Sure enough, as her anxiety lessened, boredom did start to make its presence felt in her life. However, over time, my client came to embrace this new state. She labeled it “a privilege” and a sign that anxiety had released its stranglehold over her life. Interestingly, when she stopped reacting to and judging her boredom, it started to ease. Different things came to occupy the void previously occupied by her anxiety and fear. She started writing and engaging in creative pursuits again. For this client, boredom was the vacuum left by her anxiety. Perhaps her case is not that unusual. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asserted that as humans we are “doomed to vacillate between the two extremities of distress and boredom.” Boredom and anxiety are curious bedfellows. On the surface, they have little in common. The former suggests disengagement, a lack of arousal. Anxiety, on the other hand, is denoted by alertness, our antennae up and monitoring for potential threat or danger. But both are uncomfortable states for many of us. My client’s attitude toward boredom taught me a lot. It led me to reflect upon the taboo around boredom. Many of us will gladly profess to be busy and stressed as these states confer a sense of industriousness and purpose, suggest that we’re important, we’re needed! But boredom? Broadly speaking, it’s not perceived as a particularly adult emotion. In spite of this, a recent Gallup poll found that 70 percent of Americans find their work boring. Considering that the average American spends an estimated 40 hours per week at work, that’s a lot of bored Americans! People will go to great lengths to escape boredom. Many of us would rather feel pain or discomfort than nothing at all. In 2014, Harvard psychologists found that faced with spending 15 minutes alone in a room with no stimulation (read: no smartphone!), two-thirds of men pressed a button in the knowledge that it would deliver a painful jolt. One man found being left alone in his own company so disagreeable he opted to be shocked 190 times. Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The scientists attributed the difference in self-shocking levels between the men and women to the fact that men tend to be more sensation-seeking. Timothy Wilson, who led the research, attributed the findings to humans’ “constant urge to do something rather than nothing.” For many of us, boredom can feel like nothingness, a void where we’re not feeling much, not doing much. As a child, probably the worst thing I could say to my mom was “I’m bored.” I was looking for a solution to this dilemma, something to do, some entertainment. Maybe children no longer get bored, or if they do, perhaps they’re pawned off with a parent’s smartphone. As adults we’ve learned to digitally self-soothe, pulling out our smartphones for pretty much the same reason people might have lit up a cigarette a few decades ago: something to kill time with. Our smartphones are the ultimate one-stop boredom reliever. No wonder we cannot put them down. We may not admit to being bored, but why else can’t we go 12 minutes without checking our devices? If being glued to one’s smartphone can be taken as a gauge of boredom levels, it seems a lot of us are bored a lot of the time! Several key features of our smartphones can be very magnetic to the bored mind. Take, for instance, messaging (including texting, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.), which remains the most popular smartphone function. We expect replies more quickly than ever before. When email was introduced, traditional mail was dubbed “snail mail.” Now email has been consigned to the same category. On our chat apps, we can see if the recipient has read our message and whether they’re replying in real time or not. Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist who has researched gambling addiction, likens “the roller-coaster ride of texting” to playing slot machines. Quoted in a Financial Times article on modern dating, she compares leaving a message on an answering machine to buying a lottery ticket because you don’t expect an immediate payoff. But texting taps into what Schüll dubs the “ludic loop” of the slot-machine experience. “The possibility of instant gratification coupled with reward uncertainty draws us into the game, and the absence of built-in stopping mechanisms makes us keep playing,” she says. These ups and downs, highs and lows, are the antidote to boredom, a roller-coaster ride for our jaded, bored selves. The human brain produces more dopamine when it anticipates a reward but doesn’t know when it will arrive. Most of the alluring apps and websites in wide use today were engineered to exploit this habit-forming loop. Existential therapist, neurologist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Boredom is now causing more problems to solve than distress. And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time.” Frankl wrote his book half a century before the invention of the smartphone and obviously hadn’t reckoned on a portable device that would act as a gateway to every possible type of entertainment! Frankl asserted that in the postwar years, the mass of people living lives without meaning led to the rise of what he termed the “mass neurotic triad”—namely depression, aggression, and addiction. Frankl was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for one and a half years. “Distressing” seems a gross understatement to describe what he lived through. But rather than focus on this traumatic experience, what he was drawn to amid the environment of loss and despair was the role finding a sense of meaning played in his survival. In the bleakness of Dachau he was able to find something of value within himself that he could connect with: namely, the love he felt for his wife. The acknowledgment of this love acted like a touchstone for Frankl and gave him the power and sense of purpose he needed to survive. Frankl’s belief was that no matter what life serves up, if one takes appropriate action and adopts the right attitude to the situation, a meaningful existence can be realized. His experience of transcending the conditions of Dachau would certainly attest to this. To extrapolate Frankl’s philosophy, the antidote to boredom and boredom-induced addiction is to find a meaning, a sense of purpose to our lives. If we have that, we are insulated from the “What does it matter; why should I bother?” despondency that is the breeding ground for boredom and also addiction. This was 15 years ago, well before the iPhone hit Apple store shelves. If I had a smartphone then, I might not have had this moment of realization and failed to hear the internal voice screaming, “Get the hell out of this job, this career. Do something, do anything, but don’t do this!” Instead, I would have been busy distracting myself, messaging my friends, perhaps even watching something on YouTube, putting off the inevitable point when I would finally have said, “Enough, no more.” But there are times when prolonged enduring boredom can be a signal that we’re not using our skills and talents, we’re not channeling our creativity. In short, that we’ve stalled and have become stuck, like I was at the tech conference. Like anxiety, this brand of enduring, persistent boredom underpinned by a sense that one’s contribution doesn’t make a difference can be a powerful catalyst for change when faced without judgment. Ask yourself, what is boredom trying to tell you? Mine was like a hacked, belligerent GPS shouting, “Stop! This is a dead end. Turn around and go back. Find another route!” Listening to that voice formed the first step in embarking on a career that I find very fulfilling. Had I not had that intense moment of boredom at the tech conference and felt my body, soul, and mind’s strong reaction to it, I doubt I’d now be a qualified therapist writing this book. Adapted and excerpted from The Phone Addiction Workbook: How To Identify Smartphone Dependency, Stop Compulsive Behavior, and Develop a Healthy Relationship With Your Devices. Copyright © 2019 by Hilda Burke. Reprinted with permission of Ulysses Press. All rights reserved. Burke is regularly called upon to comment on issues relating to well-being, relationships, and the challenges of modern life in the media and has been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, Psychologies, and Women’s Health and interviewed on the BBC, ITV, and London Live. In addition, she has contributed to three books: Lonely Planet’s 100 Ways to Live Well and the best-selling, The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, and The Unexpected Joy of Being Single. She was a spokesperson for National Unplugged Day in 2016 and 2017.
