Feeling bored has a purpose. Here are 5 things to know about boredom

Editor’s note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life’s mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here.

(CNN) — Thanks to smartphones, all the entertainment and distraction they offer can be in your back pocket or purse, accessible 24/7. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to remember the uncomfortable, mind-numbing, aggravating feeling of boredom.

But if one of your resolutions for 2025 is to disconnect more frequently from the cornucopia of information at your fingertips, encountering boredom may be an unexpected consequence.

In line at the bank or drive-through without a podcast or music? Interminable! Waiting at the doctor’s office without texting or scrolling social media? Excruciating! Even sitting on the toilet without an online crossword puzzle or news story to while away the minutes can cause you to die a little inside.

Boredom can be as distressing as pain and, in some cases, even less preferable: In one famous 2014 research experiment, a large percentage of participants chose the pain of a self-administered electrical shock over sitting in a room for 15 minutes with only their thoughts.

As it turns out, boredom may serve the same purpose as pain.

“Pain is not there to make you feel hurt. Pain is there as a signal to sort of galvanize you into action, to address whatever it is that caused the hurt in the first place. Boredom is the same,” cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his Chasing Life podcast recently.

“It’s not there to make you feel bored,” said Danckert, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “It’s there to get you going, to get you doing something, to get out of that bored state.”

You can listen to the full episode of the podcast here.

Danckert, coauthor of the book “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom,” turns to a literary giant to define boredom.

“I like, when I give a definition of boredom, to resort to this quote from Leo Tolstoy, from (his novel) ‘Anna Karenina,’ where he talks about ennui, or boredom, as ‘the desire for desires,’” he said. “Boredom is a motivational state. You want to be doing something that matters to you, but you just don’t want anything that’s currently available to you.”

Danckert said he sees boredom as this frustrated desire to be fully engaged with the world around you that’s unsatisfied at the moment.

So, what can you do to alleviate boredom?

“We don’t really have any good data on interventions for boredom,” Danckert noted. Instead, he offered five admittedly unscientific suggestions and thoughts, based on decades of experience and observation, to manage it.

Do not offer up a list of alternatives

If you are a parent of a child who proclaims being bored, or a friend to someone professing ennui, do not offer an array of options for what they could do instead.

“A fairly consistent and strong finding is that people who are prone to boredom feel like they don’t have a lot of agency,” Danckert said. “They feel like they’re not really taking control of their lives. And if you just give them a list of suggestions, that doesn’t solve the agency problem, right? You’re sort of, in some sense, taking agency (away) from them by trying to tell them what to do.”

He said offering alternatives might work for some people who occasionally feel boredom, but “it certainly won’t work for the people who chronically feel it.”

So, zip it and let the bored people in your life figure it out for themselves.

Create a list for yourself

Make a list of activities, tasks and projects that you can turn to when you’re bored.

“For me, the primary one is, I’ll turn to my guitar,” Danckert said. “But then you should have a second or third or fourth, (so) that when that primary thing that usually works doesn’t work, you can turn to these other things on your list.”

It could be as simple as … nope! Danckert won’t suggest what to put on your list. (Agency, remember?)

Stop scrolling mindlessly

Despite technology bringing the world to our fingertips, society is experiencing higher levels of boredom, particularly in teenage girls, than it did even one or two decades ago, Danckert said.

“Our phones and social media are not solutions to our boredom. In fact, they can make it worse,” he said. “Again, that ties into the agency, because if you’re just sort of mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds, that’s not being very agentic. … It’s going to make your boredom worse in the long run.”

Danckert said he doesn’t want to imply that technology is all bad — engaging in an online fishing community, for example, or finding a YouTube video to learn guitar or knitting can have a positive effect. “It’s that mindless part that makes it probably a negative for your boredom,” he said.

Don’t expect boredom to make you creative

Danckert said a popular notion — one that drives him and other researchers “nuts” — is that boredom will make you creative. It will not.

“The evidence for that claim is very weak, and we actually published something fairly recently showing that if I make you bored, you’re actually less creative,” he said.

“I think if you have (existing) creative outlets” — for example, if you play a musical instrument or make art of some sort — “and you have cultivated that outlet, it’s great to turn to it when you’re bored,” he said.

“What we can’t hope, and what I think the popular myth is, is that embracing boredom and bringing it into your life will somehow make you more creative. It won’t.”

Danckert said people instead probably are expressing the view that downtime is a good for creativity.

“Disconnecting from the sort of hustle and bustle of life gives you time to think and maybe means that you have thoughts that are creative and make connections that you otherwise wouldn’t make, and that feels creative. And that I don’t have any issue with,” he said. But boredom is not the ingredient that magically makes someone creative, he said.

Don’t try to hide from boredom

Boredom has a message for you, so pay attention.

“I don’t think we should embrace boredom, but I also don’t think we should try to outrun it,” Danckert said. “It’s neither good nor bad, so we should just learn to listen to it and figure out what it tells us in that moment. We need to adapt it and respond to it in good ways.”

He said one response could be a creative outlet. “But it could be any number of other things. It could be going for a run. And it could potentially be vegging out in front of a Netflix show, if you intentionally choose that.”

But if you only ever choose a passive response, he said, then you probably won’t feel like you have a lot of agency.

As for the chestnut “only boring people get bored,” Danckert said the saying is a bit judgmental.

“There’s a moralizing sense of that, ‘You’re not trying hard enough, and you should just try harder to engage with the world,’” he said. “But I think that the truth is that we all get bored. There are some of us who are very, very good and very quick at adapting to it and … the effective responders (are) making a judgment on the rest of us who don’t necessarily deal with it quite as well.”

He said, “We’re not boring people. We’re just susceptible to a very common, very normal human experience.”

We hope these five tips help you better respond to boredom. Listen to the podcast’s full episode here. And join us next week on Chasing Life when we ask: How often should you bathe?

CNN Audio’s Jesse Remedios contributed to this report.

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