Welcome to Chasing Life. If you listen to last week's episode of the show, you probably know that we are kicking off the new year by doing something a little bit different.

Instead of talking about New Year's resolutions and doing more, which a lot of people talk about at the beginning of the year, we're going to talk about the potential health benefits of doing less, eating less,

drinking less, showering less, maybe even the real value of being a little less hard on

ourselves. And today, we're going to talk about a possible side effect of doing less,

and that is boredom.

Now, take a quick second and think about the last time you were bored.

Really, truly bored.

Maybe it was in school.

Maybe you were watching a boring movie.

We're listening to a dull podcast.

Hopefully not this one.

How would you describe that feeling of boredom?

Does the word pain come to mind? Listen to this. In 2014, a team of researchers at the University of Virginia asked people to come into a lab and simply sit alone for 15 minutes.

They could either sit quietly and let their minds wander,

or they could press a button that would give themselves an electric shock.

Now get this. Almost half those participants chose to shock themselves.

Why would that be? One takeaway might be that for some people, boredom is so tortuous that it's worse than physical pain. And that raises the question, why?

My guest today is Dr. James Dankert. He's a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He's also co-author of the book, Out of My Skull, The Psychology of Bordom.

And what he says is that we are probably thinking about boredom the wrong way.

Pain is there as a signal to sort of galvanize you into action, to address whatever it is that caused the hurt in the first way. Pain is there as a signal to sort of galvanize you into action,

to address whatever it is that caused the hurt in the first place.

Bordom's the same.

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