Boredom is described as an emotional state characterized by an unfulfilled desire to do or experience something satisfying.
The lack of mental or practical activity that characterizes boredom often tends to translate into a series of negative states of mind, such as:
- impatience
- sense of agitation
- apathy
- difficulty concentrating
- disinterest
- sense of inner emptiness
- lethargy.
The lack of external stimuli leads to an increase in physiological activation in search of novelty – the failure of this search leads to the experience of boredom.
The most common definition of boredom is: "the adverse experience of wanting, but not being able, to engage in a satisfying activity". Boredom begins in a situation in which none of the possible things a person could do are attractive. This makes the person inactive, and generally unhappy. Therefore, boredom is the result of having nothing to do that they enjoy.
As a study conducted at York University in Toronto has shown, one could say that there is a "bad" type of boredom, which generates discomfort and restlessness, and a "good" type of boredom, which encourages creativity and quality of reasoning. The first occurs when one looks for the solution outside (for example in smartphones), with the result, in the long term, of decreasing the sense of self-efficacy and confidence in one's own skills.
If we tend to look for satisfaction outside, and not inside ourselves, it is likely that as soon as the stimuli cease to be interesting, boredom will return and strengthen.
Boredom seems to be associated mostly with negative consequences… yet, like all emotions, it has a purpose, an evolutionary function.
One function or benefit of boredom is that it may stimulate the production of fantasies and awaken creativity. When the bored individual cannot physically escape the boring task for something more stimulating, the shift in attention is from an external focus to an internal focus, that is, attention is directed to one’s own internal thoughts, feelings, experiences. This internal focus may involve finding new ways to perform the boring task to make it more engaging or it may involve thinking about unrelated problems or ideas that are more attractive to consider than the boring task at hand. This shift in attention is called daydreaming and is therefore a common byproduct of boredom. Various studies have shown that individuals use daydreaming to regulate boredom-induced tension, thus suggesting that daydreaming is used as a strategy to cope with the unpleasant state of boredom. The benefit of daydreaming is that it can lead to creative problem solving and suggests a link between daydreaming and creativity.
Recent research has defined daydreaming as a "mental state conducive to creativity, intuition, and problem solving in which truly novel ideas and solutions emerge."