This most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thought

最普遍的情绪被证明是比我们认为的要有趣的多

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A We all know how it feels - it's impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and indifference. There isn't even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy, flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada, compares it to disgust - an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain situations. 'If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from ''infectious'' social situations,' he suggests.

A 我们都知道它是种什么感觉——你根本没法让自己的心思集中在任何事上，时间过得缓慢，你能做的一切都无法让自己感到舒服一些。然而要对厌烦情绪下个定义，以便于可以将它置于实验室里接受研究，却证明是很困难的。首先，它可以包含一大堆其他精神状态，例如挫败感、冷漠、压抑或漠不关心，甚至在连“厌烦是否总是低能量的、平淡的情绪或者感到躁动不安是否也能算作厌烦这样的问题”也不能达成一致意见。加拿大卡尔加里大学的Peter Toohery在其著作《厌烦：一段鲜活的历史》中，将厌烦与厌恶——一种会促使我们规避某些场合的情绪——进行了对比。他说“如果说厌恶保护人类不受到感染，那么厌烦也许就保护我们不受到一些有感染性的社会场景的影响”。

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B By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types: indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two axes - one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly, Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is 'reactant' boredom with its explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what Goetz calls 'indifferent' boredom: someone isn't engaged in anything satisfying but still feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

B 通过要求人们描述自己感到厌烦的经历，德国康斯坦茨大学的Thomas Goetz 及其团队最近分出了五种不同的类型：漠不关心、摇摆不定、有所期待、应激反应和无动于衷。这些类型可以排列在两条轴线上——一条从左到右，表示的是从低到高的感受激发程度；另一条是从上到下，衡量的是这种感受有多积极或消极。有趣的是，Goetz 发现，尽管人们能体验到各式各样的厌烦情绪，他们往往都倾向于其中的一种。在这五种类型中，最有破坏力的是“应激反应型”厌烦情绪，它综合了高应激反应和消极情绪的爆发式力量。最有用的类型是被Goetz称为“冷漠”的厌烦感觉：某个人并没有从事任何能带来满足感的活动，但仍然觉得放松和平静。然而，是否存在着任何性格特质，能预示到我们每个人也许更倾向于感受到哪一种厌烦情绪还待定。

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C Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. 'All emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,' she says. Mann has found that being bored makes us more creative. 'We're all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it can lead to all kinds of amazing things,' she says. In experiments published last year, Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander in fact, she goes so far as to (suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

C 英国兰卡斯特大学的心理学家Sandi Mann 研究得更远。“所有情绪都有出现的原因，厌烦情绪也是”，她说。Mann发现厌烦的状态会让我们更有创造力。“我们都害怕自己处于厌烦的情绪中，然而实际上，它能带来各种奇妙的结果”，她提出。去年发表的一些实验中，她发现：那些被要求从电话簿里连续抄15分钟数字号码、从而感到无聊厌烦的实验对象，与对照组相比，对关于如何使用一个聚苯乙烯杯子想出更多的颇有创意的点子。Mann 得出结论：一项消极被动、令人厌烦的活动最有利于启发创意，因为它让思维得以散发。实际上，她甚至还进一步提出：我们就应该在生活中寻找更多的厌烦状态。

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D Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn't convinced. 'If you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,' he says. 'In my view, by definition boredom is an undesirable state.' That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't adaptive, he adds. 'Pain is adaptive - if we didn't have physical pain, bad things would happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.' For Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our 'attention system' into gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go painfully slowly. What's more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making you feel worse. 'People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful there's that frustration and irritability,' he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to a state where we don't know what to do any more, and no longer care.

D 加拿大多伦多约克大学的心理学家John Eastwood对此并不相信。“如果你正处在一种神游状态，那你就并不是在感到厌烦”，他说，“在我看来，厌烦从定义上来说就不是一种令人欣悦的状态。那也并不一定意味着它就是不可适应的”，他补充说“疼痛就是可适应的——如果我们没有物理疼痛感的话，就会遇上各种糟糕的情况，难道那就意味着我们应当积极主动地去引起疼痛吗？并不是这样。但是即使厌烦感已经进化到帮助我们生存，如果我们任由它蔓延，它也可以是毒害无穷的。”在Eastwood 看来，厌烦情绪的核心特质是无法将我们的注意力系统启动，这造成了无法专注在任何事上，从而令时间流逝的速度似乎慢得令人痛苦。更严重的是，你尝试着改善这种状态的努力有可能让你感到更糟糕。“人们总是在尝试与周围的世界建立联系，如果他们没能成功，就会感到挫败和易怒”，他说。也许最令人担忧的是，反复地失去专注力可能会导致这样一种状态：我们已经不知道还能做什么、并且已经不在乎了。

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E Eastwood's team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It's early days but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But of course, boredom itself cannot kill - it's the things we do to deal with it that may put us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz's group has one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who 'approach' a boring situation - in other words, see that it's boring and get stuck in anyway - report less boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for distraction.

E Eastwood 的团队目前正在尝试着探索注意力系统失效的原因。虽然为时尚早，不过他们认为，其中至少有部分原因在于个人性格。厌烦倾向与一系列性格特征有关，那些受快乐所驱动的人们似乎格外深受其苦。其他的性格特质，例如好奇，通常构成了一个很高的厌烦情绪门槛。关于厌烦会产生有害影响的更多证据来自于那些或多或少更容易感到厌烦的人群的研究。似乎那些更容易厌烦的人们在教育、职业、甚至是整体人生中面临着更为惨淡的前景。但是当然了，厌烦情绪本身不会杀人，是那些我们用来应对它而做出的行为可能会给我们带来伤害。在事情走到那一步之前我们能做些什么来缓解它呢？Goetz 的团队给出了一个建议。通过对青少年的观察研究，投身到厌烦情绪中——要比那些试图用零食、电视或社交媒体来转移注意力的人们更不容易感到厌烦。

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F Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder Speculates that our over-connected lifestyles might even be a new source of boredom. 'In modern human society there is a lot of overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,' she says. So instead of seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

F 心理学家Francoise Wemelsfelder 认为，我们当下这种交互过于紧密的生活方式有可能是一种新的厌烦情绪的源头。“在现代人类社会里，存在着大量的过度刺激，但仍有许多因寻找意义感而产生的问题”，她说。因此，与其去寻找更多的精神激励，也许我们更应该放下自己的手机，利用厌烦感来驱动我们去以一种更有意义的方式来参与到这个世界之中。