Being bored
Don’t you feel how boring and uninteresting life can be? No matter what lies in front of you, nothing seems to be of any interest to you You try watching television and you still feel like there is nothing to watch, try looking at your phone and you get bored even as you browse social media. Then you try reading and still doesn’t do any good, and nope no tasty food can do the trick. You’re simply too bored to do anything.
This happens a lot in everybody’s life especially if things aren’t going the way you expected it to go. You might want to do something else but you’re stuck with something that you’re supposed to finish and still leave it anyway. Another reason could probably be because you’re not engaged with something that can take the thought of boredom from your minds.
So what else happens while we’re going through this black and white phase of our lives.
Boredom, frustration can trigger skin-picking and other compulsive behaviors.
Ever felt so bored that you had to unnecessarily start scraping off the dried wounds laying on the surface of your skin. Well, as hard as it may seem to stop, you must stop it. While your body is taking the right initiative of healing itself, stop trying to make things worse for you and your own body just because you can’t handle your boredom issues.
Researchers have found that individuals who get easily bored, frustrated or impatient are more prone to develop skin-picking and another body-focused repetitive kind of behaviors.
Some of these body-repetitive behaviors can include -
- • Chronic-hair pulling,
- • Skin-picking disorder,
- • Nail-biting disorders
While these behaviors can be just bad for you, they may still seem to be satisfying at the moment as you’re probably not even aware that you're doing it unintentionally.
Researchers have found out that's some of these individuals may have some kind of perfectionistic kind of attitude instilled in them as they just can’t perform tasks at a slow and steady pace. They’re just so determined in getting things done as quickly as possible. And when they don’t meet those goals, they become more prone to dissatisfaction, frustration, and impatience. These people probably even experience boredom on a whole new level.
Researchers also conclude people who resort to this kind of body-repetitive behavior could benefit from treatments that can be designed to reduce frustration and boredom and can also slightly alter their perfectionist beliefs.
The study" was carried out by Kieron O’ Connor and a team of researchers from the University of Montreal.
Being bored at work can make us more creative !!
While all the strict office bosses and managers may not like this or may even seem to disagree with this, it may just actually be true. And while most of us do consider boredom as a negative experience. , a new study suggests that it could have positive results including an increase in creativity because it may just give us the time to daydream.
The best part of daydreaming may be to just wander off into the heavens above, not worried about things that are probably making us want to pull or hair apart. Well , don’t look for an excuse to daydream every now and then though.
Researchers carried out 2 different experiments with 40 volunteers to find out how people would behave once they got bored. The first test involved a boring task of copying phone numbers out of a telephone directory for 15 minutes and the 2nd test, involved coming up with different ideas for a pair of polystyrene cups that gave them a chance to display their creativity. The test results were -
- • The 40 volunteers who first copied the telephone numbers were more creative than the control group of 40 who were told to bring innovative ideas with polystyrene cups.
- • After the task was modified to become even more boring, there were few of still followed the rules of copying the numbers, but the other participants found a better idea of simply reading out the numbers than writing them.
Researchers found that while the people in the 2nd task became less creative, the ultimate winners were not the ones who wrote down the numbers but instead it was the group who came up with a much better solution of simply reading out the numbers.
Sometimes boredom may have the ability to trigger or unlock the creative minds in you. The simple act of being bored could also mean that you’re likely to bring in a whole new bunch of thoughts when you’re hardly thinking anything at all.
The research was carried out by Dr. Sandi Mannn and Rebekkah Cadman from the University of Central Lancashire at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology.
Being bored can make you go hungry !!
Ever been so bored that you became hungry and this unusual kind of hunger sent you flying toward the fridge to grab only every single food item that had fat written all over it. Yup, I’m sure you have. Thing is most of us have. Cos there’s probably nothing better in the world than gobbling all the junk foods you can get right when you feel you’ve been bored for 45 minutes straight.
In an experiment carried out by researchers, participants were instructed to watch a boring video and were presented with a range of healthy and unhealthy snacks placed by their side.
Without a doubt, participants chose almost all of the unhealthy foods like crisps, sweets and different kinds of fast food as they finished watching the boring video. Researchers conclude that people are more likely to crave tasty food items with high fat and high sugar when they became bored. It also further strengthens the theory that, boredom might be associated with lower levels of the stimulating brain chemicals called chemical dopamine that may cause the individual to get this sudden urge of eating sugar and fat-related foods if they feel they have no other option of being able to counter their boredom.
The research was carried out by Dr. Sandi Mann from the University of Central Lancashire along with fellow researchers Faye Ibbitson and Ben Edwards.
Falling asleep during boredom !!
Don’t you feel sometimes that no matter how hard you try, you just can't help yourself from falling asleep? Things can get even worse when you’re attending a lecture, and you’re not supposed to sleep but you can just feel yourself drifting away. Well, it has happened to all of us at some point in our lives but why do we fall asleep when we’re bored.
As humans, we defy sleepiness and try to stay awake when attention is necessary. Cos sometimes brain mechanisms governing the regulation of sleep aren’t well understood. It was found that a part of the brain’s region associated with motivation and pleasure called the nucleus accumbens has the ability to produce the sleep.
These accumbens neurons have an extremely strong ability to induce sleep that is indistinguishable from the major component of natural sleep, also known as slow-wave sleep and is also characterized by slow and high voltage brain waves.
Also, a substance like caffeine, a commonly and widely used psychostimulant in the world produces its arousal effect also in the nucleus accubenms thus blocking a certain receptor that makes you feel like sleeping.
The research was carried out by Researchers at the University of Tsukba’s International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine and Fudan University's Department of Pharmacology in the School of Basic Medical Sciences.