131. Why does life feel boring?

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, near listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. Thank you for tuning in. For another topic. So, something that I've been contemplating a lot recently is those periods in our lives, kind of those moments sometimes, those seasons where life just seems to lose a lot of its color and it becomes quite bland and stale. Nothing quite feels as exciting as it used to. Everything feels very much not this and just kind of boring. Life feels really boring and devoid of those experiences and emotions that keep us excited, kind of lacking that sense of a future, that there's something to be looking forward to or excited about. And I think it's a pretty hideous feeling, as speaking from own experience, to look around and realize that your life has kind of become something that you never wanted it to be, To recognize that you are just bored. You are bored of your own life. And I don't think that boredom is something we need to be afraid of, But when it becomes the dominant emotion and you're in this constant state where nothing ever changes, I think it's really hard to look at your life as if there is a certain meaning to it, or to just be happy and content with the way you are going about things. I had this when I first started working my nine to five and my days were just consumed by waking up, commuting to work, eating the same lunch, the same breakfast each day, leaving at seven pm, and then just being too exhausted to even do anything afterwards but watch TV. And I repeated this routine week after week for almost a year, and it was honestly so soul destroying. And I just kept remembering this promise that I made to myself when I was younger, that I would never have an office shop, that I would make my life as exciting as it could be, And it really hurt to realize that I was failing that younger version of myself that really wanted something more on top of that kind of chronic boredom that was seeping into all other areas of my life. And you know, work and the full time corporate grind are not the only culprit here. I think it's an accumulation of a lot of factors that push us into these extreme moments of just kind of emptiness. And I know that was such a pessimistic intro and very sorry, but if that is you right now, if you've lost a bit of your passion and spirit the older you've gotten, as you've kind of hit some of those less fun responsibilities of adulthood and your early twenties, this episode is for you. This episode will hopefully provide you with two things. Firstly, a psychological explanation for why that is, why does life feel boring? Pointing to a lot of external factors but also internal ones. I think that to know the problem is to fix the problem, or at least understand it better. And so secondly, what are we going to do about it? You really do deserve a life that you actually enjoy, not one where kind of time feels like it's standing still and you're just kind of sleep walking through your days. I feel like it's quite cliche to say this, but I think sometimes we just need a reminder that you truly only get one life. You know, I have to really hold back from saying yolo there, but you know it's kind of cringed to say, but really, on a somewhat serious note, this is it. You are not going to get this time back. And I think a lot of us, myself included, sometimes go through periods of perhaps living as if this life is a practice round that we can do it differently next time, and sadly, based on your beliefs, but based on my beliefs, there is no next time. You really do owe yourself the full depth of human experiences and to break out of this boredom cycle. So let's talk about how we can do this. Before we jump into the advice, Let's firstly talk about the human experience of boredom. We have a tendency to villainize certain amount as bad or to be avoided, but each of them plays their role. I guess boredom included, and boredom is essentially your brain telling you that something needs to change, the same way that hunger tells our body to fuel itself or loneliness tells us to reconnect. Boredom is our brains signal to our body that our current situation or environment is not providing us enough engagement or meaning, and it's somewhat, you know, draining our innate spirit. And I know that's not a psychology term, but kind of. I think it explains how it feels. And it typically occurs when our energy isn't channeled into an outlet that feels personally meaningful to us, like a dead end job or a failing relationship. There's an important distinction here between what psychologists call trait boredom and state boredom. So bored is how susceptible we are as individuals to feeling dissatisfied and understimulated by our environment and relationships, regardless of what is actually going on. And the theory behind this concept is that there are certain people who are high in trade boredom that may feel bored even in situations that objectively are really exciting, like during while they're traveling or during big life events. Basically, their threshold for mental stimulation is so high that the events that would excite them would make them entertained and happy have to be so intense that they are almost cursed by chronic boredom. It may also come I guess, from an inability to sustain our attention which is fairly typical amongst people with ADHD, who often find themselves becoming quite bored with things very quickly, not from a place of personal flos but because their brains literally cannot keep them stimulated and excited by something for an extended period of time. We might say that they have high trait boredom in the situation. And people with this high trait boredom, they are more likely to take exaggerated or really intensive risks. They're more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and even substance abuse at extreme levels. And I think that makes a lot of sense from a logical standpoint. If the rest of the world cannot give you the enjoyment that you need, maybe turning to artificial enhancers like drugs or alcohol is kind of the only viable solution in that moment. Luckily, for us, the vast majority of people do not have high trait boredom. You and me, the average person. We are more likely to experience what is known as state boredom. So this is when we feel bored in a specific situation based on our current environment. And basically the theory suggest that boredom in these instances arises as a product of what we call situational meaninglessness. We look at what we're doing and we cannot find the why behind why we're doing it. You know, sitting in a class when you're not learning anything particularly relevant, or in some eight hour seminar for a job you don't love. Being in that situation feels like it lacks purpose for the plans that you have for your life, and this essentially queues boredom, triggers boredom, which is telling our brain that something needs to change. So in those moments, it's a combination of low mental arousal and feeling unpleasant, and we want to avoid that. So our brain is saying, this is not making me happy. I don't want to be here, This is not fun for me. And not only is it not fun, but it's not particularly aligned with what we kind of had in mind for our lives. It's this phenomenon known as chronic dissatisfaction, that restless feeling of yearning or wishing for something more without even knowing what it is, but knowing that we are not happy. When this occurs, when life just feels really boring and we feel trapped by our current circumstances, this can actually operate as what we would call a catalyst for change. So it's kind of this symbolic kick to get us going, to get us back on the horse, to reclaim the agency we have over our lives and decisions. And that's probably the state that you are in right now. If you are here listening to this episode, you may have ignored some of those initial cues for too long or begun to feel a bit overwhelmingly comfortable, which is a nice enough feeling. But the reality of human existence is that our brains need a certain level of cognitive stimulation, not only to grow, but to keep us happy. Our brains also need a challenge or something to work towards, otherwise they become static, and in that state, we use these same neural pathways over and over again. We do the same things. We are not pushing our brain to engage in what we would call synaptic or neuralplasticity, whereby we strengthen and weaken certain synaptic pathways depending on what our environment requires. So when we don't provide ourselves with new experiences, our brains become less alert, they become less engaged, they become less curious, and that results in that sense of flatness and even in some cases we spoke about before kind of a reliance on external pleasures substances to keep us happy. And there was a very famous study that has showed this correlation, this relationship using rats. This experiment conducted in the nineteen seventies. It was called rat Park, which is first of all, just a super cute name to start off with, but essentially, these researchers they created three different homes or environments for these little rats, and one was full of enrichment. It had toys and slides and other rats they could play with, and the next condition had other rats but less enrichment, and the final setting involved just one rat alone in a cage by itself, with nothing to entertain it. The experimenters then gave the rats two water bottles, two kinds of sources of hydration. One of the water bottles just contained water and the other one was water laced with cocaine and heroine. The rats, who had enrichment and they had their little rat friends to play with, they didn't really go for the cocaine water. It was like free drugs, and they just were not interested. They were happy with just playing water. But the rats who were alone and who were bored and who had nothing to entertain themselves exclusively drank the cocaine water to the point that they became ill and even died despite having the plane water available. And basically, what this study concluded is that our drive to avoid boredom is so strong that we will go as far as to perhaps harm ourselves with things like alcohol, substances junk food just to give us a little bit of enrichment. We need to be challenged, we need to be entertained more than we need a lot of other things. And so our brain is going to respond in a few ways, not just regarding substance usage, but other ways when it feels this impending sense of boredom. The first is triggering that deep dissatisfaction we've spoken about, because it hopes that that will trigger certain behavioral decisions as a way to ev these feelings, like changing something about our environment, putting ourselves out there doing more quote unquote fun things so that we achieve that emotional kind of equilibrium homeostasis. But the second interaction, which we've spoken about briefly, is really interesting. So according to the study published in the Cognition and Emotion Journal in twenty twenty one. Experiencing prolonged state boredom actually results in what we would call an optimistic perception of risk, an increased risk taking behavior. So, as this article explains, the evolutionary function of boredom is to motivate us to pursue an alternative experience, and sometimes we swing way too far in the opposite direction to compensate for feeling so shitty and so stuck for so long. So they found that participants in this study who self reported that they were currently quite bored in their lives, they took a lot more risks. It's why we find ourselves when we are feeling this way, wanting to spontaneously change our hair or book some elaborate holiday, or get a tattoo, or break up with our partners. Our brains are just trying to recalibrate in that moment. But that doesn't always leave us in the most sustainable position. You know, you just have a new hair color or a new tattoo, not a new outlook. So it's a temporary fix for what is a deeper emotional and mental issue, not feeling able to direct your efforts to the things in life that will keep you fulfilled and happy. Perhaps you know you've been spending too much time in your routine, or there are certain environmental triggers like those behind seasonal effective disorder. There are a lot of reasons, but also a lot of ways that we can counteract that. So if you are someone who is feeling like life is just incredibly boring right now, I want to provide you with some tips to get over that, some tips to feel better about the kind of miracle and beauty of life. We're going to talk about all of that and more after this shortbreak. Just because life feels boring doesn't mean that it's always going to be that way. It's worth noting that we are all going to experience the occasional moment or period of dissatisfaction, especially since I don't think any one thing a job, a hobby, a holiday, a partner can keep us happy forever, and so we need boredom to kind of tell us when it's time to change, when it's time to keep evolving. And if we listen to that boredom, if we don't let it suffocate us but motivate us. I also think that it can be quite transformative. So I want to talk about some of the key factors that cause life to feel boring, but also what exactly we can do about it to kind of counterbalance or counteract their influence. Firstly, being so stuck in our routine that we don't have any new or novel experiences is a massive contributor. Routine is great for creating structure, reducing stress, allowing us to do the things we want and need to do, but when it is too highly stringent, it can actually confine our lives. It leaves little room or possibility for spontaneity. We've spoken about this before on the podcast the benefit of what we call an anti routine. The premise is that you actually need to give yourself time to do things that are unexpected and to expose yourself to new experiences. You cannot plan out every single moment of your life, every single moment of your day. It might make you feel like you have more control, but it could also be contributing to some deeper emotional experiences. If life is feeling boring, break out of your routine for a moment and try and just do one new, unexpected thing a week, whether that is trying a new gym class or a new restaurant, just starting a new project, literally just eating something new, or listening to different music or a different podcast. All of those things provides our brain with the novelty that it needs to feel less bored and research into brain health, cognition, longevity it suggests that regular experiences of novelty like the ones we've just spoken about, are essential to a long, happy life, but also for reducing that boredom, that sense of being stuck. Here's the psychology behind this theory. Our brains need stimulation and new experiences, and the reason for this preference is really simple. Novelty makes us happy. It just makes us happy. And brain research has shown that we get such a rush of dopamine every time we see something new, we experiencing something new of any kind. They published this study in this journal called Neuron, and in this study, they showed participants a series of images that were mostly very basic, simple commonplace things like you know, ordinary landscapes like a field, a couch, basic faces, like very boring, simple images, and then they randomly threw in like an odd ball image, something that was really unexpected, really out of the ordinary. And what they did was they watched their brain activity to see what areas of the brain was activated when they saw these odd ball images. And what they found was that the pleasure centers of the brain, mainly located in the mid brain, were activated extremely more so when the participants saw this new, fresh image compared to when they just were staring at the basic, ordinary landscapes. What this is telling us is that when we restrict ourselves to the ordinary and constant routine and structure, we receive less of that dope, mean and excitement. So you need to push beyond your comfort zone every now and again. Book the trip, do something spontaneous, shake things up a bit, embrace the anti routine, and you'll feel a lot better. Secondly, another reason we can feel bored by life is kind of counterintuitive, and it's because of overstimulation and excessive social media usage. Now this occurs because of two reasons. Firstly, when we consume so much social media, we spend so much of our lives online, our brains can no longer focus its attention onto just one thing. Secondly, it's the impact of social comparison. Let's start with the first one. There have been an abundance of research papers in recent years into the impact of fast media, particularly social media, on our ability to get genuine enjoyment from life. Our brains were not built for receiving this much information, and nowadays they have been completely exposed to this whole new way of receiving information and of receiving messages from the world around us, and so they have almost been altered by the instant gratification created by thirty second ten second videos and tiktoks and videos and online content with flashing lights that are going to immediately give our brain a bit of a dopamine hit. Nowadays is we can find ourselves sitting on the couch aimlessly scrolling for what could be ours, rather than actually engaging in our environment and in our lives. And as one article put it, a lot of our experience with the Internet is based on, as we said before, instant gratification, and as a result, our attention span is shortening and we are used to receiving that spike of dopamine instantly from our phones. That makes the rest of our lives where we might not get that stimulation right away, where it's just a little bit less colorful because it's not artificial, it feels boring. And additionally, being able to sustain our attention also is important, so that not being something that we can do as well as we used to be able to. That's going to increase bottom levels because it means that we can no longer actually focus on pursuing our ideas, our goals, and our visions for our lives because we get to distracted so easily. That is the first explanation. The second has to do a social comparison. Here is the fallacy of platforms like Instagram. They will convince you that everyone is doing better than you, is happier than you, is having the fucking time of their life, and you might see that, and it's going to completely change your appraisal, your perspective on your own happiness levels if you're not careful, not everyone can travel Europe for their entire lives or is constantly having the experiences that you might wish you were having. And when we don't have that oversight, that reality check, it can make it feel like our lives are comparatively quite boring, even if we have every reason to be super happy. Here's how we can break away from that infiltration that is making you feel like your life lacks some meaning. Firstly, go and search us some real dopamine here, something that exists beyond the screen, beyond the instant gratification of social media, or better yet, kind of challenge yourself to a dopamine detox to offer a bit of a circuit break or an opportunity to rewire your attention and how your brain processes enjoyment. So a dopamin detox entails essentially fasting or giving up certain dopamine producing activities like social media, junk food, things like that, anything that's a pleasure with the hope of decreasing your reward sensitivity. So the idea is that by allowing ourselves to feel bored or to feel lonely, we find pleasure more so in very simple and more natural activities, and that allows us to regain control over our lives and be better able to address certain compulsive behaviors that might be interfering with our happiness. Now, I will say there hasn't been much research into the long term efficacy of this practice, but some people really celebrate it anecdotally as it being the thing that got them to stop wasting their life consuming things like social media, and it made them feel a lot less unsatisfied with the overall state of their lives because they got to experience and spend more time actually enjoying those small joys, noticing the mundane, kind of focusing on what it is that is their sense of purpose. Also, you know, as a bonus, detaching ourselves from social media also reduces a lot of those opportunities for social comparison and kind of allows us to put the version of ourself forward we actually like, not one that has been curated or altered or changed to fit some certain expectation. So the third reason life might feel quite boring is because of something more clinical like depression or even seasonal effective disorder. Depression is a real possibility if you aren't just bored, but you do not find joy in anything that you do, in particular the things that used to make you so happy and used to make you feel so alive. We did a whole episode on depression and the links to feeling stagnant. But seasonal effective disorder, I think, is one that requires some special attention in this episode, especially as the winter months are coming in fast for a lot of you, all in the northern hemisphere. So seasonal effective disorder or depression or the winter blues it occurs when the days become shorter, the sun sets sooner, the cold kind of starts to creep in, and it naturally causes our mood to plummet kind of locks our social schedule and the amount of time we have to do things that really refresh the soul, like go outside, like actually see our friends feel human. And it may explain why the sense that life is boring can be very seasonal and really, you know, after the fun of the summer and the spring months has faded, we can find ourselves kind of trapped in this sense of life feeling quite meaningless. My best advice is to make sure that you actually have things in the future to keep you excited about. That was like my main hack when I lived in Canberra, where it got freezing cold and the sun was genuinely only up for eight hours. I kind of always made sure that there was something planned in the next two months, three months in the summer months. That gave me something to actually look for two It was kind of a light at the end of the tunnel, a reminder that life is not boring, It is just cold. It is just phrasing. I am just sad, and there will be more time to create those fun moments and experiences for myself. I want to talk about four final tips I have for this feeling, for getting out of this rut, the sense that life is boring. Number one, you need to get out of your sweatpants or your coffee clothes at least once a day. Now. I know this this hard, especially if you work from home a lot like I do. But what I was finding is that every day I kind of spent in the house in my pajamas, never getting out for even the occasional walk or coffee with a friend or some sunshine. I just ended the day feeling a lot worse than the days that I did do those things. Just the simple act of getting up, putting on an outfit, and leaving the house, it gives you just daily exposure to small things that are stimulating and interesting. Secondly, I would say say yes to everything, even if you think it's going to make you uncomfortable, or even if you think it's a little bit odd. Say yes to you know, the party where you don't know anyone, to the work trip, to just new opportunities. Because I think saying yes is a skill, and it also allows you to take action to make a change in your life to be more open to new experiences and to risks and to memories. Sometimes the easiest thing we can do is the most convenient, and the most convenient thing is to say no. But saying yes kind of says to the world, says to the universe like I'm open to exciting things. I'm open to surprises. I'm kind of open to a challenge. Thirdly, do something for others. I know this feels like quite a strange antidote for boredom, but sometimes we really do need to get out of our own heads and realize that our lives are not the only ones that matter in this world. That we are sharing this planet with billions of others who could use a bit of help or some kindness. So pull yourself out of your own head for a bit, out of all your thoughts and your boredom, and direct your attention to someone else who might need it. I actually think that it is one of the most empowering things that you can do, not just for yourself, but for other people as well. And finally, de clutter your space, give that depression room a bit of a clean. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that this is going to magically give your life a whole new meaning and change everything. But I do think there is a correlation between how you keep your space and how you approach life. If you feel like your room or your home is in order, you are more inclined to want to be more productive or active in other areas of your life. And that is the really simple formula to overcoming a sense of being being stuck or bored. You really just need to do more. You need to put yourself out there. And if you have a space that feels comfortable, you have a space that feels like it's organized and structured, it's going to kind of inspire you to do more on your you know, the external parts of your life as well, do more with your life in any way that you can. Like I said before, I think we often fall into this trap of treating life like it's an inconvenience or something that we've been forced into, because we don't recognize how precious it actually is to be alive and to be human and to love and explore and laugh and make mistakes and just do something impulsive every now and again. So if you have become trapped in a routine or a lifestyle that doesn't give you those moments of being like, yes, this is it. Life is wonderful. I think it makes sense that you're feeling bored and unfortunately, no one is going to change that for you. You have a duty, a personal duty, to create the life that you want. And you know, whether it's just a change in routine or environment, the people that you spend time with, or just focusing on your mental health, you can really pull yourself out of this feeling, out of this period of boredom and just see kind of a whole new side to the world and how you want to choose to live it. So I'm sending you strength and love, but most of all, excitement. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that it left you feeling a little bit inspired or at least informed at the bare minimum. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, if you enjoy the Psychology of your twenties, please feel free to give us a five star review. Make sure you're following so you know when new episodes are coming out. If you have an episode suggestion, or if you just have something that you want to say about this episode or any other episode you can follow us at That Psychology Podcast on Instagram and I Am at Gemmispeg on Instagram if you want to see some more behind the scenes content. Thanks again for listening today. As always, we will be back next week with another episode.