Why We Get Bored | Erin Westgate

What is your boredom trying to tell you? This week on Behavioral Grooves, we sit down with psychologist Dr. Erin Westgate, one of the world’s leading researchers on boredom, to explore why feeling bored may actually be a crucial ingredient in living a good life.

In our conversation, Erin explains the Meaning and Attentional Components (MAC) Model, which shows that boredom tends to emerge when what we’re doing either lacks meaning or fails to properly engage our attention. Too easy? Bored. Too hard? Also bored. Misaligned with our goals? Still bored. The feeling can be so powerful that people would rather shock themselves than sit alone with their thoughts, and so universal that even people in exciting, high-stakes jobs experience it. At its core, boredom functions as a feedback mechanism, an internal signal that something about our current path needs to change.

From there, we zoom out to discuss what it means to live a psychologically rich life, one filled with novel, perspective-shifting experiences that may be uncomfortable in the moment but deeply formative over time. From cave diving to career uncertainty, Erin challenges the idea that happiness and meaning are the only measures of a life well lived, and invites us to reconsider boredom not as a problem to eliminate, but as information worth paying attention to.

Want to watch this episode? Check it out on our YouTube Channel