Out of My Skull

The Psychology of Boredom

By: James Danckert, John D. Eastwood

Narrated by: Liam Gerrard

We avoid boredom at all costs. It makes us feel restless and agitated. Desperate for something to do, we play games on our phones, retie our shoes, or even count ceiling tiles. And if we escape it this time, eventually it will strike again. But what if we listened to boredom instead of banishing it? Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood contend that boredom isn't bad for us. It's just that we do a bad job of heeding its guidance.

When we're bored, our minds are telling us that whatever we are doing isn't working - we're failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Too many of us respond poorly. We become prone to accidents, risky activities, loneliness, and ennui, and we waste ever more time on technological distractions. But, Danckert and Eastwood argue, we can let boredom have the opposite effect, motivating the change we need. The latest research suggests that an adaptive approach to boredom will help us avoid its troubling effects and, through its reminder to become aware and involved, boredom might lead us to live fuller lives.

Out of My Skull combines scientific findings with everyday observations to explain an experience we'd like to ignore, but from which we have a lot to learn. Boredom evolved to help us. It's time we gave it a chance.

©2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2020 Tantor

Excellent

This was a much needed reminder of the fact that Boredom is a major driver which can be a blinding force. This book helps my feeling awareness and behavior.

great!

great book for a teacher! learned alot of things about boredom and got ideas about how to engage my students more.

Excellent exposition

An insightful book on boredom with good coverage of the academic literature. Definitely would recommend.

Ironically SUPER Interesting!

I strongly recommend this book to anyone that feels under stimulated or bored from day to day.

an important topic in the future to come

helpful book. I listened to half of it in a few hours on one day. that never happened to me but one other time.

I guess I finally got tired of boredom and the topic truly was important to me :d

also once again a reminder to myself in this book how important mindfulness can be. although my mind has a love/hate/fear relationship with meditation

Ironically...on the boring side

It's funny, I just reviewed yet another self-dev book that leaned on the same surface-level introductions to Csikszentmihalyi and Frankl...and this one was no different. Seems like no one can help themselves when talking about the mind.

And for the first half, it was actually actually a decent read and referenced some research that I hadn't already encountered in a million other pop psych books. But then defaulted to the usual Good-Housekeeping-Article style of basic, vanilla, uninsightful treatment of its material.

Missed opportunities to look at truly what we are experiencing when we BELIEVE we are bored - it's usually a cocktail of other emotions that arise in response to some belief that "this situation is lacking in some way."

My interest truly bottomed in the chapter that discussed the same old pros and cons of the internet existing: "while it's great that you can communicate with people far away, the downsides might be..." C'mon guys. The internet's been around for almost 30 years now, we've all heard these dull generalizations. Is that all you got?

The authors maybe should've considered the fact that the people reading the book would be boredom-prone (I am one such human) and maybe more needs to be offered to grab and hold their attention.

Talk about boring

I'm pretty sure I was just tricked into being a participant in one of his studies, and I was given the intentionally boring material.

Repeats the same points 100 times. We get it - bad things happen when you're bored. You don't need to say it 1000 more times.

But the worst part is that the book offers zero useful advice on how to solve the problem, except a few sentences at the end of the conclusions with some generic advice. What a joke.

Pass on this one folks.