“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
– The Plague, Albert Camus (1947)
We rarely admit it out loud, but boredom is one of the most familiar moods of modern life: the empty lecture, the 27th scroll through Instagram Reels, the WhatsApp chats you open and close without replying, the way time stretches in a metro ride with 3% battery and no earphones.
This article takes that everyday “I’m so bored” and puts it under a psychological microscope: what boredom actually is, how it shows up in the brain, why some people are chronically more bored than others, how it connects to meaning, mental health, and social media, and what to do with it rather than just doom‑scroll it away.
What exactly is boredom?
Psychologists have spent decades trying to pin down a definition of boredom, and there is still no single universally accepted one. A particularly influential synthesis by Eastwood and colleagues defines boredom as “the aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” and argues that at its core, boredom is a problem of attention. In other words, boredom is not just “nothing to do”; it is a restless dissatisfaction with what is currently available, plus a felt inability to connect meaningfully to anything else.
Cynthia Fisher, in another widely cited definition, calls boredom “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.” Put simply: when you are bored, your mind wants to latch onto something, but everything in reach feels like the wrong size, wrong flavour, or simply pointless.
Eastwood’s attentional theory of boredom
Eastwood and colleagues describe boredom as a failure of engagement driven by three elements:
- You want to be engaged (you’re not apathetic or indifferent).
- You cannot successfully engage your attention with anything internal (thoughts, images, fantasies) or external (the environment) that feels satisfying.
- You become aware of this failure and often blame the situation (“this class/meeting/person is boring”).
This is sometimes called the attentional theory of boredom because it places attention at the centre: boredom is what it feels like when the attentional system cannot connect you to anything that feels rewarding or meaningful, even when, objectively, options might be present. From this view, interventions that strengthen attention (for example, mindfulness, focused engagement, reducing background distraction) should reduce boredom, not by making life more glamorous, but by improving your ability to tune in.
Everyday boredom vs. profound boredom
Most of us are familiar with situational boredom: the dull Sunday afternoon, the long queue, the slow lecture, the family function where you keep refreshing your notifications. Philosophers like Heidegger and, more recently, commentators on Camus have also distinguished a deeper existential boredom, where it is not just this particular activity, but life as a whole, that feels empty and drained of meaning.
This distinction maps onto psychology’s focus on meaning and values. In profound boredom, the attentional failure is wrapped around a bigger question: What is the point of any of this? Boredom here becomes very close to Camus’s sense of absurdity, the confrontation with time, mortality, and the fragility of our routines. Modern experimental work on meaning regulation, which we will come to shortly, essentially tests this philosophical intuition in the lab.
State versus trait: Being bored vs being a “bored person”
Psychology draws an important distinction between state boredom (a temporary mood) and trait boredom or boredom proneness (a chronic tendency to feel bored across many situations). You can think of state boredom as a weather event and trait boredom as the climate.
Farmer and Sundberg’s classic Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS) was one of the first tools designed to measure that climate. Items tap into how often people find life monotonous, are unable to stay engaged, or feel that time drags. High scores on this scale are robustly linked with:
- Higher depression and anxiety.
- More hopelessness and loneliness.
- Lower life satisfaction and autonomy.
- More physical health complaints and poorer psychosocial functioning.
In other words, people who are “often bored” are not just mildly inconvenienced; they are at higher risk for a wide range of psychological and physical difficulties.
Trait boredom as lack of agency
More recent work moves beyond just measuring boredom proneness and asks why some people are more bored than others. Gorelik and Eastwood propose a model of trait boredom as a chronic “lack of agency.” Drawing on Albert Bandura’s ideas about human agency, they suggest that boredom-prone individuals often struggle with four key capacities:
- Intentionality: choosing meaningful goals instead of drifting.
- Forethought: imagining the future and linking present actions to future outcomes.
- Self‑reactiveness: initiating and sustaining goal‑directed behaviour.
- Self‑reflectiveness: monitoring and adjusting one’s course.
When these are weak, you can end up with a life full of unchosen routines and half‑started projects, and boredom becomes the emotional signature of that stuckness. This model is powerful because it connects a feeling (boredom) to deeper questions of authorship: Who is steering my life?
Measuring boredom: BPS and short scales
The original Boredom Proneness Scale has been widely used, but later researchers developed shorter measures with better psychometric properties. Struk and colleagues, for example, created a Short Boredom Proneness Scale (SBPS) that focuses on a single, coherent dimension of boredom proneness and performs well across samples. These tools allow researchers to track boredom in relation to outcomes like substance use, academic engagement, and mental health.
The takeaway here is simple: some people are temporarily bored by something; others live inside an emotional climate where almost everything feels boring, and that chronic state is strongly tied to deeper issues of agency, meaning, and regulation.
Key psychological theories of boredom
Boredom research is not just a list of correlations; it rests on several theoretical frameworks that explain why boredom arises and what it does. Let’s walk through some of the major ones.
1. Attentional theory: The “unengaged mind”
We have already touched on Eastwood et al.’s attentional theory, sometimes summarised in the phrase “the unengaged mind.” The core idea is:
- Boredom emerges when attention cannot be successfully engaged with internal or external information that is experienced as meaningful.
- People often misattribute this failure to external circumstances (“this is boring”) rather than recognising their attentional difficulty (“I cannot or will not engage”).
This theory is grounded in evidence that boredom is associated with more mind‑wandering, poorer sustained attention, and greater cognitive failures. It also links boredom directly to self‑regulation: directing and sustaining attention is a basic self‑regulatory task, so chronic boredom may signal chronic self‑regulatory weakness.
2. Control‑value theory of achievement emotions
Although developed mainly for academic settings, Pekrun’s control‑value theory of achievement emotions helps explain boredom in classrooms, work, and skill‑based contexts. According to this model:
- Emotions like enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom depend on two appraisals: perceived control (Can I influence this outcome?) and perceived value (Does this matter to me?).
- Boredom arises particularly when control is low and value is low.
This can happen in two ways:
- Under‑challenge: The task is too easy; you feel in control but see little value. You think, “This is pointless; I’m wasting time.”
- Over‑challenge: The task is too difficult; you feel low control and disengage to protect yourself, again seeing little value.
A recent paper on “spiritual boredom” in contexts such as meditation, sermons, and yoga shows exactly this pattern: boredom was associated with both over‑ and underchallenge and with perceiving the activity as low value. In practical terms, control‑value theory suggests that boredom can be reduced by adjusting challenge levels and by helping people see how a task connects to their personal goals or values.
3. Meaning‑regulation and existential escape
Van Tilburg and Igou developed a meaning‑regulation perspective: boredom is not just about stimulation; it communicates a deficit of meaning. When people are experimentally bored (for example, by copying long strings of letters), they report their situation as more meaningless and then:
- Strengthen their identification with meaningful social groups (for instance, their nationality or student identity).
- Show more nostalgia, reaching back to memories that provide a sense of coherence and significance.
In a broader review, meaning‑regulation researchers describe “existential escape” from boredom: some people respond by moving toward deep sources of meaning (values, communities, belief systems), whereas others respond by numbing self‑awareness (through substances, mindless media consumption, or risky behaviours). Boredom, in this view, is a small existential crisis that asks: Does this activity, and, zoomed out, this life, mean anything to me right now?
4. Agency‑based and regulatory mode theories
Agency‑based models, like Gorelik and Eastwood’s, emphasise that boredom proneness reflects a chronic difficulty in taking effective action. Even when people know what matters to them, they may struggle to translate that into concrete behaviour, leaving them stuck in unsatisfying routines.
Regulatory mode theory adds another layer. It distinguishes between two modes of self‑regulation:
- Locomotion: An action‑oriented style focused on movement and initiation (“just do it”).
- Assessment: An evaluative style focused on comparing options and doing the “right” thing.
Mugon, Struk, and Danckert found that boredom‑prone individuals tend to have lower locomotion and higher assessment. They overthink and under‑act, getting caught in “what if” loops that delay engagement. The authors call this pattern a “failure to launch”: a chronic difficulty in getting started, which then fuels further boredom.
5. Neuroscientific perspectives: DMN and the unengaged brain
Neuroscientific theories do not replace psychological ones but add a different lens. Studies using PET and fMRI suggest that during boredom, there is increased activity in the default mode network (DMN), including medial prefrontal cortex, relative to more engaging “flow” conditions.
The DMN is typically active when we are not focused on the external environment: it lights up during mind‑wandering, autobiographical thinking, and imagining the future. At the same time, fronto‑parietal networks involved in executive control and sustained attention show reduced engagement when tasks are monotonous and boring.
Taken together, this neural pattern fits the attentional theory nicely: attention drifts inward, internal simulation ramps up, but executive systems fail to successfully re‑engage with the current task. Boredom is not “nothing happening” in the brain; it is a very specific mode of unproductive internal focus combined with reduced effective engagement.
How boredom feels from the inside
Phenomenological and experimental work converge on a consistent portrait of what boredom feels like. People report:
- Dissatisfaction and irritability.
- Restlessness (wanting to be elsewhere, doing something else).
- Mental weariness or fatigue.
- Slowed sense of time (“time dragging”).
- Difficulty sustaining attention.
- A sense that the situation is meaningless or purposeless.
Elpidorou describes boredom as feeling “emotionally trapped”: the situation seems uninteresting and valueless, time feels slow, but you also cannot simply drop everything and leave. Unsurprisingly, this makes boredom strongly aversive, something we are highly motivated to escape.
Importantly, boredom is distinct from apathy or depression. In apathy, you do not care enough even to want something different; in boredom, you care a lot that this is not it, which is why the state is charged with restlessness rather than pure emptiness. That difference matters clinically: bored people often search desperately for “something else,” whereas depressed people may not have the energy or hope to search at all.
When boredom turns dark: Risk, addiction, and psychopathology
At high trait levels, boredom is strongly associated with a range of problematic outcomes. Reviews by Elpidorou and by Bench and Lench highlight that boredom proneness predicts:
- Higher depression and anxiety.
- More anger and aggression.
- Greater impulsivity and sensation seeking.
- Problem gambling and risky financial behaviour.
- Substance use (alcohol, drugs) and binge eating.
- Poorer interpersonal relationships and lower job and life satisfaction.
Farmer and Sundberg’s original Boredom Proneness Scale validation already found positive correlations with depression, hopelessness, and perceived effort, and negative correlations with life satisfaction. Sommers and Vodanovich later reported that boredom proneness is related to both psychological and physical health symptoms, even when controlling for some other variables.
Bench and Lench argue that boredom motivates the pursuit of “alternative goals and experiences, including those likely to elicit negative emotions.” In other words, bored people may choose risky or even harmful activities, not because these are good, but because anything feels better than the flat, dissatisfying now. This helps explain why boredom proneness is a risk factor for gambling, substance use, and unsafe driving: all offer intense, novel stimulation and rapid shifts in emotion, which can temporarily relieve boredom but reinforce cycles of risk.
Clinically, chronic boredom also appears in conditions involving executive dysfunction, such as some forms of traumatic brain injury and psychotic disorders, where attentional and self‑regulatory difficulties make it hard to engage in sustained, meaningful activities. Todman, for instance, frames persistent boredom as a sensitive indicator of failures in self‑regulation that can predispose to psychopathology.
Boredom in the age of infinite scrolling
You would think that a world of endless content, shorts, reels, games, streams, would kill boredom. Instead, “I’m bored” and “nothing feels satisfying” are arguably more visible than ever, especially among young people whose days are threaded with micro‑moments of checking and scrolling.
Recent work on “social media scrolling as a maladaptive strategy for coping with boredom” explicitly examines this dynamic. In a sample of young adults, higher boredom proneness and experiences of existential boredom predicted more problematic social media use, including compulsive scrolling and signs of addiction. The authors conclude that scrolling functions as an ineffective attempt to escape boredom: it fills time but does not address the underlying lack of meaning or agency, and may even worsen attentional problems over time.
This fits with the theoretical models we have covered:
- Attentional theory: Fast‑paced feeds constantly hijack attention, making it harder to direct and sustain attention when needed.
- Meaning‑regulation: Most feed content is entertaining but shallow, offering stimulation without deep meaning, so the underlying “this is not meaningful” signal remains unprocessed.
- Agency‑based models: Scrolling often reinforces passivity; you consume what the algorithm serves rather than authoring your own goals.
Over time, that can produce a vicious cycle: more boredom, more restless scrolling, more fractured attention, and less capacity to sink into demanding but meaningful activities like deep work, creative projects, or emotionally intimate conversations. From a Psychlense lens, social media is not the villain, but it easily becomes the default anaesthetic if we do not consciously choose how we use it.
The bright side of boredom
Given all the negative outcomes, it is tempting to see boredom as purely bad. But recent theoretical work argues that boredom, as a state (not necessarily as a chronic trait), has an important regulatory function. Elpidorou calls this “the bright side of boredom.”
Reviewing empirical and philosophical literature, he argues that boredom:
- Signals that a current activity or situation is no longer rewarding, interesting, or meaningful.
- Motivates us to pursue alternative goals that promise greater meaning or stimulation.
- Helps us avoid being trapped in unfulfilling routines by pushing us to re‑align with our values and long‑term projects.
Bench and Lench similarly conceptualise boredom as a functional emotion: as other emotions indicate goal states (happiness = success, anger = blocked goal, sadness = lost goal), boredom indicates that “the current goal is no longer associated with sufficient reward” and it is time to shift to something else.
Neuroscientific findings about DMN activation during boredom support this: when bored, the brain pivots toward introspection and internal simulation, which can create space for new ideas, plans, and re‑evaluation of what matters, if we do not instantly drown that space in micro‑stimulation.
The key is to distinguish between:
- Adaptive boredom – a transient signal that nudges you to adjust your goals or environment (change tasks, seek challenge, reconnect with meaning).
- Maladaptive boredom proneness – a chronic state where you cannot translate that signal into effective action, leading to cycles of disengagement and risky or numbing behaviours.
From this angle, the goal is not to kill boredom completely but to learn to listen to it.
Working with boredom: From numbing to noticing
Putting the theories together, how do you actually respond to boredom in a psychologically healthy way? Clinical and therapeutic writings converge on several strategies.
1. Reframe boredom as information, not failure
Instead of seeing boredom as a character flaw (“I’m lazy”) or a moral failure, treat it as an affective notification: something about your current activity, level of challenge, or sense of meaning is off. This shift is not just semantic; viewing boredom as functional makes it more likely you will respond with curiosity (“what is this telling me?”) instead of shame or frantic avoidance.
For example, if you notice you are bored every time you study a particular subject, that may be a signal to reassess:
- Is the material under‑ or over‑challenging for you?
- Do you see any connection between this subject and your long‑term goals?
- Are there alternative ways of engaging with it (discussion groups, applied projects) that might feel more meaningful?
2. Check the three levers: Meaning, challenge, agency
Drawing from control‑value theory and agency‑based models, a quick self‑audit in a boring situation can ask:
- Meaning: Does this connect to anything I personally care about (values, goals, relationships)? Can I consciously reconnect it (for example, linking a tedious assignment to a longer‑term academic or professional aim)?
- Challenge: Is this too easy (mind‑numbing) or too hard (overwhelming)? Can I adjust difficulty, adding micro‑challenges when under‑challenged or chunking/simplifying when overwhelmed?
- Agency: Do I feel I have any choice or authorship here? Even in constrained contexts (class, job), can I choose how I engage (note‑taking style, questions, time‑boxing) rather than seeing myself as a passive victim?
Small shifts in any of these levers can significantly change boredom levels. At Psychlense, this is often the pivot point in content: we are not just saying “don’t be bored,” but helping you explore what your boredom might be saying about your relationship with control, value, and agency.
3. Mindfulness and staying with boredom (instead of auto‑scrolling)
Therapists increasingly recommend mindfulness‑based approaches for boredom: noticing the sensations, thoughts, and urges that come with “I’m bored” without immediately acting on them. Mindfulness practices help by:
- Strengthening attention regulation (the very system that fails in boredom).
- Increasing tolerance for low‑stimulation moments (waiting, commuting), turning them into opportunities for awareness instead of triggers for compulsive stimulation.
- Allowing you to see the urge to pick up your phone as just that, an urge, rather than an automatic command.
Simple exercises include mindful breathing, sensory scans on a walk, or deliberately doing a routine task (like washing dishes) with full attention, noticing when and how boredom arises. This does not mean you will never open your phone again; it means you will open it from choice rather than reflex.
4. Building “locomotion”: Practising small, quick starts
Because boredom proneness is linked with low locomotion and a tendency to over‑assess, one concrete target is practising rapid, low‑stakes initiation of tasks. Techniques include:
- The 5‑minute rule: commit to doing a task for just five minutes; once started, inertia often flips and engagement increases.
- Implementation intentions: if‑then plans like “If I catch myself scrolling out of boredom, then I will open my draft document and write one messy paragraph.”
- Reducing choice overload: pre‑decide a small menu of constructive boredom‑time defaults (for example, short walk, 10 push‑ups, one page of reading, five minutes of sketching) instead of having to invent an option from scratch.
Over time, these micro‑actions strengthen a self‑image of “someone who starts” rather than “someone who is always stuck and bored,” feeding back into agency. They also align with PRISM‑type ideas (protective inhibition of self‑regulation and motivation), which suggest that boredom can signal a need to protect limited regulatory resources; by starting small, you respect your limits while still moving.
5. Designing “constructive boredom” into your life
Paradoxically, you can also intentionally protect small pockets of low‑stimulation time, no devices, no tasks, to let DMN‑style introspection and associative thinking do their work. This might look like:
- Walking without your phone for 10–15 minutes and just letting your mind wander.
- Setting aside one “offline hour” daily where your only options are reading, journalling, doodling, or simply sitting.
- Having technology‑free queues: deciding that whenever you are waiting (for coffee, at the metro), you will not automatically fill the gap.
Such deliberately “boring” spaces can incubate insight, creativity, and emotional processing, especially if you resist numbing them with micro‑stimulation. In a sense, you are agreeing with Camus that boredom is inevitable, but choosing to cultivate habits that open you up rather than shut you down.
Conclusion: Camus, habits, and the psychological invitation of boredom
Camus’s line, that everyone is bored and devotes themselves to cultivating habits, captures something deeply psychological: boredom is universal, and our lives are, in many ways, our set of strategies for dealing with it. Some habits, scrolling, substances, chasing constant novelty, mute the discomfort without answering its question. Others, creative work, meaningful relationships, committed projects, reflective practice, take boredom’s signal seriously and try to re‑author how we spend our finite time.
Modern boredom research suggests that boredom is not simply a glitch to be eliminated, nor a cute aesthetic of “main character ennui,” but a complex state rooted in attention, meaning, and agency, with real consequences for mental health and behaviour. It can drag us toward addictions and numbness, or push us, sometimes uncomfortably, toward growth, creativity, and re‑alignment with what we care about most.
The psychological dive, then, brings us back to a very practical question: the next time boredom shows up in your metro ride, your classroom, your relationship, or your late‑night scrolling, will you treat it as an enemy to be sedated, or as an invitation to notice, to choose, and to cultivate different habits?
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