BOREDOM is associated with maleness, traumatic brain injuries and drug use
¿iStockphoto/Satu Knape

For most people, boredom is a passing, nearly trivial feeling that lifts as soon as your number is called, a task is completed or a lecture ends. But boredom has a darker side: Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance.

Despite boredom's ubiquity and pathological associations, psychologists have yet to pin down what, exactly, it is. Several different scales all claim to measure boredom—the most widely used is the Boredom Proneness Scale—but a recent analysis suggests that they are measuring slightly different phenomena. Explanations for ennui are even more plentiful, ranging from Freud's theories of repressed emotions to individual differences in personality traits, the need for excitement, and attention skills.

Part of the boredom puzzle may be individual differences in how much excitement and novelty we require. Men, for example, are generally more bored than women. They also exhibit more risk-taking behaviors, report enjoying more dangerous entertainment and are more likely to say that their environments are dull. "People who are more likely to become bored do not see their environments as very rich or lively," says Stephen Vodanovich at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, who has been working on boredom for almost 20 years.

Clues to the underlying causes of boredom have come from patients who suffer traumatic brain injuries (TBI). According to James Danckert, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, people with TBI often begin to indulge in riskier activities after their accidents. These activities might include taking drugs or jumping out of planes&mash;pursuits they pick up in an attempt to deal with their new and chronic boredom.

Danckert theorizes that the massive flux of endorphins or pain medication necessary for recovery from a brain injury may have literally raised these patients' threshold for psychological pleasure and reward. "Now instead of a coffee doing it for you, you need a triple espresso," Danckert explains. "Anything that used to give you pleasure now has to be ramped up in order to succeed." Like chronically bored but healthy people, they need far bigger hits to find fun.

Highly bored individuals also tend to lack the ability to entertain themselves. As a result, they may turn to activities like doing drugs, says McWelling Todman at the New School for Social Research in New York City. "Drug use takes place during downtime when the person would have otherwise been entertaining themselves." This may be especially true during adolescence, a time "when they are putting together the skills needed to deal with boredom in adulthood." Boredom therefore becomes a lifelong cue for sensation-seeking behavior. If drug addicts can learn to deal with their doldrums, however, they may be less likely to relapse. In one as-yet unpublished study of 156 addicts ranging in age from 24 to 68 at a methadone clinic, the subjects' reported levels of boredom were the only reliable factor that predicted whether they would stay on course, Todman notes.

Our culture's obsession with external sources of entertainment—TV, movies, the Internet, video games—may also play a role in increasing boredom. "I think there is something about our modern experience of sensory overload where there is not the chance and ability to figure out what your interests, what your passions are," says John Eastwood, a clinical psychologist at York University in Toronto.

It is possible that the roots of boredom lie in a fundamental breakdown in our understanding of what it is we want to do. Bored people tend to score low on measures of self-awareness. They find it difficult to accurately monitor their own moods and feelings and hence understand what they truly want. These findings fit into the psychodynamic model of boredom, whereby people repress their true wants and desires and therefore cannot locate satisfying activity. The repression part is still debatable, but Eastwood has found that students who scored high on scales of alexithymia—difficulty in describing or identifying feelings, distinguishing between bodily sensations and feelings, and an inhibited inner emotional and fantasy life—also tended to be bored.