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PORTSMOUTH, United Kingdom — While most people find a day off to be a relaxing mental health break, doing nothing can actually be stressful for highly impulsive people. Now, two recent studies have found that highly impulsive people are more likely to act rashly and make unhealthy decisions when bored.
Everyone acts without thinking every now and then, buying a shirt they don’t need, spontaneously booking a trip, and so on. However, highly impulsive people take it to a whole new level. Chronic impulsivity is linked to several mental health conditions, such as ADHD, borderline personality disorder, and substance use disorder.
The recent studies, published in the journal Physiology & Behavior, found that boredom can provoke impulsive actions in people prone to high impulsivity. A look at their cortisol levels found engaging in boring tasks to be stressful, and impulsivity could be a reaction to this stress. The findings can help create more personalized treatments for reducing stress and improving the mental health of people with poor impulse control.
“Our findings shed light on the biological underpinnings of why some individuals, particularly those with high impulsivity, find boredom more stressful than others,” says James Clay, a researcher at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and Dalhousie University, in a media release. “By identifying how their stress response is triggered, and that cortisol is a key mediator, we can begin to better understand why this happens and to explore targeted interventions that help manage these reactions.”
From a psychological point of view, boredom is a type of psychological stress because it is a state of restless dissatisfaction. A bored person craves some form of stimulation. The authors argue impulsive people seek more extreme forms of stimulation because they are more affected by the psychological stress of boredom.
“We know highly impulsive people are more likely to develop addictions over a lifespan. There has always been a connection between impulsiveness and boredom, but the mechanisms behind this relationship aren’t fully understood,” notes Matt Parker, a neuroscientist at the University of Surrey.
Earlier theories about ADHD attempted to explain the connection between impulsive behavior and boredom. One explanation is that people are impatient. However, more research is needed to explain the mechanism for how boredom triggers these people to act impatiently. Understanding the mechanism could help create more effective coping strategies for feeling more comfortable with boredom.
The first study looked at 80 people completing a boring task and then being asked how it made them feel. The results showed highly impulsive people are more prone to boredom than others.
The second study took it one step further by looking at people’s bodily responses when bored. Saliva samples from 20 people before and after the boring task measured people’s cortisol levels — the physical response to stress. They found boredom increased stress hormone levels among people who are highly impulsive.
“Our research supports the hypothesis that high-impulsive people experience greater physiological responses to boredom. If we can find ways to mitigate these stress symptoms it might prevent them from seeking unhealthy stress reliefs, like drugs or gambling,” Parker concludes.
Paper Summary
Methodology
This research was done in two parts. In Study 1, 80 adults filled out questionnaires about how impulsive they are and how easily bored they get. Then, they did a boring task on a computer where they had to keep clicking on pegs. After that, they answered questions about how bored they felt.
In Study 2, 20 college students came to a lab. They answered questions about impulsivity, then gave a saliva sample. Next, they did a really boring task for 20 minutes where they had to count vowels in a long text. After that, they answered questions about how bored they felt and gave another saliva sample. The researchers tested the saliva samples for cortisol, a stress hormone.
Key Results
Study 1 found that people who said they were more impulsive also reported feeling more bored after doing the boring task. This matched what other studies have found before.
Study 2 showed something new. People who were more impulsive had a bigger increase in their stress hormone (cortisol) after the boring task. This increase in stress hormones was linked to feeling more bored. So, it seems that being impulsive makes people more stressed by boredom, which then makes them feel even more bored.
Study Limitations
The study relied on people answering questions about themselves, which isn’t always accurate. Researchers note they didn’t plan out all the details of their study before starting, which can make the results less trustworthy.
The study only had a small number of participants, especially in Study 2. This means their results might not apply to everyone. Researchers only looked at how bored people felt right then, not how easily bored they get in general.
Discussion & Takeaways
People who are more impulsive tend to get more bored during boring tasks. When impulsive people get bored, their bodies release more stress hormones. This increase in stress hormones seems to make them feel even more bored.
This connection between impulsivity, stress, and boredom might help explain why some people are more likely to engage in risky behaviors when they’re bored. Understanding this link could help create better ways to help impulsive people deal with boredom.
Funding & Disclosures
The study was funded by the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Portsmouth. The researchers say that the funders didn’t have any say in how the study was designed, how the data was analyzed or interpreted, how the report was written, or whether to publish it. The researchers didn’t mention any conflicts of interest.
