Boredom and Anxiety: Are they Alike?

A few years ago, I found myself staring at my laptop for what felt like an eternity.

I had work to do. Nothing particularly difficult. In fact, it was probably the kind of work I could have finished in an hour.

Instead, I checked WhatsApp.

Then Instagram.

Then my email.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, I went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

Nothing was interesting in it. I still looked.

I came back to my laptop and told myself, I really need to focus. Ten minutes later, I was checking my phone again. At the time, I thought I was being distracted.

I now think I was bored.

And boredom is a much more interesting thing than we give it credit for.

We tend to think boredom and anxiety are opposites. One feels like nothing is happening. The other feels like everything is happening at once.

But psychologically, they can be surprisingly close.

When something is too easy, our brain starts looking for stimulation. That is when the phone suddenly becomes fascinating. We check messages that aren't there. We scroll through videos we've already seen. We reorganise our desk.

Anything, really, to give the brain something to chew on. But make the task too difficult, and something else happens.

We freeze.

The email feels impossible to write. The business problem feels too complicated. The presentation seems overwhelming. So we do the very same thing.

We reach for the phone.

Different emotion but same escape.

There is apparently a sweet spot between the two.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow.

It is that strange state where you are completely absorbed in something. You aren't checking the clock. You aren't wondering how you look. You aren't thinking about how much longer you have to work.

You are just… working.

Interestingly, video games are exceptionally good at creating this state.

While playing a video game, the next level is rarely ridiculously easy. But it also doesn't throw something impossible at you. It gives you a challenge that is just a little beyond what you can currently do.

You fail.

You try again.

You get slightly better.

Then the next challenge appears.

That tiny gap between I can do this and I'm not quite sure I can do this is where things get interesting.

Too little challenge, and we get bored.

Too much challenge, and we get anxious.

Just enough challenge, and we get curious. I find this useful when I am stuck.

Sometimes I don't need more discipline. I need to make the task slightly harder.

If I'm writing something and my mind keeps wandering, perhaps the problem isn't that I don't want to write. Perhaps the task is too predictable.

And sometimes the opposite is true.

If I am staring at something complicated and doing absolutely nothing, perhaps I don't need to push harder.

Perhaps I need to break it into a smaller challenge that I can actually handle.

The next time you find yourself checking the refrigerator for the third time while a perfectly reasonable piece of work sits unfinished on your laptop, don't immediately call yourself lazy.

You might just be bored or overwhelmed.