Boredom at work: an underrated state that isn't laziness

It is seventeen minutes past ten. You last checked ten minutes ago, when it was seven minutes past. The same spreadsheet is open on your screen as yesterday, the same folder sits in your drawer as last year. You are not short of anything: the salary comes in, your manager leaves you alone, your colleagues are pleasant. And yet at the end of the day you feel more drained than if you had spent it carrying sacks. At home you tell your partner, “I didn’t do anything, and I’m completely dead.” And then you feel a little ashamed of that too.

These days there is a lot of talk about burnout from overload. About its quiet sister — boredom at work — almost nothing. If you complain about having too much work, you get sympathy. If you admit you have too little, or that everything you do feels empty, you get a look that says, “Lucky you.” So people who are bored at work keep quiet about it, fill it with their phone and privately conclude that they are simply lazy.

In this post I want to show that boredom is not laziness. It is a signal — and if you look at it closely, it often says something important about you, about your work and about the system you work in.

What boredom really is

For a long time psychologists treated boredom as something trivial, not serious enough to study. That has changed over the last fifteen years. In 2012 John Eastwood and his colleagues published a paper that almost every study in the field now cites. They defined boredom as an unpleasant state in which you want to be meaningfully engaged with something, but can’t be. Attention is the key: the mind looks for something to hold on to and doesn’t find it. You are aware of this — and you attribute the cause to your surroundings: “There’s nothing here.”

What the definition does not say matters too. It does not say that boredom is a lack of activity. You can be very busy and deeply bored at the same time — shuffling documents all day that no one will ever read. Nor does it say that boredom is calm. In boredom the body is often restless, tense, irritable. Boredom is more like hunger than like rest.

Just how unpleasant it is was shown by an unusual experiment by Timothy Wilson and colleagues, published in Science in 2014. Participants had to sit alone in a room for fifteen minutes without their phones and simply think. They had a button with which they could give themselves an unpleasant electric shock — one they had earlier said they would pay to avoid. As many as 12 out of 18 men and 6 out of 24 women pressed it at least once. For many, pain was more bearable than a quarter of an hour with nothing to occupy them.

So if for eight hours a day at work your mind is looking for something to hold on to and not finding it, it is no wonder you are exhausted by the evening. You will find a short explanation of the concept in the knowledge base under Boredom.

Boreout: when too little is also too much

In 2007 two Swiss consultants, Philippe Rothlin and Peter Werder, published a book in which they used the term boreout for long-term boredom at work — a deliberate play on the word burnout. They described three ingredients: work that is not demanding enough, a lack of interest in the work, and a lack of growth. Boreout is not a diagnosis and you won’t find it in any medical manual. But the name helped people, because at last they could name something they had felt for a long time and been ashamed of.

It is striking how similar the consequences of the two states are. People with long-term boredom at work often describe tiredness, low mood, cynicism, physical restlessness and a sense of having “lost themselves”. Some describe it in the same words as people with burnout. If you are curious about the other side, read Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break — you will recognise a good deal of it in boredom too.

Rothlin and Werder also described something I find important: people with boreout often develop whole strategies to look busy. They always have a document open, walk quickly down the corridor, and stretch work they could do in an hour over the whole day. Not because they are cheats, but because in most teams admitting that you don’t have enough to do is a risk. What if they decide they don’t need you?

Two kinds of boredom: too little challenge and too little meaning

In studies published in 2012, the researchers Wijnand van Tilburg and Eric Igou showed that boredom has at least two different sources. The first is too little challenge: the task is too easy, repetitive, it doesn’t call on your abilities. The second is too little meaning: the task may even be demanding, but you can’t see what it is for.

The difference is practical, because each calls for a different response. If you lack challenge, a new responsibility, learning, or a project that stretches you can help. If you lack meaning, no extra project will help — it will only fill your diary. Then the question lies elsewhere: who benefits from this work, why are you doing it, and do you still know why you once chose it?

This second kind of boredom is closely linked to the question of meaning, which you can read more about in the knowledge base under Meaning and in the post Work without meaning: what psychology knows about why we need it. I would add only this: among the people I meet, it is often the second kind of boredom that is present, even though they talk about themselves as if they lacked the first. “I’d like something new,” they say. But when they get something new, two months later it feels the same.

The workplace as a system: who gets the boredom

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we ask of every difficulty how it is woven into a system. A family is not just a collection of individuals — it is a web of roles, rules and alliances in which everyone has their place. A workplace is very similar. A team, too, has roles that are not handed out by decree but take shape on their own.

When I look at boredom at work through this lens, questions appear that the individual often doesn’t ask:

• Who in the team gets the routine work? Often not the least capable person, but the most reliable one, who complains least. “You do this so well anyway.” Reliability turns into a cage.
• Who benefits from your boredom? Perhaps a manager who doesn’t want to face the question of whether your post is needed at all. Perhaps a colleague who has taken the interesting projects. Perhaps a whole department that keeps the peace as long as nobody asks who really does what.
• Is boredom your role elsewhere too? Some people were already “the easy one” at home — the child who could keep themselves busy, asked for nothing and was therefore easy to overlook. If you recognise this, you may find the post Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the lost child — which one was yours? helpful, along with the short explanation in the knowledge base under Roles in the family.

A systemic view doesn’t mean that everything is the system’s fault. It means that boredom is often a relational phenomenon: it arises between you and your environment, not only inside you. And so it can also shift when the relationship shifts — not necessarily when you change jobs.

When boredom protects you from something harder

There is another layer I often meet in therapy. Boredom is sometimes a feeling that covers another feeling. Most often anger.

Imagine someone who lost the project he had been leading three years ago. Nobody explained why. He didn’t complain — in his family complaining was not a wise move. Since then he has been doing something else, something calmer, and he says he is just “bored”. But when he talks about it, his jaw tightens. The boredom here is not empty. It is frozen anger that had nowhere to go.

It is similar with sadness. Someone who has lost work they loved, or a colleague who made the work feel alive, may experience that loss as greyness rather than pain. Greyness is sometimes easier than grief, because it doesn’t require you to admit how much something meant to you.

I am not saying there is a hidden feeling under every boredom. I am saying it is worth asking: am I bored because there is nothing there, or because there is something I won’t let myself feel?

A conversation that opens another layer

When someone first comes because of boredom, they often expect me to give them advice on how to be more motivated. The conversation then frequently goes somewhere else. Something like this (composite, not a real person):

“It’s nothing serious. I’m just bored. I’m ashamed to complain when other people have real problems.”
“When did the boredom start?”
“I don’t know … maybe after the reorganisation. Before that I had my own team.”
“And what happened to the team?”
“They gave it to a colleague. They said I’d now have more time for strategic things. There are no strategic things.”
“What was it like when you heard that?”
“… I think I was furious. I never said a word.”

In a moment like that, boredom gets a story. And once it has a story, you can work with it — not only by filling it with new tasks, but by finally saying what was never said.

What the body and the brain say about boredom

Boredom also has a physical side. Researchers who study it describe two forms: a restless one, in which the body is aroused, can’t settle and seeks stimulation, and a sluggish one, in which the body slows down, grows heavy and sleepy. Both are unpleasant, both are tiring.

When boredom is frequent, people look for a quick way out. The phone is the easiest: every swipe promises something new. But short bursts of stimulation don’t solve boredom — they only cover it for a moment, and then it comes back stronger, because attention is even more fragmented. You can read more about how the brain’s reward system affects our willingness to start things in the post Why starting is hard and keeping going is harder: what dopamine says about motivation.

But boredom also has a bright side. In 2014 the philosopher Andreas Elpidorou wrote that boredom is useful precisely because it is unpleasant: like pain, it warns us that we are in a situation that doesn’t suit us and pushes us to look for something better. In a small study the same year, Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman showed that people who had first done a boring task came up with more ideas in a creative task than those who hadn’t. So boredom is not only a problem. It is also a compass — if you listen to it instead of silencing it.

Exercise: a boredom diary

Boredom is slippery, because we want to chase it away as quickly as possible. This exercise goes the other way: for one week, boredom becomes something to be curious about. You can start today.

1. Three times a day, note how bored you are on a scale from 0 to 10. Add what you were doing at that moment and who you were with.
2. Notice what happens in your body. Are you restless, tense, irritable? Or heavy, slowed down, sleepy? Write down one word.
3. Ask yourself which boredom it is. Too little challenge (“I could do this in my sleep”) or too little meaning (“what is this for”)? Or something else?
4. Look for the exception. When this week were you not bored, even though you were at work? What was different then — the task, the person, your role?
5. Write down one sentence you didn’t say. Who would you say something to, if you dared? This is often the most important piece of information from the whole week.

At the end of the week, read your notes. You are not looking for a solution, but for a pattern. It often turns out that boredom isn’t even — that it thickens around certain tasks, people or meetings. That is already much more than you knew before.

Where this view falls short

I want to be honest here, because the idea that “boredom is a signal” can quickly turn into pressure for every job to be fulfilling.

Some jobs are simply boring. Not every job is a calling, and it doesn’t need to be. Many people accept monotonous work deliberately — because it gives them security, an early finish or peace for the things that really matter to them. In Slovenia a permanent contract still carries a lot of weight, and that is not unwise. If you are bored at work but your life outside it is full, it may not be a problem at all, but a choice.

Not everyone can easily change jobs. The advice “find something that makes you happy” sounds different when you have a mortgage, two children and you are fifty. The systemic view doesn’t promise that a way out is always possible. It only promises that what is happening can be understood — and that understanding sometimes changes how you spend the day.

Boredom is sometimes a sign of something else. If nothing appeals to you at home either, with friends, or in things you used to enjoy, it may not be boredom at work but a loss of the capacity to feel pleasure. The post Anhedonia: when nothing brings joy any more writes about this. In that case it is right to talk to your GP, who can assess whether it might be depression. The same applies if boredom and difficulty concentrating have been with you all your life and in every area — that too is worth looking at with a professional.

When work is being systematically taken away from you, it isn’t necessarily boredom. If your tasks have been removed, you are left out of meetings and given pointless work with the aim of pushing you out, this is no longer a question of motivation. The post Workplace bullying or just a difficult relationship? How to tell them apart and what you can do about each looks at how to tell such a situation apart from an ordinary difficult relationship. For the legal side, it is worth consulting a trade union or a lawyer who specialises in employment law.

What you can do once you know what boredom is telling you

Once boredom has a name, some options open up. None of them is magic, but each is better than pushing it into your phone for years.

Change the task before you change the job. Workplace researchers call this job crafting: small shifts in what you do, with whom, and how you think about it. Perhaps you could take on the induction of a new colleague. Perhaps you could do one routine task differently. Perhaps you could find out who, at the end of the chain, uses what you produce.

Say it out loud. In many teams admitting boredom is taboo. But a manager who doesn’t know that you have too little work, or that the work doesn’t stretch you, can’t offer you anything else. The conversation isn’t necessarily easy — especially if you are the one in the team who is “no trouble” — but it is often the first real shift.

Look at what you bring from home. If you recognise that your reliability has become your cage, it is worth asking where it came from. When did you learn that it was safer to ask for nothing? This is where therapy can help, because a pattern that repeats at work often repeats in relationships too.

Allow yourself the feeling under the boredom. If you recognise anger or sadness beneath the greyness, let them exist. You don’t have to act straight away. It is enough to stop calling them “boredom”.

When boredom lasts a long time, it can turn into cynicism — the kind of “I don’t care” that is no longer light. If you recognise that, you may find Cynicism as a sign: when you no longer care and it isn’t your character helpful.

What to remember

• Boredom is not laziness. It is an unpleasant state in which you want to be meaningfully engaged but can’t be — and that is why it is exhausting.
• There are at least two kinds of boredom: too little challenge and too little meaning. Each needs a different response.
• At work, boredom is often a relational phenomenon: who gets the routine, who benefits from your silence, and what role you play in the team.
• Beneath boredom there is sometimes anger or sadness that was never allowed out.
• If nothing appeals to you outside work either, it may not be boredom — talk to your GP.