A healthier life

"Fatal potential of boredom," you say, citing the conclusions of a British epidemiological study, to be released in April. No surprise to us. As a psychiatrist and a coach, we recognize the power of boredom.

Boredom is a forerunner of stress. Stress causes a cascade of chemical events including the inflammatory response, the primitive immune system defense with its "shotgun" approach to protect us from infection. The inflammatory response works by releasing cytokines, which, especially if it's a chronic event, raises the risk of arterial disease. Thus, like other chronic stress initiators, boredom kills.

Judging from news reports, research authors Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London, seem reluctant to blame boredom itself. "The state of boredom is almost certainly a proxy for other risk factors," they wrote, even though they made statistical adjustments for many risk factors including physical activity level and employment grade.

As we often recognize the distress of boredom in our practices, we have come to believe that boredom is an unheralded and understudied basic human emotion, which, like other emotions such as anxiety and anger, may set off this cascade of potentially harmful chemical events. At the least, boredom leads to secondary anxiety and anger, which are well known to cause stress.

Boredom in school and on the job is a main reason for seeking help from coaches and mental health professionals. Their children's "I'm bored" is a major complaint of parents as is the resistance parents encounter when trying to get children to do boring things like clean their rooms or do homework. Boredom thus spills over into anxiety about impending boredom and anger toward those who enforce boredom and spawns behaviors such as overeating, substance abuse, and crime.

In particular, people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) suffer from intense distress from boredom. They don't come seeking relief from boredom; they come for help with their underachievement or failure to complete anything. They don't say the "B" word first thing. They are too used to hearing the response "only boring people are bored" or "you're bored are you, here's some soap and water, go wash something" that they think twice before uttering or admitting their complaint. We see signs of huge relief when patients or clients realize we understand and accept their expressions of boredom and we define their boredom, in its own right, as worthy of strategies to help.

People who say, "I wish I had time to be bored" are actually speaking of leisure. People who say they enjoy boredom because they get to sit and think about things or daydream are not bored. Their minds are pleasantly occupied and they look forward to that state. Our definition of boredom insists that it is an uncomfortable negative feeling. It is too often one that an individual cannot easily fight off or avoid, especially if he is constrained from self-treating by daydreaming, moving freely, or creating other releases. Our mission is to help easily bored people find interest or change boring situations into more interesting ones.

The development of interest building skills is a big part of our practices. Our approach to helping appears to be validated by another recent study, published in JAMA, that showed a significant deficit in the function of the dopamine reward pathways in individuals with ADHD. James Swanson, Ph.D., one of the lead authors, says the research points to "an interest deficit" in addition to an attention deficit. Isn't boredom interesting?

See more at ThePowerOfBoredom.com and www.LetitiaLifeCoaching.com.

(Lyndon D. Waugh, MD, is an Atlanta child, adolescent, and family psychiatrist and Letitia Sweitzer, MEd, coaches students with ADHD and others.)