Practice Set 13 Test 1 (C13T1) | Why Being Bored Is Stimulating – And Useful, Too

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too

This most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thought

A

We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, chán nản, trầm cảm and indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling varietyadaptiveagitatedIntriguinglykích động and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to thresholddisgustrestlessinfectionghê tởm – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from nhiễm (bệnh), boredom may protect them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

B

By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently pronearousalidentifiedthresholdxác định five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high sự kích thích, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. mentalcuriosityIntriguinglywanderthú vị, ngạc nhiên, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most indifferencedamagingadaptivethresholdgây hại is ‘reactant’ boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t tham gia, bận (làm gì) in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

C

Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. ‘All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says. Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to stuckrestlesswanderindifferencenghĩ lan man, lơ đễnh. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that we should frustrationseek outdefiningdistractiontìm kiếm more boredom in our lives.

D

Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn’t alleviatedistinctspeculatesconvincedbị thuyết phục, tin tưởng. ‘If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t detrimentalparticularlyexplosivenecessarilynhất thiết mean that it isn’t adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the situation can varietyend upexplosiveindifferencecuối cùng making you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there’s that frustration and sự khó chịu, dễ nổi nóng,’ he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to state where we don’t know what to do any more, and no longer care.

E

Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days but they think that at least some of it apathydetrimentalcomes down tostay away fromphụ thuộc personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a varietydefiningstay away fromoverstimulationđa dạng of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularlyfrustrationassociatedstuckđặc biệt, rõ ràng badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are proneassociatedapathydistinctliên quan tới with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has deal withindifferenceapathydetrimentalcó hại effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospectsdefiningoverstimulationdistinctviễn cảnh, khả năng in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill – it’s the things we do to curiositymentaldeal withpronexử lý, đối phó it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring situation – in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuckrestlessspecialiseadaptivekẹt in anyway – report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

F

Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder đoán that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of definingmentaloverstimulationadaptivesự kích thích quá mức but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.