How You Respond To Boredom, Largely Determines Your Success

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substitute the campfire for darkroom colors\/puffs

I'm bored - let's take some drugs to make it less boring!

I'm depressed 😞 - I need more creature comforts to luxuriate in, to pamper myself!

Gazing into the darkroom - this is sooo boooring. I could be playing video games, watching streaming media, or scrolling/swiping feeds (and getting into online arguments) on my phone!

In the recap closet/crate - yawn! all this old rehashing...I should read a book or thumb through a graphic novel. At least something new and interesting!

etc. etc...for there is seemingly no end to the excuses and arguments coming from the foreign installation (internal monologue). the real opponent.

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Mastering Boredom (abridged):

Sometimes difficult, challenging work is easily dismissed as boring. We should be careful not to allow our students to confuse the two. In a culture of instant gratification, such heralding of gritty, boring work is unlikely to be an easy sell! (especially in the era of 21st century anti-boredom computer technologies).

Why, you may ask, should we subject our students to spells of disinterest and impulse quashing boredom? Well, there are some well-founded scientific reasons to focus on a determined mastery over boring work? Now for some neuroscience… The crucial aspect that links mastery of boredom for our students to their learning behaviour is what scientists call ‘executive function‘. Put simply, it is a term used to describe the self-regulatory behaviours needed to guide our actions with success. When we plan or organise, shift and sustain our attention, or, crucially, inhibit our desire to stray from the task at hand, we are exercising our executive function (EF).

[It is the] Orchestration of basic cognitive processes during goal-oriented problem-solving.

Planning and sequencing of complex behaviours:

– Resistance to distraction and interference– Inhibition of inappropriate response tendencies– Ability to sustain behavioral output for relatively prolonged periods

... In an excellent book about the effects of scarcity, entitled ‘Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much‘, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, they also show that children from poor backgrounds can be distracted more easily than their peers. Effectively they have had their EF impaired by their childhood experience (need recap!). Social class can be crucial. Younger children from more privileged backgrounds are more likely to have better access to environments which better foster the development of their EF from birth, such as responsive caregivers, scaffolding, predictable order and an avoidance of threats and disruptive influences.

Strengthening Executive Function(will) to Master Boredom and More:

1. Planning (intending) to succeed:

2. Difficulty getting started and struggling with complex tasks:

- Create routines (rituals) and ‘cues’ for where and when (you) will begin a task.

- Modelling is the real master skill....strategies should be repeated to reduce the mental workload that, when strained, leaves (you) prone to distraction. (ie. do recap!)

– Review success criteria before a task to ensure you understand the goal.

– Ensure explanations aren’t overloaded with too many steps. Keep to a core message. With lengthy tasks, remind yourself of crucial information for that particular phase of the task, rather than repetition of the original instruction. Ensure you haven't forgotten crucial information by repeat (verbally or in writing).

– Encourage a ‘growth mindset‘ attitude in your (sorcery training).

3. Easily prone to procrastination and distraction:

– Create support scaffolds. For example, create ‘if then…’ options. A list of potential solutions if you are stuck or struggling. A quick discussion of **‘**if then…’ options before a significant task could eliminate a myriad of time-consuming obstacles to learning.

– Create an orderly atmosphere where distraction is obvious. If silence is golden then distraction is typically audible. Create the conditions for real focus. Rather than allowing for immediate, knee-jerk excuses, write out the excuses you can think of beforehand. This usually dissuades people from asking ‘learned helplessness‘ questions that they know the answer to already!

– Remind yourself of the ‘why‘ of the learning. What long-term goal are you working towards that will ramp up your motivation to stay on task and avoid procrastination?

(*see below,*^(*) for more)

4. Difficulty in self-monitoring:

– Allocate time to reflect on a given task. Talk about what didn’t work and how you would alter the plan next time. DIRT time is crucial here.

– Use ‘gallery critique‘ (posting on this subreddit) to create a dialogue about improving your work and reaching the highest of standards.

– Make good progress visible. With open eyes! And not merely mental imagination, or purely a product of cognitive interpretation.

Will these measures ‘fix‘ students? Of course not. Are many of the strategies simply part of good teaching and learning and nothing new – well, yes! Still, we should bear in mind the importance of boredom – and the capacity to master boredom. As Walter Mischel states – the human brain has tremendous ‘plasticity‘ – our brain and our behaviours can change. We can strengthen our will and learn to conquer the slings and arrows of distraction and boredom.

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^(*) Mind Wandering is Inevitable Over Time (abridged):

A new study reveals that regardless of task difficulty, people’s minds increasingly wander with time, reaching a 50% distraction rate towards the end of activities. Analyzing over 10,000 participants in 68 studies, the research found no significant difference in distraction levels across various tasks. This phenomenon persists even without external distractions like phones or social media, emphasizing an inherent vulnerability in human attention...

...The longer a person spends on a task, the more their mind starts to wander regardless of whether the activity is difficult or easy. In fact, toward the end of the task, individuals are typically thinking about something else at least 50 percent of the time, according to a new University of Miami study.

[it's important to understand that all of the individuals in this study were stuck at the Blue Line on the J-Curve. Things get easier, and not harder, as we continue with the intent to silence the inner monologue...and thus move along the J-Curve ]

The findings, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, represent the most comprehensive research to date on typical rates of mind-wandering while completing tasks. While some people are better at staying focused than others, everyone’s mind tends to wander more frequently over time, the researchers found.

[also, we are all born with differing reserves of dreaming attention]

“You might expect that it’s harder for people to pay attention during more difficult tasks or that maybe during easy tasks, people feel bored, and their mind wanders more. However, we didn’t find any systematic differences between those types of tasks. Our (Blue Line) minds wander more and more regardless of what we are doing...”

...Participants in these studies completed tasks of varying types and difficulty while researchers periodically interrupted them to check on their level of focus. These tasks mostly took place in quiet environments with no outside distractions.

“We often blame our phones or social media for why we are distracted. But our minds will drag us off-task even without these external distractions,” Zanesco said.

The findings have wide-ranging implications outside the lab. Previous research has indicated that performance tends to worsen over time in tasks that require us to stay focused. But the reasons for this decline are still unknown (🤣). Researchers have proposed several possibilities for our short attention spans, including that our minds tend to wander to our thoughts more frequently over time.

Zanesco and his colleagues investigated this question directly. Their research suggests that our tendency to get stuck thinking about something other than what we are currently doing may be one reason why we struggle to pay attention. Finding effective strategies for curtailing mind-wandering is an important next step (like darkroom games)

“This kind of research can make us aware that our attention is vulnerable,” Zanesco said. “It’s important that we recognize that our attention can be vulnerable and that we have a strong tendency toward mind-wandering so we can work to guard against it.”

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Additional Journal Article - "On The Function of Boredom"

Popular Press - "Boredom: How it Affects Someone With ADHD"

YouTube: "🎞️

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