Speaking of Psychology: Why boredom is surprisingly interesting, with Erin Westgate, PhD

We’re taking a holiday break, so we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes from this past year. Back in the spring we talked to University of Florida psychologist Erin Westgate about the surprisingly fascinating topic of boredom. What is boredom? Is it always bad to be bored? What can we do to infuse even boring times with meaning?

Erin Westgate, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, where she studies boredom, interest, and why some thoughts are more engaging than others. She received her PhD in social psychology from the University of Virginia in 2018. Much of her research has been on the conditions under which people enjoy or do not enjoy their own thoughts. She has extended that work to the larger question of why people become bored, developing a new model of boredom that explains what boredom is, why we experience it, and what happens when we do. 

Kim Mills: Speaking of Psychology is taking a holiday break, so we’re rerunning one of our favorite episodes from the past year. Last Spring, I talked to University of Florida psychologist Erin Westgate about the surprisingly fascinating topic of boredom. What is boredom? Is it always bad to be bored? What can we do to infuse even these boring times with meaning? As we look toward a long winter of limited socializing and few distractions, these questions seem as relevant as ever. I hope you enjoy this episode from our archives.

Speaking of Psychology will be back with new episodes starting in January, at which point we will also be going to a weekly schedule. Thank you for listening.

Kim Mills: The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the US was identified in January. By March, most of us had been strongly advised, if not ordered, to keep at least six feet away from other people in public, and pretty much to confine ourselves to our homes. As a result, many of us are unable to visit friends or family. We can't go out to a movie, to the gym, or out to dinner. In short, the coronavirus has radically curtailed the way many of us live. Are we bored yet? If we are bored, is that a problem? Is boredom bad?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology. The flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association, that explores the links between psychology and every day life. I'm Kim Mills. What does psychology tell us about boredom? Why should we care? Is boredom even a legitimate area for psychologists to study? What can we do, during these strange times, to keep from being bored, or to use our boredom productively?

Our guest today is Dr. Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida. Where she studies boredom, interest, and why some thoughts are more engaging than others. Much of her research has been on the conditions under which people enjoy or do not enjoy their own thoughts. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, Dr. Westgate.

Erin Westgate, PhD: Thank you so much for having me.

Mills: Let me start by throwing you a big softball. What is boredom, and how is it different from other states of mental inactivity?

Westgate: Boredom is actually an emotion. There's often a lot of confusion about this. Is boredom actually a feeling I have? Is it an emotion? Is it a state where I'm not feeling anything at all? There's been a lot of debate in psychology about this, but the growing consensus is that boredom is an emotion like any other that you experience, like anger or sadness. We define it as those cases where you're not able to engage meaningfully in whatever it is that you're doing. Either because you're not able to pay attention, or because whatever it is that you're doing just doesn't feel meaningful to you.

Mills: As I mentioned a moment ago, a lot of us are stuck in our homes with very little to distract us. Are you hearing that boredom is on the rise as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Westgate: There's some interesting research out of Italy, actually, that looked at folks in quarantine right now, that suggests that they themselves said that the second biggest downside to being stuck at home was lack of freedom first, obviously, but the second most problematic thing that they were experiencing was boredom. Even more than the social isolation feelings of loneliness. I think it really depends a lot. I think certainly there are some people who may be home, home-schooling kids, and trying to work from home, and who are not bored. That, if anything, they may be feeling overwhelmed and anxious.

I think there's an awful lot of us who are at home, and suddenly find ourselves without the routines that structured our lives, or the tasks that we've spent most of our days doing, and stuck with those long periods of time with nothing to do, and limits on what you can do about it. I think a lot of us are feeling a bit bored.

Mills: What made you want to study boredom? Were you in a state of boredom and it hit you that, "Wow, this is something I need to think about"?

Westgate: I always get a laugh when I tell people I study boredom. People are like, "Did you always grow up wanting to be a boredom researcher?" No, absolutely not. [laughs] I don't think that's anything little kids aspire to do.

Mills: [laughs] Haven't heard that one from a kid yet.

Westgate: No, right? Like, "I really want to study boredom one day." I fell into studying boredom because I was doing earlier work on whether people enjoy being alone with their own thoughts. We all find ourselves stuck at times, such as at the stop light or just waiting in line, when it would be nice if we could sit back mentally and daydream or just enjoy our own thoughts. When I started graduate school, I was interested in this question. I started doing research on this question and found that a lot of us really struggle to do this. It's not as easy to simply sit back and intentionally have a pleasant daydream as you might think.

In one study, for instance, we even found that when you ask people to do this on demand in the laboratory, we tell them, "Sit down, try to think of a pleasure, but if you want, you can shock yourself with this little electric shock here." About 67% of the men and 25% of the women chose to shock themselves, rather than just sit and think. When we asked them why, they looked at us like, "Well, duh." They were like, "Well, it was really boring."

[laughter]

Westgate: I'm like -- I wonder, because that's such not an answer. Well, I was bored so I shocked myself? I was so intrigued by that question. I pivoted a little from, why do people enjoy daydreaming? Why is it so hard to daydream? To like, what is this strange state that makes people willing to shock themselves? Why are they bored? Can we figure out how to make people not bored, and can we understand what people do when they are bored?

I really had a shift that came out of the research I was doing, and what the participants themselves were telling us. I realized -- I like to say boredom is actually pretty interesting. That's not something I would have said 10 years ago, before I started doing this work.

Mills: That's an interesting study that you did. I know that you found differences between men and women. I'm also wondering, you can talk about that in a moment, but did people shock themselves more than once? Was it just out of curiosity or did they just sit there and do it a couple of times because what the heck?

Westgate: It's the darndest thing. They did it multiple times. I know. The results came in and we were like, "Well, let's give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just wanted to see if we--" Maybe they wanted to call our bluff. Maybe they weren't sure if we were really serious about it, or maybe they just wanted to see what would happened. The majority of people that shocked themselves, shocked themselves more than once. We had one person who we actually excluded from the data because he shocked himself like over, I forget now, it was over like 75 times, and it was only--

Mills: Wow. He was having a good time.

Westgate: Yes, I know, or something. It was only a 20 minute period, or a 15 minute period. We actually had a research assistant go back and see if our machine was even capable of shocking someone that many times. Maybe the machine was broken. This wonderful undergraduate research assistant, for science, sat there and shocked herself like a hundred times, just to see if the machine would work. We don't think it was something like just calling our bluff or-- and the other thing is that all these people, we gave them a taste of the shock up front, and we had them experience it and rate it. They could tell us whether they enjoyed it or didn't enjoy it.

Everyone basically says they don't enjoy it. We said, "Okay, imagine we give you $5, how much would you pay to not be shocked again?" Most of these people that went on to shock themselves said they'd pay, on average, about $2 to not be shocked.

Mills: [laughs]

Westgate: I know. It's like we're strangers to ourselves. It's a failure of imagination. I think we don't know how we're going to feel in the future. I think we don't realize how boring something might be, and how motivated we can feel when we are bored to do something, even to do anything to stop feeling that way.

Mills: That raises a question for me, which is whether there's anything useful about boredom, or is it detrimental, or is it somehow both?

Westgate: D. All of the above. Boredom is useful when it's working correctly. I always like to say that boredom is like pain. No one wants to experience pain. Pain is unpleasant. It hurts. It's also really, really useful because it tells us that there's something wrong going on in our bodies, and it's a way of alerting us to that problem, and motivating us to take steps to stop it. Right? Boredom, and other negative emotions as well, act in the same way. Boredom tells us, "Hey, look, something is wrong."

In this case, that we either can't pay attention to what we're doing because it's too hard or too easy, or because what we're doing doesn't feel meaningful to us, but whatever it is, boredom says, "Stop, this is hurting us mentally. Can you do something about it?" Boredom is really important because it signals instances to us when we're not meaningfully engaged in the world, and it gives us an opportunity to fix it.

That said, that's only healthy and adaptive in cases where you can do something about it. If you are trapped, for instance, in a room, by a psychologist, with nothing else to do but shock yourself, there's not really any good solution available to you. In that case, boredom is an adaptive signal, but it can become a problem when we don't have good options on the table to fix it. If you're stuck in the room and you have nothing figuratively to do to stop feeling bored other than to shock yourself, then people will shock themselves. That, obviously, is not good.

I do like the analogy that boredom is like pain. It's healthy and useful and important information, but it can become chronic. When it becomes chronic, it doesn't serve as that useful signal anymore. We can vary in the ways we respond to it. We really want to treat the underlying cause of that pain or that boredom. We don't want to just treat the bad feelings and make them go away without fixing those underlying issues.

Mills: That sounds almost like boredom can morph into depression. Is that what happens to us?

Westgate: It's not clear. There's a lot of discussion and debate right now on what exactly the relationship is between boredom and depression. Boredom is certainly a feature of depression in many cases. People who are depressed often talk about a lack of motivation, an inability to find anything meaningful, they struggle to pay attention. These are all things we see in boredom, and many depressed people report feeling bored a lot. What's not clear is if depression causes boredom or if boredom causes depression.

What I think may be most likely is that situations that cause chronic boredom, being in situations where you're stuck or you don't have any good options on the table, that's going to make you bored. That's also, over time, going to make you depressed, independent of whether you're bored or not, in time. I think it's very complicated, and that's one of the-- there's a few questions that I think that are really at the forefront of boredom research right now. I think that's one of them, is untangling how boredom and depression, and a lot of really maladaptive behaviors associated with both of them. Like substance use and alcohol use, how they're all interrelated, and who's causing who?

Mills: Good questions. Are you using brain scans, fMRIs, things like that to determine when people say they're bored or can you tell based on what their brains look like, whether they're experiencing something other than boredom?

Westgate: We usually, in studies of boredom and all emotion really, rely pretty face validly on what people tell us. There's been a lot of debate in psychology about how do you best measure something like happiness, or you best measure something like boredom. The consensus is largely that the best, most reliable way is to simply ask people what they're feeling. Now, people can't tell you why they're feeling that way. If they try-- if you ask them, "Why are you bored?" They may have theories or they may have causal ideas for it, and they may think that's why they're bored, but we know that people can't actually accurately introspect on those things.

They can't actually tell us why they're bored because we don't have access to that information mentally, but they can tell us what they're feeling. There is some work looking at boredom in terms of neuroscience. There's not a lot of it. Most of it has been done by James Tinker and his crew, out of Canada. I haven't gone that much that direction. Partly because of the work by Kristen Lindquist and Lisa Feldman Barrett and others, that suggest that there aren't really good neuro markers of specific emotions in the brain.

That when you look at anger, sadness, and fear, people's brains all look pretty similar. That you can't really reliably distinguish one emotion from each other. I think there's lots of important neuroscience to be done in boredom, but it's not a direction that I've really pursued.

Mills: That's interesting. The neurons just fire no matter what. You're feeling something intense, and that's what they see.

Westgate: We're still working on that question, but we do think that what seems to be happening is that there's an affective response. When we say affect, we mean like emotion. That when people are feeling lots of big emotions, you do see lots of activation in the brain, but it's hard to tell, just from looking at the brain, whether that's an anger response or a fear response or what exactly is going on in those cases.

Mills: Back in the days when I used to be able to go outside and see people, I would notice a lot of folks had their phones in their hands all the time. We're using smartphones, tablets, computers constantly. Is that having an impact on our ability to experience boredom? Are we keeping ourselves away from the normal experience of boredom by substituting these screens?

Westgate: That's a question that I always get, and the quick answer is, we don't know. Certainly, if you look throughout history, every generation has had its version of the smartphone. If you look back, you start seeing people complain about newspapers. How people are just reading on the subways to the [unintelligible 00:14:05] novels were the big vise back in the day when they first came out. Like, "Oh, people are ignoring the world for these fake melodramas that aren't even real." I really wish I had a time machine.

As a social psychologist, people always ask, "If you had a superpower, what would you do?" I would time travel, and I would take my questionnaires and my studies, and I'd go back in time and see. What we do know is when we look at-- this isn't exactly boredom, but we do know that when you look at who is best able to daydream or enjoy their own thoughts, there is a very, very, very, very small but significant correlation between the amount of time people spend on their cell phones and the extent to which they get bored when trying to daydream.

That the more time you spend on your phones, you're probably a little bit more likely to be someone that has difficulty enjoying your own thoughts and not getting bored by them. Again, is that causal? Is it that the cell phone use is causing people to have a hard time finding their own thoughts interesting, or is it that people that are prone to boredom are more likely to pick up their phone? That's really tricky.

There was a study, this isn't boredom exactly, but there was a study recently, that paid people to not go on social media for a couple of weeks. They did find that it increased people's happiness and wellbeing when you paid them to stay off the social media for a while. I know. I'm like, "I guess I'm doomed to be unhappy."

[laughter]

Mills: Another question that occurs to me is whether there is any link between say, overall intelligence and boredom. Are smarter people more likely to not be bored because they've got greater intellectual resources, or am I just prejudiced in favor of smart people here?

Westgate: I think it's a blessing and a curse because you can get bored for two reasons. One, is you can get bored when something is too hard. Certainly, having more cognitive resources to bring to the table is going to reduce the times when something is too hard for you. You simply have a higher baseline chance of finding it interesting, but boredom is also caused when suffice things that are too easy. There's actually research, I'm so sorry I didn't tell you that there's actually research, some research, that suggests that people with higher IQ or higher need for cognition may be more susceptible to boredom, especially when it's caused by repetitive, monotonous tasks.

Precisely because they have so many resources. That if you're like you're sitting there and you have like say, 10 resources, and this monotonous, boring thing is only occupying two of them, there's this huge gap between what you are doing and what you could be doing. When that happens, we find it hard to pay attention, and that causes boredom. It's a mixed bag. That like, yes, there may be some instances where more intelligent people have a leg up on finding challenging, cognitively demanding tasks interesting, rather than boring.

We know work from Paul Sylvia suggests that to feel interest in something, there has to be a gap there, where you don't understand it yet, but you feel like you can understand it. Intelligence helps with that, but it also makes you more prone to this other source of boredom. I think it's you win some, you lose some. In theory, you would think that people who are smarter would be better at coming up with ways to fix boredom once it comes up, but what we don't see are strong ties between emotional regulation, as we call it, when it comes to boredom and intelligence.

It doesn't seem like that the experience is necessarily, from the very limited evidence that we have, that once you are bored, that your cognitive resources, kind of intelligence is going to influence whether or not you're good at escaping that.

Mills: As you look at the question of boredom, are you also looking at what makes an individual boring? Is that something that you have examined? Can we treat people who are boring?

Westgate: Yes, we have. This is very-- none of this is published yet. It's still very exploratory. There's some work that Karen Gasper and colleagues are doing on this question, that suggests that when someone bores us in conversation, we think badly of them. There's also work that I've been doing on what I call the, only boring people get bored.

Mills: Yes.

Westgate: Which is this idea that if you're bored, there must be something wrong with you. The thing that's wrong with you is probably that you're a boring person. I've been looking at people's stereotypes about, what is a boring person like? What do you think about boring people? Are people responsible for their own boredom? All of that work is very preliminary, so we don't have good answers right now. What I can tell you so far is that what your lay guesses or an intuition look like, are pretty consistent with what we're seeing in how people are rating boring people and who seems boring to them.

There is work, and I love this work, so I'm just going to drop it in here, that if you're worried about being boring, the chances are that you're not as boring as you think you are. There's great work by Peggy Clark and colleagues that show that there's this liken gap that we all think that we're less interesting and more boring and less likable than we actually are. If you actually put us in conversations with each other and ask your partner how you were, they tend to rate you more positively. When it comes to worrying about you being boring, you're probably not as boring as you think you are.

Mills: That's good to hear. Especially for people who are locked up with the same people day after day right now. I was also looking at the work that you've been doing around categorization, which I found interesting because I'm a birder. When I'm not stuck in the house, I like to go out and look at birds, and some people think that that's crazy. Why are collecting and categorizing interesting to some of us and some of us find it inherently meaningful?

Westgate: I love that you asked this. I have a question for you. Do you have a favorite bird?

Mills: Wow. That's hard. Where I live, one of the birds that I love to see, particularly this time of the year, the male wood ducks, I think they're so beautiful. There are so many. Resplendent quetzal. I mean, how could you-- roseate spoonbill. I could go on and on with birds. You see, now I'm going to get boring.

Westgate: I know. The roseate spoonbills just came to Florida. I've been very-- I went out to see them right before all the lockdown stuff happened. That was very exciting. I asked you because I think people who are into [unintelligible 00:21:10] birds, you can hear it. It's exciting. I have gotten into birding as a result of this research interest because I was looking at categorization. I was really struck by how many people, and when I talk about this in lectures, I always ask the audience, "Is anyone here a birdwatcher or birder?" Inevitably, one or two people raise their hands, often shyly.

[laughter]

Mills: We get a bad rap.

Westgate: Then I make it worse. I'm like, "Isn't it hilarious that grown adults go out and like count things in the world?" It is, in the most wonderful of ways, I think it's absolutely wonderful. I think what's happening here is, we've done a number of studies, we're writing this up for publication right now, that what categorization does for us, and by categorization, I mean any of these categorization hobbies. Shell collecting, bird watching. This work was actually inspired by a scuba diving trip to Honduras, where I brought a fish identification chart with me on the boat and everyone was making fun of me, until we got in the water, and then they all wanted my identification chart, and I didn't have it anymore. I was like, "Well, why would you--"

Mills: [laughs] It's all in the boat.

Westgate: Yes, why would you even want to know this information? We think what's happening is that when you see something, especially something that doesn't-- you don't have a good conception of, or that doesn't make sense to you, or you haven't made sense of, categorization is a way of helping you literally create order and coherence in the world. That imagine, for instance, you're not a birder, and you just heard our conversation about all these birds, and you're just like, "Oh my God, there's just all these birds."

What categorization let's you do is break that down into like, "Oh no, there's this kind of bird, and there's this kind of bird, and there's this kind of bird." We know that when we see patterns in the world, they feel meaningful to us. That patterns give us a sense of meaning, whether it's being able to recognize and see patterns in the wild flowers, or the birds, or just even our own daily routines. Samantha [unintelligible 00:23:19] has wonderful work that shows that people who have more routine in their lives experience more meaning in life, and they also feel like their lives are more meaningful while they're engaged in those routines.

We really value this kind of predictability and coherence. That's what categorization gives us, is when we look at this big mess out there in the world, and then we can order it and put it into little boxes, that lets us make sense of what's happening, and we experience that sense of making sense of what's happening, as a sense of meaning. That's a really powerful feeling for most of us. It also, because meaning is related to boredom, it reduces boredom and increases interest and enjoyment.

Mills: I think that's great. It reminds me of taking walks in the woods with somebody who can identify plants, how that's a different experience from just walking and looking and not knowing what you're seeing. Just taking a tour of an art museum, and having a docent or getting the headphones so that you understand what you're looking at. It certainly makes a lot of sense.

Westgate: No, it's a completely different experience. In social psychology, we talk a lot about construes, and that your emotions and behavior and thoughts are shaped on your construe or understanding of what you're seeing, and categorization changes that. When you see this painting as-- when you understand its full historical significance, or you understand that that weird little ugly plant there is actually a really rare and valuable native species that eats ants or something insane. It's a fundamentally different experience on every single level.

Mills: You've also done research into procrastination, which I have to say, it seems like you're trying to put a positive spin on a lot of stuff we do that gets a bad rap for being unimportant and not socially useful. What are you learning about procrastination that grow out of your work on boredom?

Westgate: Procrastination, there's a saying in psychology, that researchers research. I started working on procrastination as an undergraduate, in a course that I took on motivation and self regulation. Because I wanted to understand why I procrastinated all the time. What I found out was really interesting because I went to a really small liberal arts college, where there was this really strong sense of academic identity, and people really valued this idea of the intellectual life and academia for its own sake. It manifested in a lot of academic bragging, but like not like, "I got a good grade." Like, "I stayed up until 6:00 AM working on my paper."

Someone else is like, "Oh yes? I haven't left the library in 48 hours." My college actually started closing the library at 2:00 AM to prevent this insane behavior. I became really interested in this question because what I noticed was that many of my peers that would brag about having done nothing but work on this paper for the past week, would be failing half their classes. I was like, "Well, is it possible that you can procrastinate in ways that aren't what we typically conceptualize procrastination as?" We often think of procrastination as that instead of doing the thing you're supposed to be doing, you go off and watch Netflix, or you go to a party, or you do something that's fun and trivial.

That wasn't what I saw the students doing at this college. What I saw them doing was procrastinating on things that they really should have been doing, but they were procrastinating by doing other important things. They were doing other important school work as a way of avoiding this task that they were putting off for some reason. I became interested in what I call productive procrastination. By that I mean, procrastinating on something by doing something else that still has value. Like I said, studying for an exam instead of watching Netflix, or it doesn't have to be in the same domain.

You can procrastinate on one academic task and working on another academic task, and that could be productive. You can also procrastinate on that academic task by doing the laundry, or washing the dishes, or baking bread, or doing something that's productive, but not necessarily academic. I'm not really interested in this question of like, one, is this a real thing or am I just making this up? Do people actually engage in these different kinds of procrastination? Two, if they do, is it as bad as these classic ways of procrastinating? Like blowing off your work to go party with friends or watch TV?

What we found was like twofold. First of all, people absolutely reported doing this. This idea is out there everywhere in pop culture. Procrastibaking, right? Is totally a phrase that people use. It was in The New York Times not too long ago. It was like a guide to procrastibaking. We see people talk about it in everyday life, but we don't see it showing up in their research. We just designed a study asking people very descriptive qualitative-ish study, basically looking at whether people first just do this, and they do.

It is as common, if not more common, than the old school traditional ideas of procrastination, where you put off one important task by doing something unimportant or a blow off thing instead. People were just as likely to say that they are putting off academic tasks by doing work for other classes, or putting off a hard assignment by doing an easier assignment, or putting off schoolwork by cleaning the dishes. That was just as common as these kinds-- as watching Netflix or doing something that had no point.

It's not just college students. Most of the work that we've done has been in academia and academics, both for convenience and because that's where it's an obvious issue, but we've also done some work, for instance, with visitors to the North Carolina State Fair, which is a much broader group of people. It's just people that went to the fair, and agreed to participate in a psych study. We see similar rates when you ask about procrastinating on tasks at work, or procrastinating on tasks around the home. For instance, I have still not filed my IRS returns. I'm absolutely procrastinating on that, but I feel justified because I've been working on grant applications.

Mills: They changed the deadline this year too.

Westgate: They changed the deadline. I will pretend like that's the reason why.

[laughter]

Mills: It also sounds like an issue of prioritization. I certainly work with people who, if you don't tell them, "Look, this is the most important thing you need to do today," that they don't understand, that they'll do the thing that's maybe fifth or sixth down the list, in my mind. Is that different or is that the same kind of procrastination?

Westgate: I think it's subjective. I think it counts as procrastination when you know you should be doing it, but choose not too. If you legitimately don't think you should be doing it. I think that's actually why this is a great example. I think the tax return is procrastination, in my case, because I know I should be doing it, and I'm deliberately putting it off by doing other things that make me feel better about it, not doing it.

Someone else, like my father, also hasn't filed his tax return, isn't planning to do so until the end of April, but in his case, he rationally looked at the extended deadline and said, "It makes sense for me to wait and do this later because there's this other really important stuff I have to do." In that case, I would say that is not procrastinating. He's not putting it off. He doesn't think he should do it now. He, very legitimately, has simply reordered his priorities to [crosstalk].

Mills: It's a conscious decision.

Westgate: Yes. I think procrastination is, in some ways, a subjective state. That it depends on the psychology of why people are doing it, and how they feel about it. The good news, this is very preliminary, but we do have data that for academic procrastination, at least, that-- I'm not going to go so far as to say you should do productive procrastination, that's definitely too far, but when we compare people that don't procrastinate at all, which is an embarrassingly large percentage of humanity, I've discovered.

Mills: Who would have thought?

Westgate: I know. Depending on the study, it's like 25% to 30%, 40% of people that like-- everyone's human, but by and large, they tend not to procrastinate. When you look at people that engage in a lot of productive procrastination, so putting off their taxes to apply for grants, or putting off studying for an exam to work on a paper assignment, they don't look any different in terms of their college GPAs. Their GPAs look about the same. It doesn't look like their grades are suffering because of this decision, overall.

The other thing that we find is that when you engage in productive procrastination in this way, it doesn't seem like it puts you at risk for alcohol use and risky alcohol drinking, in the same way that we often see with other forms of procrastination. That classic procrastination where you blow off your school work to go party, or go watch Netflix, that's associated with a lot of problems.

Just the self regulation in general, and self control in general, and you see a lot of correlations there between people that procrastinate in those ways, and increased risk of alcohol use disorder, increased risk of hazardous drinking in college, binge drinking, all that stuff tends to go along as a package with that behavioral profile. It's really not what we see for the productive procrastinators.

I'm writing up a paper right now, but our current thinking is that productive procrastination may be an unorthodox but acceptable [unintelligible 00:33:25] that people use to emotionally cope with tasks that are difficult and hard for them to do in some way. That at least you're not totally disengaging. If I am having a really hard time on this school assignment and I decided to work on this other assignment for school, I'm still engaged academically. I'm not losing my overall academic motivation. I may be better prepared to circle back and work on that original task that I've put off at a later date.

Productive procrastination, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a positive or a good thing, but I don't think it's a bad thing, and I don't think people need to feel as guilty about that kind of procrastination as they do for just blowing it all off and going and doing something fun instead.

Mills: That makes sense.

Westgate: Yes.

Mills: Any final words of advice for our listeners who might be feeling bored, or maybe putting off doing things that they could be doing right now?

Westgate: Yes. I'm going to tackle those separately because I have two sets of tips. One, for procrastination, Alexandra Faringdon Zarek has fabulous data showing that there is a really nifty trick that you can do with procrastination to help. I wrote about this in the research literature. I cite it in my papers all the time, and I use it in my own life. I have personally replicated it with a sample of one many times, and I find it helpful. The idea is that a lot of times, when you're dreading doing a task, there's two different reasons you might dread doing it.

You might dread actually doing it. Like, "I don't want to sit down and do this super monotonous, complicated thing." Or you might dread doing it because the stakes are so high. Like, "Oh, I know it's just this one little email to send to someone, but I'm really worried about how they're going to respond, and if they respond badly, it's going to ruin everything." What Alexandra Faringdon finds is that if you can figure out why you're putting it off, you can focus on the other thing instead.

If you don't want to do your taxes because, "I don't want to go and find all the little forms, and do all the little numbers," and like, "Where's my W-2? Oh, I moved institutions. I need to find my--" All these little, like the nitty gritty details, by shifting my focus to why I'm doing it, the bigger overarching abstract goal, like, "Oh, I'm going to get a tax free fund. I'm going to not get in trouble with the IRS." That can increase motivation and make it easier to actually just get started and do the task. If you're put off by the detail, the nitty gritty details, focusing on the bigger reason for why you're doing it helps.

Conversely, if you're putting it off because the big reason that you're doing it is so stressful or overwhelming, it helps to instead shift to the nitty gritty details of that. "Okay, instead of focusing about how this email is going to make or break my career, I'm just going to focus on writing it one word at a time." That shift in level helps people fix the problem. I think that's actually a valuable lesson for boredom in general, because often, not always, but procrastination is about anticipating that something's going to make you feel anxious, or anticipating that something's going to make you feel bored.

We know that we can reduce boredom by fixing the problems that caused it. We opened today talking about how boredom signals that you are not able to pay attention, or that what you're doing doesn't feel meaning, but then also give you the information you need to stop feeling bored. If you feel bored because what you're doing doesn't have meaning, maybe you should either go do something else or find a way to see the meaning in what you're doing.

For right now, for instance, we're all under these stay-at-home orders, and that doesn't feel like we're doing much. It doesn't feel super meaningful. I know it is, objectively, but it doesn't feel that way. Anything we can do to remind ourselves and keep that frame in mind that, "What I'm doing right now, literally, by sitting at my desk is saving lives."

Mills: Right.

Westgate: Any way that you can increase the meaning of what you're doing. Whether it's a reminder on the fridge, or talking about it with others, it literally makes us feel less bored because it infuses everything you're doing with a sense of meaning. That quiets down all those parts of your mind that are alerting you that what you're doing isn't meaningful because your think, "Yes it is." The same thing goes for our attention. That if you're having trouble concentrating because things are too hard right now, it's okay to listen to that signal and back off. Step it down to a level that you can handle.

Conversely, if you don't have enough to occupy your days, use it as license, if that's where you're at, not everyone is, but if you're at that point where you want to engage in some new hobbies, or download that book you've always been meaning to read, that can be a great fit for people too. I think fixing boredom and fixing procrastination are really about listening to your emotions, and listening to the information that those emotions are trying to tell you. We have this idea that emotions are irrational, and they're not.

They're so rational. They're like our internal messaging service, to tell us what's going on with our minds. By listening to them, we can get that information and use that information to fix them and feel better.

Mills: Well, that's all great advice. Dr. Westgate, thank you so much for joining Speaking of Psychology. I have to say I found our conversation to be anything but boring. Thank you.

Westgate: Thank you so much. That's always my fear.

Mills: [laughs] For our listeners, if you have any comments or ideas that you want to share with our podcast, you can send an email to  speakingofpsychology@apa.org . That's speakingofpsychology, all one word, @apa.org. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website and download all the episodes at  www.speakingofpsychology.org. Thanks again for listening, for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.

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