By Liv Bailey Imagine: you live a life where you never get bored of anything. Not even 90 minute long history classes with nothing but a very dull powerpoint to keep your attention. Wouldn’t that be incredible? You’d never be forced to stare at a wall and not know what to do with yourself ever again. Now, obviously, that’s not entirely possible. I don't have some magic trick that just gets rid of boredom with a wave of a magic wand and a couple multivitamins that don’t seem to do anything. There is, however, a way to get around spending your days generall bored with your life, and it doesn’t even involve drastic lifestyle changes! Not that I’d be writing this if I was going to tell you you had to move to another country and throw away your phone. I’m not that much of an idiot — I know you aren’t going to do any of that, and if you aren’t going to do any of it, you’d stop reading this article, and what would be the point of that? Alright, here’s the thing. Boredom? It’s actually something we developed evolutionarily. Boredom is because of this thing called “hedonic adaptation.” I know, I know, scientific jargon, but it’s actually really simple. Hedonic adaptation simply means that over time, we get used to things — whether they’re good or bad. In other words, if your grandmother dies, you’ll be heartbroken (probably. I don't know what your relationship with your grandmother is like), but eventually, that pain will fade away. On the flipside, if you get a new car, you’re going to be super excited and happy about it for a couple weeks, and then that happiness will fade, and it’ll just be your car. Hedonic adaptation, despite the fact that it takes away our happy emotions quite often, does serve an important purpose. Extreme emotions can be nice (or terrible), but no matter what, they always render us unable to remember things as easily, and they make us less motivated to do things. Rushes of emotion reduce brain function, and if we were always like that, we wouldn’t convert a lot of long term memories, and we’d really not get a lot done, because we’re so caught up in feelings. Hedonic adaptation levels out our emotions for us, so we aren’t hindered by them for too long. The problem? When all your emotions are leveled out, you stop really feeling things, and you get bored. In 2018, two men named Robert W. Smith and Ed O’Brien decided to run some experiments to determine what people could do counter boredom. They had people do some interesting stuff, but apparently having participants eat popcorn with chopsticks helped them determine how to free oneself from boredom, so how much can I complain? Anyways, they found that there’s a couple of things people can do that are relatively easy, and still counter boredom incredibly. Here’s my favorite three.
Getting up at 6:00, starting school at 8:00, going to the same scheduled classes every other day, going to sports practice at 2:45, and then going home to do homework at 5:00 can get extremely boring. It’s the same thing, again and again, every day, with no way to get out. I know it kills me. There isn’t really much I can change about my schedule, since it’s so packed, and I don’t even have my licence yet (I’m a sophomore and I’m still fifteen, I know, I don't want to hear about it), so I can't just decide to go somewhere… ever. So, obviously, I have a lot of opportunities to get bored. Reading about a study like Smith and O’Brien’s was very enlightening for me. All the strategies that their experiment revealed were things that I can easily do, despite my age and… immobility. It’s not that hard for me to decide, one day, that I’m going to eat something new or to rearrange my workspace. I will certainly be using these ideas in the near future. So, what did we learn? Well, boredom is something that proves you’re evolutionarily up to date, for one. Was hedonic adaptation the hidden part of the software update that made everything stop working properly? We’d like to think it is, sure, because maybe it’s the cause of our last breakup (the relationship lost its “new” feeling and all of a sudden, you realized you actually didn’t really like the person you were with), but it’s very important that our strong emotions fade over time, so that we can, you know, use our brains properly. Too much evening out causes boredom, however, so we have to find ways to counter that. Smith and O’Brien (what great dudes) conducted a study that found a couple of ways we can do that — eating food unconventionally (a.k.a. go buy yourself some chopsticks), organizing your workspace, and asking people new casual questions (if I hear “how are you?” one more time, I swear). If you do these few things, you’ll be able to reduce your boredom drastically, by creating a small feeling of “new” every time you do something, so that hedonic adaptation doesn’t have a chance to sink its claws into your routine. Works Cited Fraga, J. (2019, March 30). What to Do When You're Bored With Your Routines. Retrieved May 22, 2019, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/smarter-living/what-to-do-when-youre-bored-with-your-routines.html?rref=collection/timestopic/Psychology and Psychologists&action=click&contentCollection=health®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=24&pgtype=collection
O’Brien, E., & Smith, R. W. (n.d.). Unconventional Consumption Methods and Enjoying Things Consumed: Recapturing the "First-Time" Experience - Ed O'Brien, Robert W. Smith, 2019. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167218779823 [Popcorn and chopsticks]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/article/try-eating-popcorn-chopsticks
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