If ever I complained about being bored as I child, my mum would throw her hands up and ask ‘How can you be bored when there’s so much tidying to do?’ Which is probably the type of thing I say to my husband now.
However, even in a world where there are always more chores to plough through, we still somehow find ourselves bored – and an almost universal smartphone addiction is definitely making it worse.
Take social media consumption, for example. One study has found that ‘digital switching’ – where you frequently switch between videos and fast-forward through them – actually makes you feel more bored than you were before you started. In fact, rather counterintuitively, rather than bobbing around between content, watching one video in its entirety will make you feel less bored than if you try and gobble up a whole load at once.
‘Digital switching’ could increase your boredom when using a digital device
The study involved 1,200 participants and seven experiments conducted in the United States and Canada. It found that participants who were allowed to jump between multiple short videos or fast-forward through a long video reported higher levels of boredom compared to people who watched a single 10-minute video from beginning to end without fast-forward.
The results of the research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, were consistent across demographics, though the participants reported varying levels of boredom.
Researcher Katy Tam of the University of Toronto, Scarborough, explained that boredom exists in the gap between what a person hopes to get out of their engagement with online videos and what they actually get out of that experience, which leads to ‘a feedback process intensifying boredom over time’. Engagement decreases as you swipe between videos, and you end up watching things you don’t care about at all.
Unsurprisingly, an expert who spoke to the New York Post said that as well as limiting our digital switching, we should be looking to limit screen time altogether. ‘This is not to say that apps such as TikTok and YouTube should be abandoned, but if experiencing boredom, then rapid fire, highly addictive forms of social media content are probably better consumed in limited quantities’ Dr George Alvarado said.
