 Elon Musk's Hyperloop tunneling machine is like a mechanical engineer's fantasy made real. It's such a beautiful piece of machinery, it kind of makes me want to cry. Talk about being bored to tears. Think back to the last time you were bored. Really powerfully bored, like the meeting has already been running for two hours over time, and two of your co-workers are still hotly debating what color highlighters the office should buy, and you're just sitting silently screaming. Psychologists have been researching the phenomenon of boredom for several decades now, trying to answer questions about things like why it happens, what its effects are, and why it sucks so much. The degree to which being bored sucks is actually a large part of what has made it interesting to study. For example, in one study, test subjects performed some bogus experiment which involved painful electric shocks as negative feedback, which they could and often did pay real money to avoid. They were then left alone in the testing room for 15 minutes while the researcher went to fetch something, and asked to sit quietly. No cell phones, no pens or paper, nothing but four blank walls for 15 long minutes. During that time, about half the research participants deliberately triggered the shock device. That seems crazy at first. People were willing to pay money to avoid getting shocked, yet many of them would rather zap themselves than sit and be bored. That is how much boredom sucks. Culturally, boredom is often painted as a symptom of weakness of character. After all, a properly industrious person should always be able to find some productive pursuit with which to occupy themselves. Harunth. But it's hard to argue that mind-numbingly tedious situations don't exist, or that it's possible to stay focused and alert regardless of circumstance. There's tons of compelling evidence that a reasonably stimulating environment is absolutely essential for mental development and well-being. There have been numerous studies tying lack of interesting stimulus to developmental problems with cognition. For example, children raised in an impoverished environment, given few or no opportunities for creativity or play, underperform in many cognitive tests, and elderly adults who are similarly deprived of such opportunities in nursing homes suffer from accelerated cognitive decline. On the extreme end of the spectrum, a horrifying form of sensory deprivation known as white torture has been used by several governments to extract information from prisoners of war. Even hardened military veterans with training in resisting torture techniques have been deeply traumatized by the experience of being simply locked in a quiet, featureless room with nothing interesting to do or look at. Draw your own conclusions about the pervasive practice of solitary confinement in prisons. So this isn't just a case of short attention spans or weakness of will. Long-term boredom can be a serious problem for brain function. Of course, that doesn't imply that occasional boredom is a bad thing that should be avoided at all costs, even though it feels that way. It's a helpful emotional signal to move on from the current activity and try something new, and it may be implicated in more complex mental processes. Many artists and other creative people cite boredom as a useful tool for generation of new ideas. You never really work on a problem harder than you do when you're desperate for anything to escape mindless tedium. But it's clear that some people are better at coping with dull situations than others. I'm not talking attention disorders, although that's certainly relevant here, but there's a range of individual capability to make it through to the end of that highlighter meeting without chewing a leg off. In 1986, researchers Farmer and Sundberg published a paper containing a new psychological metric, the boredom-proneness scale. It was a simple set of true-false questions designed to capture just how easily someone became painfully disinterested in whatever they were doing if it wasn't attention grabbing, and researchers have found some pretty crazy stuff associated with it. People who tested as being easily bored on the BPS were more likely to become addicted to drugs, alcohol, smoking, and gambling. They tend to drive less safely and have more auto accidents. They tend to have anger issues, social issues, and work performance issues. They perform around 25% worse on average in school, about as much as if they suffered an IQ drop of 15 points, and are at a significantly higher risk of anxiety, unprotected sex, eating disorders, and depression. That's a lot of bad news, but it kind of makes sense if you think about it. It's not hard to see why someone who gets bored easily might reach for their phone every couple of minutes. Combine that impulse with a 30-minute commute to and from work every day, no wonder they're more likely to get into accidents. And if a normal group of people are willing to shock themselves to avoid being bored, what would someone who's prone to boredom do if they're regularly bored in class, or at work, or with life in general? So, let's say that you're like me, and right now you're thinking about just how much you freak out if you leave your phone at home, or how much an overlong meeting about highlighters sounds like your own personal version of hell. You can take the test yourself to find out if you're prone to boredom. There's a link in the description. But let's just say you have some concerns. Is there a way to train your brain to be less prone to boredom? Unlike some other personality traits, boredom-proneness is shaped a great deal by factors which are totally within your control, and a lot of them are things that you really should be doing anyways. First, regular exercise is correlated with a low BPS score. It may be causally related in the other direction too, of course. People who get bored easily probably won't stick with jogging for a half hour every day. But considering all the other established cognitive benefits of exercise, it's certainly feasible that a solid workout regimen can help you stay focused in potentially boring situations. And, of course, there's also the whole keeps you from dying for a while thing. Second, thinking about the part of a situation that's keeping you from fleeing out the nearest window has shown to be effective at refocusing people's attention and allowing them to stay engaged. Whether it's I need to make it safely home, or I need to stay on the boss's good side to get that promotion, remembering your motivation for doing what you're doing can keep you from succumbing to ennui. Self-awareness also turns out to be pretty key at staving off boredom. Not being embarrassed, but rather being conscious of your internal emotional state. Recognizing when you're becoming bored and being proactive about dealing with it effectively before it's a problem is a great way to develop good habits and keep yourself engaged with the task at hand. To that end, meditation has been shown to cultivate both self-awareness and mindfulness, the ability to be psychologically present in one's immediate environment, which is also demonstrably helpful. Finally, one of the strongest negative correlates for boredom-proneness is need for cognition, a measure of an individual's propensity to think deeply about things. Wanting to think carefully and relishing challenging intellectual pursuits is like kryptonite for boredom-proneness, and it seems to lead to all sorts of other cognitive and behavioral benefits. Grinding away at puzzles until you defeat them, learning new things with others, and feeding your curiosity might well be great ways to develop a healthy tolerance for boring meetings. Hmm. Feeding your curiosity about stuff that requires intense and challenging thought. Where have I heard that before? Are you also worried about your proneness to boredom? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.