is adaptive for us to normally engage in effective, logical problem solving—what Dennett calls the “joy of debugging.” In other words, detecting faulty reasoning is instructive, and we experience it as funny to ensure we keep doing it.20 Desirable qualities—sweetness, cuteness, amusement—are not inherent in the things themselves but are the result of evolutionary processes that have shaped our desires over time. This inversion of logic, although strange at first, makes sense when it comes to things like the near-universal desire for calorie-rich food. But how could Darwin’s inversion of logic account for one man’s abiding passion for traffic cones?
David Morgan, acclaimed Dull Man of Great Britain, is the proud owner of the world’s largest traffic cone collection.21 Remarkably (for those in the know), his collection includes a highly valued 1956 Lynvale rubber cone from Scotland. David enthusiastically describes his passion: “There are so many different shapes, sizes and colours. And the models are always changing.” The Dull Men’s Club, known for taking pleasure in “everyday, run-of-the-mill stuff,” recently applauded David’s interest by featuring him in their 2015 calendar of Dull Men. The interests of David and his calendar mates, such as Kevin Beresford of the United Kingdom’s Roundabouts Appreciation Society are surprising and strangely fascinating. Their peculiar interests make it clear that objects or activities are not inherently interesting. Interest, like love, is in the eye of the beholder. But how is it possible that one person can derive pleasure from collecting traffic cones while another must walk across a wire strung between the Twin Towers in New York and another must climb a 3,000-foot cliff face with no ropes?22 It is difficult if not impossible to understand the vast breadth of human interests by pointing to evolutionary programming—people’s interests are simply too idiosyncratic.
However, applying Darwin’s inversion of logic to David Morgan, the traffic cone man, we would say that he is not interested in traffic cones because they are interesting, but rather traffic cones are interesting because he is interested in them. In this way of thinking, interest is an outcome, not a cause. David presumably came into the world like the rest of us; desiring foods (like honey) that are sweet. We seriously doubt his attraction to traffic cones is similarly innate.23 If evolutionary processes did not directly shape his unusual hobby, what did? We think it could have been boredom.
Our biology has wired us in such a way that we like being mentally engaged; it feels good, and the opposite feels bad. The good feeling of engagement stems from the fact that it is adaptive for us to engage with the world to gain mastery and develop skills. Our desire to be mentally engaged will therefore push us toward engagement. Once we become engaged with something, magic happens—our attention to that thing makes it interesting. Masato Nunoi and Sakiko Yoshikawa from Seisen University and Kyoto University in Japan, demonstrated that things we more deeply pay attention to are preferred compared to things we pay less attention to.24 They showed people abstract shapes and asked them to do one of two things—report the position of the shape on the screen or tell the experimenters whether they were able to make some association with the shape. They might, for example, say that the shape resembles a dog—an exercise much like finding shapes in the clouds. For some of the shapes people completed this task only once, and for others, five times. Later on, they showed people the same shapes intermingled with some new abstract shapes they had never seen and simply asked them to rate how much they liked the shapes. You might imagine that novelty would win out, and people would rate the new shapes they were seeing for the first time higher than the others. That’s not what happened. The shapes people preferred the most were the ones they had seen multiple times and with which they had made frequent associations.
The power of engaged attention to make something interesting is similar in many ways to an older research finding known as the “mere exposure effect,” derived from pioneering work by Robert Zajonc from the 1960s onward. Essentially, the mere exposure effect shows that people prefer things they are familiar with. Even if you rate a song on first listening as horrible, your feelings for it will rise on a second listening and can be higher than songs you hear for the first time.25 We seem hardwired to like familiar things. Robert Zajonc has been quoted as explaining it like this; “If it is familiar, it has not eaten you yet!”26
Critically, this preference for familiar things really sticks; in the Nunoi and Yoshikawa study they tested people six weeks after they’d first seen the abstract shapes, and people still preferred what they had more deeply paid attention to and explored. Things, especially things like traffic cones that we are not biologically predisposed to attend to, are difficult to deliberately focus on. But if we can rise to the challenge and devote ourselves to attending to them, they eventually become interesting. Boredom does not push us toward traffic cones, or anything else for that matter. Boredom pushes us away from the uncomfortable feeling of being mentally unengaged. If a traffic cone happens to be in front of us when that push comes, we might develop a lifelong passion for them, as David Morgan did. In that sense, boredom is a pre-interest mechanism that motivates us to become mentally engaged. Once engaged with whatever it may be, interest develops, which in turn deepens and maintains our engagement.27
The moral of the story is that you too could have your own peculiar—possibly dull to others—interest if you give some unassuming object enough of your attention and if the push of boredom gets you started. Our argument that boredom is a pre-interest mechanism that pushes us to engage with our environment suggests that boredom and interest are functionally different. But what about the feeling of boredom vs. the feeling of interest? Are they opposites? We would argue no. Boredom is about our state of mind, namely that we are not mentally occupied. Interest is about something more particular—fly fishing, classical music, even traffic cones—with which we engage. Boredom is a contentless, objectless yearning to be engaged. Although not strict opposites, they never coexist. If we are feeling interest, we can’t also feel boredom. More pointedly, boredom is not merely a lack of interest. Boredom involves a restless desire to be engaged, in addition to the sense that what is at hand is not interesting enough to satisfy.
Interest is also not the same as flow. Being interested in something can lead to a flow state, but it does not necessarily do so. For one thing, we can be interested in things that are objectively unpleasant—think of horror movies. Flow, by definition, is felt as pleasant. So you could be interested in a horror movie, but the in-the-moment scares could hardly be seen as pleasant. And what of the sense of control or agency that is critical to flow? Think of the almost ubiquitous early scene in horror movies of a cat jumping out from behind the curtain. We might be able to predict the coming jump scare, but our hearts skip a beat nonetheless. At the mercy of surround sound and musical artistry, we can’t help but be startled even if we know it’s likely to be a trick. So watching a horror movie can be interesting and engaging without being strictly pleasant or requiring us to feel flow. It is the sense of engagement that allows us to effectively connect with the world and ward off boredom.
If we continue to pursue what we might classify as boredom’s opposite in a quest to find the best solutions to the discomfort of boredom, we must consider not just interest but also curiosity. It has been said that “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”28 So maybe curiosity is a good candidate for boredom’s opposite, and perhaps cultivating curiosity might be a great way to keep boredom at bay. As we hinted at in Chapter 6, humans have always been curious about the world around them, enough to push exploration of inhospitable regions from polar ice caps to outer space. Like interest, curiosity is about feeling drawn to something in the environment. We want to know what is around the next corner. And, as with interest, it is incoherent to say we are both curious about and bored by the same thing. On the other hand, curiosity and boredom do share a similar function—both signal the motivation to explore.
Curiosity spurs exploration of something in particular, boredom pushes us to address the uncomfortable feeling of being mentally unoccupied more generally, and interest helps to maintain engagement once we have started. Exploration itself serves many roles: searching for resources (for example, food, shelter, mates), seeking information to fill explanatory gaps (such as, why are grapes more plentiful on this side of the valley?), learning how the world works (think, for example, of infants repeatedly dropping objects from their high chairs), and so on. Exploratory behavior, spurred on by curiosity, minimizes what behavioral economists refer to as opportunity costs.29 That is, if we decided we were content with our lot in the world and never explored our environs to discover new things, we would run the risk of missing out on more bountiful resources or opportunities. The berries in our valley may be tasty and sufficient for now, but what if the berries just around the corner are bigger, juicier, and more plentiful? Without exploration, we would never know.30
Curiosity is thought to consist of two types: information seeking and stimulus seeking.31 The former is intended to address knowledge gaps. Where there are holes in what we know of the world, we seek out more information. The latter is related to the need for varied experiences—not thrill seeking per se, but the desire to seek out new sensations and experiences. The two types are clearly related. Any search for new sensory experiences might highlight the things we don’t know about the world but would like to: why do certain things we’ve encountered for the first time taste, feel, or look the way they do?
Researchers have yet to explore the relationship between curiosity and boredom in great detail, but there are some indications that the two are negatively correlated.32 In an academic setting, not only are curiosity and boredom at the opposite ends of the engagement continuum, they also demonstrate distinct relationships with learning and the value we associate with the task at hand. Much of this might seem obvious. Of course we value something that we are curious about or interested in more highly than something that we deem to be boring. Curiosity and boredom also show opposing influences on learning strategies. When curious, we tend to adopt optimal learning strategies, engaging in rehearsal of learned information, thinking more critically about the information as presented, and using strategies to elaborate or go beyond the surface material. All of these learning strategies are negatively correlated with boredom. When bored, we struggle to adopt an effective attitude toward learning—an attitude that would normally be well cultivated by curiosity.
Curiosity and interest represent states in which we successfully occupy our minds. They illustrate that we can be engaged without necessarily experiencing flow. However, flow, curiosity, and interest all differ from boredom, for all involve effective pursuit of goals. Whether our desire to achieve something leads to that intense experience of the world falling away, to concentration so powerful that hours seems to pass in minutes or seconds is less important as an antidote to boredom than the fact that we have an actionable goal that engages our mind and allows us to express our skills and desires.
But are there other ways we can avoid boredom without needing a specific end in sight?
Try to recall the last time you really, deeply relaxed. Perhaps it was at the cottage, or on a beach with the latest Jo Nesbø thriller in hand, or even just on the couch, watching the afternoon sunlight slowly shift across the hardwood floor. Wherever it was, your mind was clear; thoughts of work were nowhere to be found; worry and tension were blissfully absent. Nothing needed to change, and you wanted for nothing. That’s the key to relaxation—a conspicuous absence of any restless urge to be doing something. No particular goal in sight, no desperate need for productive pursuits, just time to be.
Relaxation is a low-energy, pleasant feeling. Boredom is in part a restless desire to have something to act on. In the throes of that desire we can’t relax. And boredom is always unpleasant while relaxation, by definition, is pleasant. But can the contrasts go deeper? At its core, relaxation is the absence of unfulfilled desires. It’s this absence of yearning in relaxation that qualifies it more profoundly as a candidate for the opposite of, and antidote to, boredom. Boredom is underpinned by a strong feeling that the desire to be mentally engaged is going unfulfilled. When we are relaxed we are free, unburdened by unmet desires.33 Indeed, simply telling highly boredom-prone people to relax works to decrease their feelings of in-the-moment boredom.34
At first blush, it may seem that boredom and relaxation actually share something in common—an underutilized mind. But they are clearly not the same thing. When relaxed, we are unburdened by goal-directed desires, which is not the same as being mentally unoccupied, the precondition for boredom. Even during states of relaxation our mind is still occupied. Perhaps we are lost in a daydream, planning for the future, or puttering around in the garden. Our mind is engaged, albeit in a somewhat unfocused manner. We may not even be deliberately directing the content of our thoughts but letting our mind drift here and there as it pleases. Nevertheless, our mind is still occupied in a way that is not the case when bored.
In Japan a recent practice known as shinrin-yoku, or “forest-air bathing,” has gained in popularity.35 The practice simply involves spending time in nature to promote health and well-being. Comparing time in the forest with time in an urban setting showed that hostility and depression decreased significantly when people were in the forest. So too did boredom. Maybe there is something particularly important about being in nature; or maybe it is simply a place where the demands of life recede and we can more easily relax. Indeed, many of us find it difficult to relax in our day-to-day lives. Without constant activity, striving for accomplishments or looking for attention-grabbing situations, we often slide into boredom and quickly find ourselves seeking succor from an exciting environment. Relaxation requires the ability to be idle without becoming bored.
It’s not necessary to be in a state of flow, interest, curiosity, or relaxation to avoid boredom. But each of them are in some way incompatible with boredom; and they each clarify and deepen our understanding of it. When bored, our mind is unoccupied, and we can’t remedy the situation because our desire for engagement is ineffectual—we’re stuck in the moment with no solutions presenting themselves. We are caught in boredom’s desire conundrum. Boredom’s opposites, in contrast, are characterized by fulfilled desires, mental engagement, and a strong sense of agency. To return to free solo climber Alex Honnold, we would speculate that his love for the sport encompasses all of boredom’s opposites: that at times he may find himself in the state of flow, that he is probably interested in honing his technique, that new climbs with new partners are likely something he is curious about, and that a successful climb is followed by intense satisfaction and possibly a moment to relax. We have no idea if this means he never experiences boredom. But climbing or other all-consuming sports may fulfill our need for agency and reduce the scourge of boredom. What we can say is that if each of these varied forms of engagement are indeed opposites of boredom, perhaps in their pursuit we can prevent boredom from taking hold. But that still leaves us with the question of how we should respond when boredom does strike.