If you’re anything like me,  you probably have a tendency   to reach for your phone anytime you  have more than 30 seconds to kill.

Be alone with my thoughts? No thank you.

And while staring at your phone all  the time isn’t the healthiest activity,   research shows that the boredom that drives  us to do it actually can be beneficial. But here’s the weird thing. There’s more than one kind of boredom, and not  all of them are as good for your brain as others.

So let’s explore the science of boring,  which turns out to be anything but. [♪ INTRO] Boredom is pretty universal. It’s a cross-cultural phenomenon that people have  written about going back to the ancient Greeks. Despite that, there are still a  lot of question marks around it,   starting with what boredom actually is.

Like, researchers have gone back and forth over  how exactly we should be defining boredom.. These days, most researchers define boredom  as a negative experience that happens when   you want to be doing something satisfying,  but either can’t or aren’t able to do it. But that definition doesn’t tell  us what causes that experience.

Like, some people might be able  to focus on their math homework,   but others find it so dull that  they’d rather watch paint dry Some researchers think that the reason people feel  this boredom is that there’s a mismatch between   how much stimulation is around them, and how much  they’re looking for, whether that’s more or less. Others think it’s a failure of attention, or  that it’s related to emotional unawareness,   or even that it’s a sign that you’re  struggling to find meaning in your life. So if you’re bored right now, think on that.

So we don’t know exactly why boredom happens. Do we know how it happens? Also no.

To figure out what’s happening  under the neurological hood,   researchers need to start by making  their participants really bored. They’ve done this in a lot of different ways,  including making people do easy math problems,   having them play a video game  without clear objectives,   or watching a video of people hanging laundry. Then, they use fMRI imaging to see  which neural networks are active while   the participants are sitting there, probably  regretting signing up for such a lame study.

The most consistent finding is that boredom is  related to activity in the default mode network. The default mode network is a group  of brain areas that activate together   when your brain is wandering or  when you’re not doing a specific task. It includes areas like the  medial prefrontal cortex,   the posterior cingulate cortex, the  angular gyrus, and the precuneus.

While we may still be unpacking  the exact mechanisms of boredom,   we do know a lot more about its effects on people. More specifically, the ways that  it can be good, or bad, for you. But before we get into the rest of this story,   even the boring research  needs funding, and so do we.

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They’re also giving you unlimited daily access   to everything on Brilliant with 20%  off an annual Premium subscription. Thank you to Brilliant for  supporting this SciShow video. Before we get to whether boredom is good for you,   we should clarify that there  are different types of boredom.

One key distinction is between  state boredom and trait boredom. State boredom is the experience  of feeling bored in the moment. If you’ve finished up work  and all your friends are busy,   you have leftovers in the fridge  so you don’t need to start dinner,   and you’ve already finished the newest seasons of  all your shows, you’re experiencing state boredom.

But trait boredom is the  innate tendency to feel bored. People with high trait boredom may feel  bored in a lot of different situations   that would be interesting to someone else,  feel bored more quickly than other people,   or often feel like there’s  nothing for them to be doing. So when we’re trying to figure out  if boredom is good or bad for us,   we have to be clear about what kind  of boredom we’re talking about.

A lot of the research out there is actually  on trait boredom, not state boredom. There’s a growing body of research that suggests  that high trait boredom is associated with a whole   bunch of other issues, including problem gambling,  substance abuse, and dropping out of school. And it’s associated with anxiety and depression.

All of this has a bit of a  chicken-and-egg problem, though. Maybe getting bored easily causes  people to engage in problematic   behaviors and causes them to  develop anxiety and depression. Or maybe it’s that tendency towards  addiction-related behaviors or depression,   that leads to these people becoming  increasingly bored with other things in life.

We just don’t know which comes first. So, when we’re talking about trait boredom, it’s  hard to say conclusively if it’s bad for you,   but it’s definitely associated  with things that aren’t great. There’s less research on state boredom,  and what we could find is kind of bonkers.

Like, in one study, people were alone in a  room with nothing to do for fifteen minutes. They had no phone, no TV, just a button that,   if you pressed it, would  give them an electric shock. To be clear, they didn’t have to push this button.

They’d still spend the same amount of  time in that boring room either way. And yet, 67% of male participants and 25%   of female participants chose to  shock themselves at least once. Plus, they had to exclude one outlier who chose  to shock himself one hundred and ninety times.

What’s even weirder is that these were participants who had previously said   they’d be willing to pay actual  money to avoid being shocked,   and they still chose to willingly  shock themselves to avoid being bored. Yes, even 190-shocks McGee. People clearly hate being bored.

But state boredom does seem  to have some benefits, too. Some researchers suggest that being bored  signals to us that we’re not on the right track. There’s something about what we’re doing  that isn’t fulfilling or isn’t allowing   us to achieve our goals, and it prompts  us to think about that and adjust course.

Like, if you find all your classes boring, it  could be a sign that you should switch majors,   or maybe that college isn’t for you right now. Some models go even further and suggest that  boredom is an evolutionary benefit, because   it would encourage us to move on from recurring  situations that aren’t helping us meet our goals. Like, if you’re searching for food over and over  again in the same location and don’t ever find it,   boredom may have evolved as a clue  that it’s time to search elsewhere.

And these course corrections aren’t just  good because they make us stop feeling bad. Being involved in things that we  find meaningful or significant can   keep our actions in line with our beliefs and  encourages us to engage with our community. Both things that are important to overall  psychological well-being on their own,   above and beyond you making  the icky feelings go away.

While there’s still a lot to learn about boredom,   there’s plenty of evidence to suggest  that those who are chronically bored   might want to be on the lookout for  other problem behaviors in their lives. But if you got bored watching this video? It might have been good for you.

So, you’re welcome. [♪ OUTRO]