What do you do when boredom strikes? The answer varies. A friend apathetically grabs her cellphone, clicks a game app and there, her sluggish-bored status shifts to alert-focused-killing-time mode.
But why do we get bored? Predictable and repetitive activities, become monotonous routines. When we do the same things over and over again, specially when we don’t actually feel any purpose or reason for doing them, we become bored. We become bored too, when we do things that are too easy for us (no challenge at all). We also get bored when we don’t have the sufficient knowledge and skills to do a task at hand.
Specific personal attitudes also can be good causes of boredom. People who are classified as high-risk takers easily get bored when faced with slow-paced, not-so-interesting tasks; those who have attention-problems are highly susceptible to boredom too – they have less motivation and have difficulty focusing. People who do not have goals and direction in life are most prone to boredom – they simply do not know what and how to do things to put their lives in order.
Boredom leads to loneliness, habitual worrying and other negative emotions. Serial or periodic boredom can eventually lead to unnecessary or unhealthy vices – a major root of some evil – like smoking, alcoholism, drug addiction, to name a few.
But boredom can also be reckoned differently. I think of boredom as a tool to discern whether the current task I’m doing is worth my time. Questions like: “Does this task lead to the achievement of my goal? Or diverts away from my goal?” come to mind when boredom strikes. I also consider boredom as a warning sign; time to stop, step back, think and re-assess my present status, mode or style of approach in things and in life.
But that’s me. How about you, how do you deal with boredom when it strikes.
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