Boredom Series — Episode 2 | 10

In 2014, researchers from the universities of Virginia and Harvard conducted a simple experiment: leaving people alone in an empty room, with no phone, no book, no nothing, for 15 minutes. Their only instruction: to think.

Before starting, each participant had tested an electric shock to the ankle. All of them had rated it as unpleasant. Some had said they would pay to never experience it again.

Then they were left alone with their thoughts. 67% of the men pressed the button. 25% of the women did too. One participant shocked himself 190 times in a quarter of an hour.

They knew it was painful. They chose it anyway, rather than the silence.

We may have become incapable of enduring emptiness. Not because we are weak. But because something in our environment has deeply reconfigured our relationship with boredom.

🔁 The rising threshold

The brain gets used to things. What was stimulating yesterday is less so today.

This adaptation mechanism, useful for evolution, becomes problematic in an environment of infinite and permanent stimulation.

Digital platforms are not designed to inform or entertain. They are designed to maximize attention time. Every notification, every like, every new video triggers a release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter of the desire to have more.

The result, after years of exposure: it takes more and more to feel engagement, and less and less is enough to feel boredom.

This is not a metaphor. It is a documented neurobiological mechanism, close to that of behavioral addictions.

📱 The paradox of channel surfing

Faced with boredom, the reflex is to switch: change videos, open another app, scroll a little faster.

The work of Cynthia Tam and Michael Inzlicht shows that this strategy is not only ineffective. It worsens boredom.

Surfing fragments attention into shorter and shorter units, preventing the brain from reaching the state of deep engagement that produces real satisfaction. We have consumed a lot. We are nourished by nothing.

There is also what researchers call the perceived opportunity cost: in an environment of digital abundance, every minute spent on one piece of content is experienced as a minute potentially missed on another. This anxiety of permanent choice is exhausting without being stimulating.

😰 FOMO, or the fear of being alone with oneself

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is correlated with a higher propensity for boredom, poorer emotional regulation, and problematic use of social media.

But what is interesting is the reverse mechanic: FOMO does not drive engagement. It drives the avoidance of boredom. It is not the desire to be over there that motivates. It is the fear of being alone here.

Permanent connection then becomes less an opening to the world than an escape from oneself.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa goes further: our modern societies have established a temporal regime in which silence and waiting have become culturally unacceptable. Boredom no longer poses only a personal problem. It poses a problem of social conformity.

🧠 What we sabotage by fleeing emptiness

By removing silence, we remove an essential psychological process.

The default mode network, active during daydreaming and introspection, plays a central role in memory consolidation, emotional integration, creative thinking, and long-term planning. This network needs unstructured time to function.

What we call "lack of concentration" or "difficulty getting started" is often the sign of a brain chronically deprived of its reset times.

And research on allostatic overload goes even further: a nervous system kept in a permanent state of activation eventually wears itself out. Anxiety, irritability, sleep disorders, chronic fatigue can be the consequences of a systematic refusal of emptiness. Not from an excess of work. But from an inability to disengage.

Allostatic overload: when the nervous system is kept in a state of alert for too long, even at a low level, it eventually wears itself out. It is not acute stress that wears us down, it is the lack of recovery.

💡 What you can do

Introduce periods of non-stimulation into the day: walking without headphones, eating without a screen, waiting without looking at one's phone. This is not a luxury. It is a neurobiological necessity.

Observing your own reaction to boredom is already informative: after how many seconds does the urge to grab the phone occur? What emotion precedes this action? This observation, without judgment, is a starting point.

If the inability to remain without stimulation is accompanied by marked anxiety, sleep disturbances, or persistent irritability, a consultation can help assess if something deeper is at play.

Silence is not a lack. It is a cognitive space.

What we have progressively lost is the ability to inhabit this space without feeling dread. Reclaiming this ability is not a matter of willpower. It is, in the literal sense, an act of care toward one's own nervous system.

The question is not: "how can I distract myself better?"

It is: "why do I need to distract myself so much, and what am I protecting myself from?"

Next episode: boreout, when boredom at work becomes a health risk.