Q. When you get up in the morning, you never want to go to work. Your job is repetitive, uninteresting and offers no challenges. When you are there, the clock barely moves, and you can’t wait to leave. In short, you are bored. What is to be done?
A. People who are bored need to create more challenges and find more meaning in their work lives. They need to find a way out of the feeling that “there’s nothing to do, they’re forced to do things they don’t want to do, or they don’t know what they want to do,” said John D. Eastwood, an associate psychology professor at York University in Toronto who has studied boredom.
Over all, boredom is a state of “being disengaged from one’s environment,” he said, and it reflects a passive relationship to one’s work.
Q. What are common symptoms of boredom?
A. A telltale sign is that time seems to pass very slowly, Professor Eastwood said. This can be accompanied by difficulty concentrating and feelings of depletion and lethargy. Low-energy states may alternate with feelings of agitation and irritability as the sufferer struggles to find some kind of engagement, he said.
Q. Are some people more prone to boredom than others?
A. Boredom tends to afflict people who have a high need for stimulation, Professor Eastwood said. People who have a hard time understanding or labeling their emotions are also vulnerable, because emotions give us the “compass points” that can lead us toward meaningful activities, he said.
Q. Is your job making you bored, or are you at the root of the problem?
A. It could be either or a combination of both, and determining the answer is crucial. Nina Ham, a psychotherapist and a career coach in Berkeley, Calif., says it is important to see boredom as a “call to action.”
If you are reacting to the rest of your life the way you react to your job, it might be time to see a therapist and treat an underlying problem like depression, she said.
But if the rest of your life is going well, you may be a poor match for your job or your industry. Or you may have outgrown your job, which is why boredom often hits people in mid-career, Ms. Ham said.
“If you’re changing,” she said, “why not expect that what you want from a job is going to change?”
Q. What can you do to cure boredom at work?
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That Boring Job Should Sound An Alarm
March 20, 2008 by Rich | 0 Comments
In Employees, Productivity, Stress
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