The Surprising Link Between Anxiety & Boredom You Need To Know About

Anxiety is probably the most common presenting issue among my client base. One of my clients stands out as having a particularly long history of it; she doesn't remember a time when anxiety wasn't a feature of her life. Over the years I've worked with her, she has gained a lot of understanding as to what lies behind her anxiety to the extent that it no longer derails her. Though still prone to anxiety in certain situations, like most of us, her baseline state is a lot calmer. In the initial stages of our work together, I would try to get her to imagine what life without anxiety might look like, how she might feel in its absence. She confessed that one of her fears was that once the anxiety faded away, boredom would loom large in the foreground. Over her decades-long acquaintance with anxiety, she knew and had become accustomed to it, but boredom inspired a real sense of dread in her.

Sure enough, as her anxiety lessened, boredom did start to make its presence felt in her life. However, over time, my client came to embrace this new state. She labeled it "a privilege" and a sign that anxiety had released its stranglehold over her life. Interestingly, when she stopped reacting to and judging her boredom, it started to ease. Different things came to occupy the void previously occupied by her anxiety and fear. She started writing and engaging in creative pursuits again. For this client, boredom was the vacuum left by her anxiety. Perhaps her case is not that unusual. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asserted that as humans we are "doomed to vacillate between the two extremities of distress and boredom."

Boredom and anxiety are curious bedfellows. On the surface, they have little in common. The former suggests disengagement, a lack of arousal. Anxiety, on the other hand, is denoted by alertness, our antennae up and monitoring for potential threat or danger. But both are uncomfortable states for many of us.

Much consumer marketing, advertising, and product development is designed to address boredom. Indeed, if we were more comfortable being bored or sufficiently creative to amuse ourselves without the aid of consumer goods, then our capitalist society would probably collapse. Some advertising explicitly pitches to bored consumers. In a recent search for a tablet computer, I read in one product blurb that with the purchase of said device one "need never be bored again."

People will go to great lengths to escape boredom. Many of us would rather feel pain or discomfort than nothing at all. In 2014, Harvard psychologists found that faced with spending 15 minutes alone in a room with no stimulation (read: no smartphone!), two-thirds of men pressed a button in the knowledge that it would deliver a painful jolt. One man found being left alone in his own company so disagreeable he opted to be shocked 190 times. Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The scientists attributed the difference in self-shocking levels between the men and women to the fact that men tend to be more sensation-seeking. Timothy Wilson, who led the research, attributed the findings to humans' "constant urge to do something rather than nothing."

"The truth is, many people fall into drug and alcohol addiction because of boredom. It's something to do." I read this on the website of Raleigh House, a rehab center in Colorado, recently. I believe the same principle applies to our smartphone addictions. Being constantly on our phones keeps boredom at bay.

Several key features of our smartphones can be very magnetic to the bored mind. Take, for instance, messaging (including texting, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.), which remains the most popular smartphone function. We expect replies more quickly than ever before. When email was introduced, traditional mail was dubbed "snail mail." Now email has been consigned to the same category. On our chat apps, we can see if the recipient has read our message and whether they're replying in real time or not. Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist who has researched gambling addiction, likens "the roller-coaster ride of texting" to playing slot machines. Quoted in a Financial Times article on modern dating, she compares leaving a message on an answering machine to buying a lottery ticket because you don't expect an immediate payoff. But texting taps into what Schüll dubs the "ludic loop" of the slot-machine experience. "The possibility of instant gratification coupled with reward uncertainty draws us into the game, and the absence of built-in stopping mechanisms makes us keep playing," she says. These ups and downs, highs and lows, are the antidote to boredom, a roller-coaster ride for our jaded, bored selves.

In an article for the Atlantic based on her book Yawn: Adventures in Boredom, author Mary Mann says, "It's easier to label that itchy sensation 'boredom' than it is to consider the feeling one gets sometimes that the train of life is stopped on its tracks, that the narrative is going nowhere." She adds, "Because boredom is such a motivating, annoying, irritating force, boredom can be kind of useful."

Existential therapist, neurologist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "Boredom is now causing more problems to solve than distress. And these problems are growing increasingly crucial, for progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time." Frankl wrote his book half a century before the invention of the smartphone and obviously hadn't reckoned on a portable device that would act as a gateway to every possible type of entertainment! Frankl asserted that in the postwar years, the mass of people living lives without meaning led to the rise of what he termed the "mass neurotic triad"—namely depression, aggression, and addiction.

Frankl was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for one and a half years. "Distressing" seems a gross understatement to describe what he lived through. But rather than focus on this traumatic experience, what he was drawn to amid the environment of loss and despair was the role finding a sense of meaning played in his survival. In the bleakness of Dachau he was able to find something of value within himself that he could connect with: namely, the love he felt for his wife. The acknowledgment of this love acted like a touchstone for Frankl and gave him the power and sense of purpose he needed to survive.

Many of us need to go through years of doing things that feel unimportant, unstimulating—in short, boring—until we can bear no more and are pushed to develop a sense of what we were put on this Earth to do. That was certainly my experience. For half a decade, I plodded along in a fog knowing that I wasn't fulfilled in my career. I was making just enough effort to keep my slate clean and my boss off my back. I felt stuck but lacked the energy required to make the jump to something else. I had an aptitude for what I was doing, which allowed me to coast, a particularly deadening state for me. I had my epiphany moment in the middle of a conference on some hard-core technology in Washington. The fact that I didn't understand what was being discussed was the least of my worries. I felt I was in the wrong place. I had no business being there.

When I work with boredom, I take a similar approach as when addressing anxiety. Rather than reacting to it, trying to suppress it, distract from it, I encourage my clients to treat it with curiosity (curiosity being another natural antidote to boredom!). Being bored, feeling unstimulated is certainly part of the ebb and flow of life, and if we go with it rather than distract ourselves from it, we can learn a lot about being still and patient.

But there are times when prolonged enduring boredom can be a signal that we're not using our skills and talents, we're not channeling our creativity. In short, that we've stalled and have become stuck, like I was at the tech conference.

If you're on a journey to cut back on your digital addictions, perhaps you've noticed your phone use dipping. Maybe you feel bored, and you don't know what to do with the free time you've created; welcome to "the void." This is a good place to be.