Terrifying Boredom

Over the last year, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by boredom. That may sound paradoxical. I’ve heard some creative writers say, “you can’t write about boredom without being boring.” I’ll take that challenge, because I’ve come to believe from my own experience and from my clinical work that “boredom” can often mask disturbing internal experiences we are trying to avoid, a euphemistic sensation prompting distraction from seriously uncomfortable or painful emotions.

Cognitively speaking, “boredom is what it feels like to have an unengaged mind” and is characterized by the dragging of time, a struggle to concentrate, the feeling that whatever we’re doing is pointless, and the incongruity of feeling lethargy and restlessness at the same time. Why is it that having an unengaged mind can result in these kinds of negative sensations for so many? Boredom generally bears negative connotations on a cultural level; indeed, boredom may often feel pathological to those who have been criticized for it or criticize themselves for boredom and its associates, procrastination, laziness, impulsivity, etc. The famous John Berryman poem (Dream Song 14) goes,

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored,
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Berryman expresses well the mysterious problem that is the heart of boredom’s aversiveness, a state of emotional static and identity fragmentation (both never good!), which we only encounter consciously when we are cognitively unengaged. When the mind is not focused, it can be doing a different kind of essential work, like trying to take in the big picture and make sense of it by fostering greater coherence and integration. This is the work of the unconscious mind growing and healing. If it encounters emotionally arrested objects that it does not know how to process due either to trauma or to the simple fact that we were never taught (when were we supposed to learn?) how to process this emotion properly, we feel an urgent, even desperate, need to engage in a focused mental activity and to distract, numb, or forget. Some who carry significant trauma have told me that they find boredom so intolerable they have to dissociate while they wash their hands or brush their teeth. Adolescents and teenagers who don’t know what to do with their emotions are hellbent on avoiding boredom and will move heaven and earth to have “fun.” Whatever the reason, the unconscious mind will encounter something overwhelming inside, but consciously we will have the (quite literally) misleading impression that we are empty inside. In truth, that impression is all just part of the defense.

John Berryman’s poetry and life attest to the rather serious side of this condition. He led an “increasingly disheveled life” divided among drinking sprees, hospitalizations, and university classes. His relationships ran to ruin and he committed suicide by jumping from a bridge not so far from his place of work. On some level, he recognized the depth of elemental feeling he contained within himself (“the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, / we ourselves flash and yearn”) and his poetry, as I think is characteristic of good poetry, is pregnant with an unconscious awareness. Sadly, in the face of the elemental forces of a yearning vast as mountains, sea, and sky, he ends the poem feeling nothing more than the solitary wag of a dog’s tail.

While I acknowledge readily, the distinction between Berryman himself and the speaker (“I”) in this poem, I think it is plausible they shared the experience written in Berryman’s confessional style: the experience of a blockaded inner world that made it impossible to access a sense of inner sufficiency or I-am-enoughness. A lack of “Inner Resources” does not mean there was something intrinsically wrong with him or missing, but the pathologically bored (deeply depressed) person has trouble living out their inner resources. I’ve seen, in my work, this often coincides with a suppression or flattening of emotion and lack of energy. Someone in this state certainly can write about and express their inner world through art—in fact, that might be the primary mode of safely encountering their dammed up inner resources! Berryman’s wife had speculated that he would have committed suicide much sooner if it weren’t for his poetry. Living out those inner/emotional resources directly is a different matter though. I’ve had some individuals say that they’d always feared they were uninteresting or boring people, but when they began experiencing and expressing emotions more fully they discovered they did indeed have a genuine “personality” after all, from which fulfilling relationships simply ensued.

Consider the Rilke antidote:

Think... of the world which you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future—only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.

Case Studies

Instead of facing my own sadness after a serious breakup, I felt intensely bored, and I needed intensely stimulating activities to help me distract myself. I didn’t even realize that I actually felt sad until I had gotten so annoyed with my angsty, self-indulgent behaviors that I made myself slow down for just a small part of a day and sit around doing nothing. In effect, I summoned and confronted my boredom, and something was unmasked. The seemingly harmless, impish feeling, always nudging me to spend as much time out with friends as possible or to drink beer and watch Netflix all evening, was in fact an intolerable sense of loss I was afraid to accept. I shed a few authentic tears before my rationalizing mind started to explain away why I was sad. I had barely wet my lips with this sadness before delivering a hasty verdict and blaming the most obvious recent source of loss: the break up. I patted myself on the back (figuratively) and started reading a fantasy novel.

Over the course of the next year, through a series of brushes with boredom, I had to admit that the emotional wound was far deeper than I’d been willing to notice. It wasn’t just the recent breakup; it wasn’t just a divorce from years before, during which I felt I’d lost touch with my spiritual self. Is it the pervasive loneliness of someone with an avoidant attachment style? Probably not just that either. Emotions never seem to be about just any one thing. What deep oceanic trench had I begun descending into? No, that’s my fear speaking again—the same fear, wearing so many different masks—the mask of boredom, the mask of over-rationalizing—all trying to protect me from a painful sadness. Only once I recognized that fear (in this case, a secondary emotion) was blocking my experience of real sadness (the primary emotion) was I able to see things more accurately. I wasn’t descending into deep stagnant waters. I was allowing room for sadness, a sense of loss and loneliness, backlogged for so long, to emerge and flow again in a transformative cycle: precipitation, condensation, evaporation. Some part of me I’d exiled was actually emerging from the depths. I had to practice feeling sad and letting it flow moderately.

I asked some clients to try unmasking their boredom. J. and I devised an experiment. She set an alarm for 10 minutes during which she was supposed to do nothing but just sit there. A meditation? A mindfulness exercise? No, a date with boredom, a “boredom séance” we called it. She gave it a try and quickly got irritated. She started batting things off the table like a cat. “Why am I angry?” she wondered. J. didn’t have an answer to that question, but at least she now realized there was a question. It was hard to leave it hanging there, but she wisely didn’t explain it away as I explained away my sadness, at first. Even by the end of the 10 minutes, some of her anger was beginning to dissipate. She was patient with her anger by not forgetting what she’d experienced in her boredom, and, in time, some plausible objects of anger came into view such as (but not just!) herself—the glowing coals of self-loathing, heated by an internalized belief that there is something inherently wrong with who she is, prompting ambitious projects of self-transformation and chameleon-like behaviors in many social contexts. It seemed J. was more prone to feeling bored when she also felt most self-critical.

In another manifestation of this all-too-human phenomenon, during his initial consultation, A. commented on how bored at work he was, how prone to procrastination, which was negatively impacting his performance. He described a number of ostensibly more urgent issues in his life, but I couldn’t help asking more about the boredom. We briefly mapped its influence on his life. As it turned out, A. rarely ever got bored anywhere but work. He valued his free time dearly and made the most of it with writing, reading, and spiritual exercises. By contrast, work was always a drag and gave him little meaning or satisfaction. Nevertheless, his work behaviors bothered him because procrastination and inattention weren’t congruent with his values in general. So I asked him to imagine what it would be like and how he would feel if he were a really good employee. Also not good! Over a couple months, we peeled back the layers, and A. came to realize that when he was with clients or put into collaborative roles with colleagues, his higher self was shutting down—he felt he had to play by “silly” institutional rules to be accepted or praised. Simultaneously another valued part of him that demanded creativity and excellence felt betrayed, because it only knew how to live out self-actualization while alone, and would whisper in his subconscious that he should somehow be taking control of the situation and figure systemic problems out himself. When he couldn’t, he felt like a failure, of course. In this instance, boredom was prompting him to avoid the moral double bind he encountered at work, the impossible choice between seemingly irreconcilable needs: the need for social belonging and the need for personal growth.

Common Themes

We all were avoiding a primary emotion that we did not know how to process. A. didn’t know what to do with his fear (of choosing between seemingly mutually exclusive needs), J didn’t know what to do with her anger (at herself), and I didn’t know what to do with my sadness (about lost relationships).

We all sought distraction because we felt stuck. A.’s story involves a double bind: he did not know how to meet the demands of his social world at work and the demands of his higher self at the same time. J. consciously knew that her anger at herself was not constructive (and that she struggled expressing her anger in general), but she nevertheless was angry about her alienation and uncertain at what she could direct this anger if not at herself. As for me, sadness didn’t feel safe because I couldn’t see the “bottom.” I felt stuck between feeling too little and feeling too much because I didn’t know how to process my sadness moderately. Some part of me wanted to get rid of sadness but it just felt deeper and deeper the more I felt it.

This feeling of being trapped in a double bind or stuck is not objective but subjective—that is to say, a matter of how we perceived the situation. Each of our perceptions resulted from the automatic unfolding of a “schema” (plural: schemata) involving subconsciously held emotions and beliefs, which were developed long ago in our respective pasts. A. recognized a connection between his reluctance to engage with the expectation of individuals in his workplace and feeling rejected as a child when he expressed his own mind too freely for his mother’s liking. By contrast, he was praised by his parents when he stayed out of trouble at school. J. was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and always felt like she was doing something wrong and, indeed, her behaviors were often criticized. Later important relationships reinforced the often unconscious (sometimes conscious) belief that it was her fault when valued relationships weren’t going well. As for my avoidance of sadness, I felt it went back to when I was 9 years old, and my grandmother had a stroke, which left her bed-ridden and unable to communicate, recognizing us only some of the time. I witnessed my father and aunt taking care of her for two years, and what I saw mostly (as best I can remember) was duty duty duty, without any memorable glimpses into my father’s mourning. Ever since, I’ve struggled to encounter others’ turmoil without detaching from my own emotion to fulfill my sense of duty.

For each of us, boredom was masking the activation of defective subconscious schemata, which were substantially formed in our childhood and adolescence. While all this schema stuff happens subconsciously, we are only consciously aware of feeling bored. Since boredom, at root is an impulse to avoid engaging with the faulty processing of a primary emotion, it is a kind of fear, and so it makes sense to say, though it may sound a little funny, that it takes courage to confront and unmask boredom. SO FAIR WARNING: unmasking boredom will probably lead to a period of greater dissonance during which you begin to do something with your unprocessed emotions. Know that enduring the amplified dissonance is worth it. We were all more vulnerable to abusing substances to some extent or another when our problems remained entirely mysterious and were written off as just boredom. We all found our way to the belief that this is not just an emotional problem but a relational one and that some salvation lay in practicing (with this newfound insight and wisdom!) more vulnerable social connection.

Finally, I want to note that I chose these three cases deliberately to illustrate a gendered pattern that I believe is reflected in our broader culture. Many men struggle to find a healthy place for sadness and fear in their lives; many women struggle to find a place for anger. There is so much social messaging that attacks masculinity for experiencing the helplessness of these emotions and attacks femininity for embracing the power of anger. There are many men, women, and gender non-binary who live out exceptions to this cultural tendency, but I dare say no one could say they have not felt and not had to reckon with the constant chatter of these stereotypes that threaten to fragment or distort our wholeness.