Work

Bored at work? Your brain is trying to warn you.

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Boredom isn’t the enemy; it’s a catalyst for changing your relationship to work.

Key Takeaways

  • Most American workers are either disengaged at work or find their jobs miserable.
  • Boredom at work isn’t an inescapable mental state; it’s an emotional warning that you need to change your current predicament.
  • You can find fascination and reward in your work by entertaining your curiosity or connecting with the meaning behind your job.

Our modern understanding of the relationship between work and boredom developed largely out of the Industrial Revolution. As the demand for factory labor increased, millions of people were forced to perform the same repetitive task for 12 hours a day, day after day, ad nauseam. This seismic shift from the work of centuries past erupted in a boredom epidemic.

In fact, our modern word boredom didn’t originate until the mid-19th century, a combination of bore (one that causes weariness or restlessness) and the suffix –dom (a state of being).

This association is so strong that many consider boredom to be a strictly modern phenomenon. While conditions may have improved, the argument goes, the same through line of soul-crushing efficiency and productivity connects the assembly lines of yesteryear to the Zoom meetings of today. Is it any wonder then that almost half of U.S. workers aren’t engaged at work while a further 15% find their jobs miserable?

Except this argument misses a critical detail: Even our ancient ancestors could get bored with work. No generation has lived in a blissful age in which every mason, philosopher, and turnip farmer has enjoyed the products of their labor as only a true artisan can. They too struggled to find the flow and fascination in their work.

Far from a modern malaise, boredom is a psychological tool that serves a vital evolutionary function. It’s a warning for you to either change your current situation or risk the consequences.

A Ford company assembly line in 1913.
Works on the first moving assembly line at a Ford Company factory in 1913. The changes brought by the Industrial Revolution indelibly linked work with boredom.

Dancing with the noonday demon

The ancient Greeks may have provided the earliest formal expression of boredom. Their concept of acedia represented a kind of whole-body languidness leading to apathy and self-neglect. Centuries later, early Christian monks would borrow acedia to describe the tedium of monastic work-life. (If you think eight hours in a cubicle sounds like a drag, try devoting all your waking hours to abstinence and prayer.)

But for medieval monks, boredom wasn’t simply a question of unmet performance goals. Feeling weary in the service of the Lord their God was a spiritually fraught prospect. Sloth would be promoted to one of the seven deadly sins, and that deadliness wasn’t hyperbolic. As W.E.H. Lacky noted in his History of European Morals (1920): “A melancholy leading to desperation, and known to theologians under the name of ‘acedia,’ was not uncommon in monasteries and most of the recorded instances of medieval suicides in Catholicism were by monks.”

By the Middle Ages, acedia’s association with sin and ungodliness personified it into a being called the “noonday demon.” This devilish figure would plague people with lethargy and agitation during their daily routines — typically around noon. The demon gets its name from the Old Testament, specifically Psalm 91:6, which implores its readers to not be afraid of “the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”

And this is just one of boredom’s historic pathways. Others include the French, who famously gave the world ennui. The Germans have langeweile, which connects boredom to a lengthened sense of time. The Russians have skuka, a word derived from the onomatopoeia for the sounds chickens make. 

Then there’s the sickening boredom the stoic Seneca bemoaned when he wrote: “All things pass that they may return. I do nothing new, I see nothing new. Sometimes this makes me nauseous. There are many who judge living not as painful but empty.”

Yes, even the great Roman philosopher occasionally got fed up with his job.

The key is that we must be self-determined and engage the world on our terms.~ James Danckert & John D Eastwood

Bored inside of your gourd

As this very short history suggests, settling on what boredom is and what it means to experience it has been a vexing problem. Is it a choice, a mood, a state of being, a cultural trait, a mental sickness, or an oddly punctual demon?

While research into boredom is new and unconcluded, the growing consensus considers it an emotion. Like anger, sadness, or happiness, boredom is a complex combination of behavioral and psychological responses to a stimulus or experience. In the context of this article, that experience is work, but it could be anything from seminars to dinner gatherings to that book you just can’t bring yourself to put down.

Also like other emotions, boredom seems to have evolved to engender feelings that prompt us to specific responses. Just as a jolt of fear alerts us to something potentially harmful, or a burst of joy earmarks a rewarding experience, boredom produces feelings of uneasiness and discomfort to inform us that the current situation is not in-line with our desires and drives.

“In this regard, boredom reveals an important aspect of being human: we have a strong need to be engaged with the world around us,” psychologists James Danckert and John D. Eastwood Eastwood wrote in Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom. “For humans and animals alike, the key is that we must be self-determined and engage the world on our terms; we must be free to make choices based on what matters to us.”

An American mink in a cage.
Research into animals such as minks, dogs, and pigs suggest they too grow bored when confined in bare cages without enrichment activities. This further suggests that boredom is an evolved response to a lack of specific stimuli.

Boredom isn’t always the enemy

While boredom is universal, nothing is universally boring. A project one person finds exhilarating, another may find mildly dull, and someone else may find mind-numbing. This is one of many difficulties in studying an emotion like boredom, and psychologists are still identifying its potential sources and various types. One thing they have learned is that not all boredom is bad — even at work.

Just as we can’t be ecstatic all the time, we can’t always be engrossed in every situation. Everyone needs mental and emotional downtime, and boredom can be a rest mode for our brains at the end of a busy day or during a long weekend.

Similarly, everyone has aspects of their jobs they find pedestrian. If the boredom associated with those parts of the job is short-term and low-grade, that’s fine. Maybe even optimal. You can use boredom as a guide, scheduling stimulating work during your energized hours and reserving more tiresome tasks for when you need a break.

“We can’t avoid boredom — it’s an inevitable human emotion. We have to accept it as legitimate and find ways it can be harnessed. We all need downtime, away from the constant bombardment of stimulation. There’s no need to be in a frenzy of activity at all times,” Esther Priyadharshini, a senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia, told The Guardian.

However, when boredom becomes protracted, and self-determination remains out of reach, then our physiological response to it never shuts down. Over time, that constant background drone of dissatisfaction can degrade our mental and physical health.

Chronic boredom has been associated with anxiety, poor nutrition, increased risk-taking, and a loss of attention. It can also produce copious amounts of stress, which is further associated with ailments such as burnout, social withdrawal, and various cardiovascular diseases.

Seeking a new course

So, how do we overcome boredom and motivate ourselves to self-determine and connect with the world on our terms? 

Unfortunately, boredom itself can’t answer this question. Just as anger can’t tell you how to make a situation right, and sadness can’t tell you what will make you happy, boredom only lets you know that you need a change from the monotony. After that realization, it’s up to you how to proceed.

“We need to be engaged, mentally occupied, giving expression to our desires and exercising our skills and talents. In short, we have a need for agency. When this need is fulfilled, we flourish. When this need is thwarted, we feel bored, disengaged,” Danckert and Eastwood write.

Although how you exercise your skills, talent, and agency is up to you, psychologist Dan Cable has some recommendations for where to start.

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First, dedicate more time to working on projects that either allow you to experiment or play toward your strengths. Both arouse your curiosity and trigger your brain’s reward system.

A key cranial player is the ventral striatum, a cluster of neurons located in the forebrain. The ventral striatum helps our brains process rewards and motivation by releasing the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine. Specifically, Cable notes, the ventral striatum triggers a dopamine outpouring when we experience something novel or challenging. For this reason, he refers to it as the brain’s “seeking system.”

“This system is urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know. It’s urging us to be curious,” Cable said in an interview. “And, by the way, I mean innately. Evolutionarily, this system was developed to keep us learning.”

Cable also advises you to try to connect more strongly to the meaning behind your work. He points to research by psychologist Adam Grant to demonstrate the boredom-stamping power of meaning. 

Grant took university call center workers and separated them into two groups. The first group (the control) worked their typical shifts. Meanwhile, the second group was provided an extra 15-minute break to speak with university students. The students thanked them for their service and discussed how their efforts gave them the opportunity to attend university.

Grant found that the second group had more energy, grew more engaged, and raised more money compared to the control. In discovering the meaning of their job, they found it more purposeful, and their connection to it grew.

“For humans, this idea about identity and what is my potential and what am I capable of while I’m on the planet, that seems to be something that is an ignition switch. It makes us enthusiastic to try. It makes us want to pursue the potential that we have within us,” Cable said.

That doesn’t mean we’ll never grow bored at work. Even the best of us will feel jaded at a bad day or tedious task. But if we can tap into our curiosity, meaning, and agency, we can better weather those dull storms or find enjoyment in work.

Work During Your Hours of Peak Productivity

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With 2018 here, you’ve probably got a list of resolutions you’d like to keep, goals you’re itching to accomplish, and habits you’d love to cement into your daily routine. Of course, these monumental tasks and projects will take some time, but it’s better to know when you’re most likely to get them done to keep yourself from struggling on a huge task at the end of the workday. The reason? According to Redbooth, a project management software developer, your productivity isn’t constant throughout the week, or even throughout the day. If running out of steam when five o’clock rolls around sounds like a part of your routine, don’t fret: it’s part of being human.

After anonymizing and analyzing the productivity habits of its “hundreds of thousands” of users and their collective 28 million completed tasks over a two year period, Redbooth discovered some interesting patterns related to when people got work done. 11 a.m. is the most productive hour according to Redbooth’s data, when nearly 10% of the day’s tasks are marked as completed. So if you’re hoping to get some high priority tasks out of the way before you run out of steam, you’re better off taking care of it before the lunchtime rush.

Winter Isn’t Great For Getting Things Done

While people become more productive as the year goes on, that comes to a peak around October,. Once November hits, however, you can say goodbye to your normal number of accomplished tasks. Whether it’s due to an approaching winter, the upcoming holiday season, or mood changes caused by the decreasing sunlight, you’re probably not getting as much work done as usual (along with everyone else in your office).

When in Doubt, Find Your Own Performance Schedule

Redbooth’s findings aside, not everyone fits the mold when it comes to finding their most productive hour. Night owls especially might find it hard to fit into a normal workday schedule if they’re most productive when the sun goes down. You can alleviate the potential timing issues by automating particular tasks, or handling more in-depth projects during the evening when your productivity is at its peak. Tactics like the Pomodoro technique also help in keeping you focused by building in breaks after each session of focused work.

People without a traditional 9-to-5 gig can keep track of their most productive hours using an app like Rescuetime, or by keeping a running list of your completed tasks and accomplishments throughout the day. Just don’t expect to maintain that steady pace when you’re at your peak performance level. You’re only human.

If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living?

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Workers Leaving the Factory Lithograph, 1903 by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen. Image courtesy http://www.famsf.org

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else – the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated – would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.

And how, in this world of total work, would people think and sound and act? Everywhere they looked, they would see the pre-employed, employed, post-employed, underemployed and unemployed, and there would be no one uncounted in this census. Everywhere they would laud and love work, wishing each other the very best for a productive day, opening their eyes to tasks and closing them only to sleep. Everywhere an ethos of hard work would be championed as the means by which success is to be achieved, laziness being deemed the gravest sin. Everywhere among content-providers, knowledge-brokers, collaboration architects and heads of new divisions would be heard ceaseless chatter about workflows and deltas, about plans and benchmarks, about scaling up, monetisation and growth.

In this world, eating, excreting, resting, having sex, exercising, meditating and commuting – closely monitored and ever-optimised – would all be conducive to good health, which would, in turn, be put in the service of being more and more productive. No one would drink too much, some would microdose on psychedelics to enhance their work performance, and everyone would live indefinitely long. Off in corners, rumours would occasionally circulate about death or suicide from overwork, but such faintly sweet susurrus would rightly be regarded as no more than local manifestations of the spirit of total work, for some even as a praiseworthy way of taking work to its logical limit in ultimate sacrifice. In all corners of the world, therefore, people would act in order to complete total work’s deepest longing: to see itself fully manifest.

This world, it turns out, is not a work of science fiction; it is unmistakably close to our own.

‘Total work’, a term coined by the German philosopher Josef Pieper just after the Second World War in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), is the process by which human beings are transformed into workers and nothing else. By this means, work will ultimately become total, I argue, when it is the centre around which all of human life turns; when everything else is put in its service; when leisure, festivity and play come to resemble and then become work; when there remains no further dimension to life beyond work; when humans fully believe that we were born only to work; and when other ways of life, existing before total work won out, disappear completely from cultural memory.

We are on the verge of total work’s realisation. Each day I speak with people for whom work has come to control their lives, making their world into a task, their thoughts an unspoken burden.

For unlike someone devoted to the life of contemplation, a total worker takes herself to be primordially an agent standing before the world, which is construed as an endless set of tasks extending into the indeterminate future. Following this taskification of the world, she sees time as a scarce resource to be used prudently, is always concerned with what is to be done, and is often anxious both about whether this is the right thing to do now and about there always being more to do. Crucially, the attitude of the total worker is not grasped best in cases of overwork, but rather in the everyday way in which he is single-mindedly focused on tasks to be completed, with productivity, effectiveness and efficiency to be enhanced. How? Through the modes of effective planning, skilful prioritising and timely delegation. The total worker, in brief, is a figure of ceaseless, tensed, busied activity: a figure, whose main affliction is a deep existential restlessness fixated on producing the useful.

What is so disturbing about total work is not just that it causes needless human suffering but also that it eradicates the forms of playful contemplation concerned with our asking, pondering and answering the most basic questions of existence. To see how it causes needless human suffering, consider the illuminating phenomenology of total work as it shows up in the daily awareness of two imaginary conversation partners. There is, to begin with, constant tension, an overarching sense of pressure associated with the thought that there’s something that needs to be done, always something I’m supposed to be doing right now. As the second conversation partner puts it, there is concomitantly the looming question: Is this the best use of my time?Time, an enemy, a scarcity, reveals the agent’s limited powers of action, the pain of harrying, unanswerable opportunity costs.

Together, thoughts of the not yet but supposed to be done, the should have been done already, the could be something more productive I should be doing, and the ever-awaiting next thing to do conspire as enemies to harass the agent who is, by default, always behind in the incomplete now. Secondly, one feels guilt whenever he is not as productive as possible. Guilt, in this case, is an expression of a failure to keep up or keep on top of things, with tasks overflowing because of presumed neglect or relative idleness. Finally, the constant, haranguing impulse to get things done implies that it’s empirically impossible, from within this mode of being, to experience things completely. ‘My being,’ the first man concludes, ‘is an onus,’ which is to say an endless cycle of unsatisfactoriness.

The burden character of total work, then, is defined by ceaseless, restless, agitated activity, anxiety about the future, a sense of life being overwhelming, nagging thoughts about missed opportunities, and guilt connected to the possibility of laziness. Hence, the taskification of the world is correlated with the burden character of total work. In short, total work necessarily causes dukkha, a Buddhist term referring to the unsatisfactory nature of a life filled with suffering.

In addition to causing dukkha, total work bars access to higher levels of reality. For what is lost in the world of total work is art’s revelation of the beautiful, religion’s glimpse of eternity, love’s unalloyed joy, and philosophy’s sense of wonderment. All of these require silence, stillness, a wholehearted willingness to simply apprehend. If meaning, understood as the ludic interaction of finitude and infinity, is precisely what transcends, here and now, the ken of our preoccupations and mundane tasks, enabling us to have a direct experience with what is greater than ourselves, then what is lost in a world of total work is the very possibility of our experiencing meaning. What is lost is seeking why we’re here.

A Radical Self-care Conspiracy to Transform Your Life.

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SELF-CARE

Let us advance on Chaos and the Dark. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each of us views the world through lenses of our choice, and I believe that a closer look at superficial symptoms can reveal a profound underlying root cause. Often people feel broken or lost among an overwhelming amount of inputs.

When this occurs, I like to get to the root cause of suffering, which can often be lifted with a renewal of commitment to self-care. Did you know that the word “radical” actually means root? Equally as interesting is the meaning of the word “conspire”: to breathe together.

Daily, we are invited to participate in stories with others, where sometimes all we can do is breathe together. Is it possible to take a closer look at where we do have power to shape our own stories within a larger community? Recently a loved one sent me the above photograph of a rose bush, which I believe illustrates my point. A single yellow rose, with its own distinct fragrance, stands out among the red roses who expected it to be red also. They are all rooted in the same source and get light from the same source, but one flower has processed the sunlight through very different lenses.

What better way to further illustrate self-care than with a fable by the Brothers Grimm entitled The Handless Maiden?

A father has fallen into poverty and makes a deal with a shady character: Severing his daughter’s hands in exchange for endless material wealth.

After the maiden’s hands are severed, she relegates herself to the forest, eating fruit from the trees like a giraffe. When a charming land baron finds her grazing in his pear orchard, he has hands of silver fashioned for her. The two fall in love and have a child together.

But the shady character begins to stalk the maiden once again, so she has her child lashed to her back and escapes to the forest. As she sits near a stream to attempt to nurse her baby, the baby slips into the stream. The maiden desperately thrusts her silver hands into the water, but as she brings her arms up out of the water, her silver hands have been replaced with real flesh and fingers, with her child clutched inside them. 

She realizes her power for renewal lies in the water, and that in caring for her baby she has ultimately cared for herself.

I love this story for its vivid imagery and creepiness, but also for the message of shaping our own stories despite the overwhelming pressures and inputs we must process. Each of us can see ourselves as the yellow rose from the photograph, breathing together with the rest while also voicing the song that only we can sing.

Source: Purpose Fairy

When Work Makes You a Worse Person?

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Navin Mehrotra, a 32-year-old investment banker in Mumbai, thought so. In recent years, he found himself becoming more irritable, moody and short-tempered. “I became something I wasn’t,” says Mr. Mehrotra, who has been working for seven years.

He attributes the change in his personality to high workload, strenuous deadlines and long working hours. Over time, his changing behavior started affecting his relationships outside work, and took a toll on his health. Last year, he turned to a psychologist for help.

Mr. Mehrotra is not alone. Today’s fast-paced, high-pressure work environment is causing a visible change in the behavior of professionals, say psychologists and counselors who train executives.

In many cases, these changes can lead to more serious problems.

A study released earlier this year showed that 43% of U.S. executives surveyed had chronic illnesses due to work-related stress. These included depression, psychological disorders, impaired immunity functions, even suicidal tendencies, according to the study by the American Psychological Association.

In India, too, stress has become an increasing part of work life.

Deepali Kapoor, a senior counseling psychologist at New Delhi’s Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, finds that professionals often display erratic behavioral patterns like outbursts of anger, overreacting to situations or becoming reclusive at work.

In a study of 500 India-based professionals conducted last year, Ms. Kapoor found that 65% of people said that work was the sole cause of stress in their lives. Some of the professionals surveyed were as young as 25 years old.

Most of these people “weren’t even aware that work-related stress was altering their behavior for the worse,” says Ms. Kapoor.

The most common changes in people’s behavior are restlessness, mood swings, and frequent irritability. Some professionals turn to measures like excessive smoking, drinking, or drug abuse to relieve them of stress. This makes them increasingly prone to hypertension and chronic illnesses, including cardiac arrests and cardiovascular diseases.

Typically, professionals tend to ignore unexplained changes in their behavior. But experts say that a few minutes of introspection can help rein in long-term damage.

“Damage control should ideally begin the second you notice, or are made aware of, your changing outlook,” says Abha Singh, who heads the psychology department at Noida-based Amity University.

Start by making a list of what may be causing the stress. Is it unrealistic deadlines, long working hours, over-competitive employees, or a difficult boss? Once you’ve identified what’s making you fret, set some goals to rectify the situation.

For instance, if you are upset and stressed out because you’ve been passed over for a promotion then evaluate whether you want to continue in your current job. Or, if the work load is too much, inform your boss and ask for help, instead of quietly taking on more and more work. If your job profile isn’t living up to your expectations, ask for a transfer or consider looking for another job.

Consider talking about your situation with a trusted colleague or close friend who can give you a chance to vent and offer some practical advice. If that doesn’t help, consider approaching a psychologist or counselor for help.

Get rid of the notion that a psychiatrist or psychologists only deal with treating mental disorders. “Most Indian professionals, particularly top-level executives, still consider it a taboo,” says Kapil Kakar, who heads New Delhi-based IPSSR Pvt., which provides training to corporate professionals in stress management and leadership.

Ms. Singh of Amity notes that many companies in the West, such as BellSystems Inc. and Apple Inc., have set up dedicated teams of counselors, trainers and psychologists to constantly review and fast-track aspirations of employees.

Mr. Mehrotra, the investment banker, found it very helpful to go to a psychologist. Though his job is still stressful, he says he has better control over his mood swings and temper, thanks partly to anger-management sessions. He says he has “a much more positive outlook at work than two years ago.”

Source: MSN