Why Are You Bored? What Is Boredom? What Lies Behind Boredom? - What If You're Bored?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-15 16:05

Sunday again … I watched the series - boring, played a game - boring, went out for a walk - boring … Boredom seems to be a simple feeling, but in reality it hides a lot of feelings, desires and needs. Boredom seems harmless, but it can make your life completely unbearable. Many, because of this state, commit blunder - they get married out of boredom, quit or change a good job out of boredom, move, decide to travel, but all this is useless, because you cannot run away from yourself, and sooner or later, this will become clear

What is boredom? Why does it arise? What is behind this feeling? What to do?

Boredom is a type of negatively colored emotion or mood, a passive psychological state characterized by decreased activity, lack of interest in activity, the world and people. Unlike apathy, boredom is accompanied by irritability and anxiety - and this is where the difficulty lies.

Why does boredom happen? It is conditionally possible to distinguish external factors (boring monotonous work, some kind of expectation) and internal factors (a person cannot catch on to any action).

1. For a person to feel bored, he must be in a state of emotional excitement, not understanding what to apply this excitement to (to what action and object). Nothing catches his interest, and, accordingly, boredom arises. If there is no emotional arousal, boredom will not arise, rather apathy will appear.

2. Most often, boredom occurs in situations where we cannot control our lives and actions. The most striking everyday examples that everyone has come across are the queue at the supermarket, waiting for the plane to take off at the airport, when the check-in stage has passed. As a rule, when a person gets bored, he changes the type of activity, but in such cases it is difficult to do this. If we talk about a deeper psychological factor, a person who is not attached to some action is in fear that he does not control his life, does not have the right to those actions that he really wants to perform.
3. The object that makes you bored, sooner or later, begins to cause irritation, aggression and hatred. And this irritation can persist for a long time. A striking example is literary works that were forced to read at school (many of us, having matured, did not reread the school curriculum, although the works are important, necessary and useful, perhaps even interesting). Our interest is blocked by exactly that, even at school, irritation - in free form we take a book and read it, and if we don’t like it, we put it aside, but at school you had no right to do that. Accordingly, you have developed irritation with this object. Similarly, it works in the opposite direction - when someone annoys you, the mechanism works quickly and often (after all, it was already formed in childhood). Often, you don't even have time to notice how it worked.

Someone annoys you, but you should not be irritated, show your anger and aggression - many of us were taught in childhood that you should not be angry (this is "fu-fu-fu"). What is happening in our minds? We absorb our feelings and, to protect ourselves from aggression, we feel bored by deceiving ourselves a little in this way (supposedly we are bored).

Boredom is a signal from the brain that your mental resources are being spent inefficiently and you need to change your action. All the feelings that we experience, evolutionarily came to us for a reason - each has its own function. For example, irritation and anger protect us so that we can express our aggression and deal with the enemy; we need fear in order to understand what danger is nearby. And boredom is a signal that you are not developing mentally, you have stopped in place. If it were not for this feeling, you would repeat the same actions uselessly over and over again, you would not grow. It is boredom that makes us move forward, do something new, because the old actions have already ceased to be effective and do not bring the desired result.

So, a person is bored not just at the moment when he has nothing to do. He wants to do something, but he can not focus his attention on one thing. As if there is some inability to get emotionally involved, emotional experiences, feelings of joy, lack of goals and meaning in life.

In fact, boredom is a defense mechanism when there is a lot of energy, and you don't know where to direct it, so the psyche blocks the release. We go in search of something to do, but the energy is actually there. Where? This is the energy of repressed desire (we want something, but do not understand what it is). All this suggests that some kind of connection with yourself has been lost, the mental fibers that are most important about your needs do not work. There is another option, when what you really want is forbidden, condemned and bad (for example, someone told you that drawing is a waste of time, it is better to smoke over jurisprudence, because it is much more important). As a result, someone's belief sinks so deeply into your unconscious that you cannot even remember who and what told you, but at the same time you do not allow yourself to do what you really want. Psychoanalysis says about boredom, that it is an internal conflict of the super Ego, as if you are between a rock and a hard place in your boredom, suppressed.

What is the danger of boredom? If you do not work it out, do not bring internal conflicts into the level of awareness, this can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, drug addiction (everything where it is easy to drain tension and not think, turn off the brain). That is why, if you now notice boredom in yourself, deal with your desires and what prevents you from acting. What beliefs do you have that make you unable to be free? But most importantly, identify your wants and needs. And as soon as you do this, a huge amount of energy is released in order to do what you want and with pleasure. It is important for each of us to find contact with our soul in order to live in pleasure.