im bored

Boredom is a universally dreaded feeling. Being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t. It’s our brain telling us to take action, much like pain is an important signal for danger or harm.

Boredom is also how our brains alert us that things aren’t going well. Scientists who study the emotion note that every episode of boredom creates an opportunity for making a positive change instead of reactively looking for the fastest, easiest escape. We just need to pay attention.

“Boredom is sort of an emotional dashboard light that goes off saying, like, ‘Hey, you’re not on track,’ ” said Erin Westgate, a social psychologist at the University of Florida who studies boredom and co-authored the shock experiment. “It is this signal that whatever it is we’re doing either isn’t meaningful to us, or we’re not able to successfully engage with this.”

Boredom is a warning sign, she says, and it’s “really necessary.”

Can boredom make you mean?

In a 2021 study, Westgate and her colleagues found boredom led participants toward more sadistic behaviors. In one experiment, bored participants watching a mundane 20-minute video were even more likely to do something presumably none of them had considered doing before: shred maggots named Toto, Tifi and Kiki in a coffee grinder. (The researchers named the maggots to humanize them.)

Among 67 participants who watched the boring video, 12 of them (18 percent) dropped a maggot into the coffee grinder. By comparison, in another group watching an interesting documentary, just one out of 62 study subjects tried to shred a maggot.

(It’s worth noting that the maggot-mangling machine was fake. No maggots were actually harmed during the experiments.)

Other experiments have shown a link between boredom and different kinds of bad behavior, from online trolling to bullying in the classroom to verbal and physical abuse by members of the military toward one another.

The good news is that boredom doesn’t always make us meaner — it just calls us to take action, good or bad. When better alternatives are available, boredom can also make us do good deeds.