Scientific American Mind: Bored - Find Your Focus And You Could Change Your Life

I’ve never been good at waiting around for something to do. If work slackens slightly, I volunteer for new projects that I will find challenging— and the way I race down the hall from one task to the next is the subject of a lot of good-natured office humor. My shoulder bag is always stuffed with reading material, to ward off idle moments during the train ride home. Truth is, I just really, really hate being bored.

One way I recently have staved off dullness is by reading Anna Gosline’s fascinating account of the complex psychological underpinnings of what she calls “this most tedious of human emotions.” In her feature article “Bored?” she explains how multifaceted those ho-hum moments actually are, influenced by levels of attention and awareness, emotional factors, adeptness at identifying one’s own feelings, and the nature of the matters at hand. Boredom can drive some people to achieve — but those who easily experience ennui are more prone
to suffer chronic depression or drug addiction. Getting at the roots of boredom could help prevent and treat these ailments. The story begins on page 20. Surely the least boring decade in the past century was the psychedelic sixties, when so much of pop culture seemingly came under a hallucinogenic influence.

Now, after a long research hiatus, those drugs are back in the labs. Scientists are probing the very real value of LSD and other mind-blowing drugs to ease a variety of difficult-to-treat mental illnesses, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and drug or alcohol dependency.
Check out “Psychedelic Healing?” by David Jay Brown, on page 66. Medicines are not the only way we improve our mental health, of course.

Habits, behavior and helpful feedback are also important. That is why, advises psychologist Carol S. Dweck in “How to Raise a Smart Child,” we need to be careful about how we praise our children. Yes, you read that right. Encouragement is valuable — but it has to be the right sort. Curious? Turn to page 36. We hope the article will make you feel wiser, too.