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Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

Ever felt bored to tears?

Maybe it was yesterday flipping through a thousand streaming options and not liking any of them.

Or maybe it's just the daily grind of work, dinner, and chores that never seems to change.

Bortem is sort of an emotional oxymoron. Your mind itches for something to do, but your body doesn't

respond. What happens when, but your body doesn't respond.

What happens when that flat-lined feeling doesn't go away?

Could you really die of boredom?

We sometimes call chronic boredom Anui, characterized by listlessness, discontent, and sadness,

a kind of mental weariness.

Anui is a French word that English speakers adopted around the 16 to 17-700s, with roots in the

same words that gave us terms like annoying and odious, which boredom certainly is.

References to the idea of boredom stretch back to the ancient philosophers,

but the word boredom didn't appear until the 17 to 1800s, after which literature exploded

with musings on it. Tolstoy called boredom the desire for desires. Bortem and Anhui are

difficult to study. They're distinct from depression,

although they are associated. They can be difficult to pin down. It's not like there's a blood

test for these emotional states, and they seem to arise from a combination of both external

and internal stimuli. For the article this episode is based on,

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