Is boredom bad for your health?

What were you doing before you started reading this? Were you fully focused on another article? Or doing the crossword? Eating breakfast? Organising your day? Or were you staring out of the window, feeling restless and bored?

It is more likely to have been the latter. Fleeting moments of boredom are universal, and are often what drives us to stop what we are doing and shift to something that we hope will be more stimulating.

But although boredom is common, it is neither trivial nor benign, according to Dr John Eastwood, a psychologist at York University, Toronto. Eastwood is the joint author of The Unengaged Mind, a major new paper on the theory of boredom.

Boredom, he points out, has been associated with increased drug and alcohol abuse, overeating, depression and anxiety, and an increased risk of making mistakes. Mistakes at work might not be a matter of life and death for most of us, but if you are an air traffic controller, pilot or nuclear power plant operator, they most certainly can be.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/oct/14/boredom-is-bad-for-health


Well "nature abhors efficiency", at least that is what I have read! So we are probably doing the expected things.