By Manoush Zomorodi
Every emotion has a purpose — an evolutionary benefit,” says Sandi Mann, a psychologist and the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good. “I wanted to know why we have this emotion of boredom, which seems like such a negative, pointless emotion.”
That’s how Mann got started in her specialty: boredom. While researching emotions in the workplace in the 1990s, she discovered the second most commonly suppressed emotion after anger was — you guessed it — boredom. “It gets such bad press,” she said. “Almost everything seems to be blamed on boredom.”
As Mann dived into the topic of boredom, she found that it was actually “very interesting.” It’s certainly not pointless. Wijnand van Tilburg from the University of Southampton explained the important evolutionary function of that uneasy, awful feeling this way: “Boredom makes people keen to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those at hand.”
“Imagine a world where we didn’t get bored,” Mann said. “We’d be perpetually excited by everything — raindrops falling, the cornflakes at breakfast time.” Once past boredom’s evolutionary purpose, Mann became curious about whether there might be benefits beyond its contribution to survival. “Instinctively,” she…
