Why do we get bored?
From a word first recorded in 1852 to a 2018 model of attention and meaning: what research says about why we get bored.
Answer to the question
Why do we get bored?
Research points to two sources. Attention is not engaged with what a person is doing, and the activity feels without meaning to them. Eastwood and colleagues defined boredom in 2012 as wanting to take part in an activity and being unable to, and Westgate and Wilson's 2018 model adds meaning as a second, independent source.
Key takeaways
- The noun boredom is first recorded in 1852 in a Dickens novel, and the older word bore, for a tiresome person, appears in letters of 1766 and 1767 (Allison Pease).
- Richard Farmer and Norman Sundberg published a 28-item Boredom Proneness Scale in 1986, which let researchers compare how readily people report boredom.
- Eastwood and colleagues defined boredom in 2012 as an unpleasant state of wanting to take part in a satisfying activity and being unable to, explained through attention.
- Bench and Lench proposed in 2013 that boredom moves people towards new goals when the current one has stopped being useful, and noted that experimental support is still limited.
- Westgate and Wilson's 2018 MAC model finds attention and meaning to be two independent sources of boredom, and explains why it sends people looking for something interesting.
Why do we get bored? Part of the answer is that the word itself is young. The noun boredom is first recorded in a Dickens novel of the mid nineteenth century, according to the historical dictionary entry as set out by the literary scholar Allison Pease, and, in her account, the older word bore, meaning a tiresome person, appears in aristocratic letters of the later eighteenth century. For most of history people sat through dull hours without a name for the feeling. The name arrived first, the measurement came later, and the explanation is still being refined.
When did people first get bored?
The literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks made the case in a book on the literary history of the feeling that boredom became a recognised state of mind in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the word began to circulate. Earlier generations lived lives that look dull to a modern reader, she argued, but they did not describe those lives as boring. She tied the change to more leisure time, a weaker hold of religious belief, a growing emphasis on individual rights and a rising interest in inner experience.
Pease places the English experience in the late eighteenth century and reports that the historical dictionary's first entry for boredom itself is a scene in Bleak House, where Dickens uses it of a character in a wealthy household. People could get bored long before they had the word, but the word let them say so to one another. A name for a feeling can be late without the feeling being new, so the date shows when people started to describe the state, not when it began.
What the history does show is a pattern: the word grew up alongside free time and attention to the self, the two conditions in which a stretch of nothing can begin to feel like a problem.
Boredom becomes something to measure
For two centuries boredom stayed a theme of novels and essays. In 1986 Richard Farmer and Norman Sundberg moved it into the laboratory by publishing a 28-item Boredom Proneness Scale. Scores held steady when people were retested a week later, and they tracked other boredom measures and findings on interest and attention in the classroom. The scale made one idea testable: some people get bored more readily than others, and the difference can be compared across groups.
That shift changed the question. The scale also gave researchers a plain way to ask who tends to get bored, how often, and in which settings. A feeling that novelists had treated as a mood of an age became a tendency that varied from person to person, and the next decades of research asked what lay beneath it. The trait view also has an everyday counterpart, the capacity to stay with a quiet moment without reaching for something else, a capacity usually called Boredom Tolerance. Scores on a scale say how often a person reports the feeling. They do not say what the feeling is, and that was the work of the next stage.
A definition built on attention
In 2012 John Eastwood, Alexandra Frischen, Mark Fenske and Daniel Smilek set out to define boredom by the mental processes behind it. Drawing on psychodynamic, existential, arousal and cognitive theories, they concluded that boredom is an unpleasant state of wanting to take part in a satisfying activity and being unable to. Their proposal was that attention explains it: the person cannot focus on the thoughts, feelings or outside things needed for the activity, and attention then fixes on that very inability.
The definition fits an ordinary case. A person waiting for a late train has plenty to think about, yet nothing grips, so they get bored anyway, and the wanting to be engaged is the part that hurts. The same account explains why a crowded room or a screen full of options can leave someone bored, since the problem is a failure of engagement and not a shortage of things to do.
A year later Shane Bench and Heather Lench asked what the feeling is for. Their proposal was that boredom pushes people towards new goals when the current one has stopped being useful. While people are bored, attention to the present task falls, the state feels unpleasant and bodily arousal rises, which readies the person to act on alternatives. They presented this as a proposal, and they noted that the existing evidence supports it only in part and that more experiments were needed.
Why do we get bored today?
The most developed account is the MAC model of Erin Westgate and Timothy Wilson, published in 2018. It treats boredom as a signal that attention is not engaged with an activity that matters to the person. Two deficits can produce it. One is attention: the demands of a task do not match the mental resources available, and that can mean too little to do or too much. The other is meaning: the activity feels pointless or disconnected from goals.
Each deficit produced boredom independently, and the model covers boredom during outside tasks and during a person's own thoughts. It also explains why the feeling sends people looking for something interesting, not simply something pleasant.
Christine Rosen takes the question into daily life in The Extinction of Experience. Her argument is that gaps in the day, queues and waits and journeys, are now reliably filled with a screen, so anticipation, daydreaming and boredom are being cut short and not lived through. That is an argument about habit and culture, and the studies above do not test it directly. It fits their general shape, though: if attention is unengaged only briefly before a device takes over, the signal that boredom provides never gets to do its job. Wandering thought, the subject of Mind-Wandering, is one of the things such a gap used to hold.
| Year | Account | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| 1766 and 1767 | Letters using the word bore, as reported by Pease | A name for the tiresome |
| 1852 | Dickens, Bleak House, as reported by Pease | First dictionary entry for boredom |
| 1986 | Farmer and Sundberg | A scale for boredom proneness |
| 2012 | Eastwood and colleagues | Boredom as unengaged attention |
| 2013 | Bench and Lench | A proposed function: moving to new goals |
| 2018 | Westgate and Wilson | Attention and meaning as two sources |
Each row answers a different part of the question of why we get bored. The first rows say why the label exists, the scale says people differ, the attention account says what is going on in the mind, and the function account says why it is useful. A chosen stretch of nothing, as in Why is doing nothing suddenly so popular, borrows a meaning that the unchosen kind lacks, and an empty spell can feel long, as in Why Ten Quiet Minutes Feel So Long, for the same attention reasons.
An interesting task relieves the feeling for longer than a pleasant distraction, because it gives attention something that matters.
Common questions
Why do we get bored?
Research points to two sources. Attention is not successfully engaged with an activity, and the activity lacks meaning for the person. The feeling is an unpleasant signal that pushes people towards something interesting.
When did the word boredom first appear?
According to Allison Pease, the historical dictionary entry for boredom cites Dickens in 1852. Pease also reports that the older word bore, meaning a tiresome person, appears in letters from 1766 and 1767.
Is boredom useful?
Bench and Lench proposed that it moves people towards new goals when the present one has stopped serving them. They noted that experimental support is still limited.
Do some people get bored more easily than others?
Farmer and Sundberg built a 28-item scale in 1986 to measure proneness to the feeling, and it showed that individuals differ in how often they report the feeling.
Sources
Rosen, C. The Extinction of Experience. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Extinction of Experience.
Farmer, R., & Sundberg, N. D. (1986). Boredom proneness: The development and correlates of a new scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 50(1), 4-17. doi:10.1207/s15327752jpa5001_2 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa5001_2
Eastwood, J. D., Frischen, A., Fenske, M. J., & Smilek, D. (2012). The unengaged mind: Defining boredom in terms of attention. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 482-495. doi:10.1177/1745691612456044 https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612456044
Bench, S. W., & Lench, H. C. (2013). On the function of boredom. Behavioral Sciences, 3(3), 459-472. doi:10.3390/bs3030459 https://doi.org/10.3390/bs3030459
Westgate, E. C., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Boring thoughts and bored minds: The MAC model of boredom and cognitive engagement. Psychological Review, 125(5), 689-713. doi:10.1037/rev0000097 https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000097
Pease, A. (2012). Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom. Cambridge University Press. Introductory chapter on the word boredom.
Spacks, P. M. (1995). Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. University of Chicago Press.