The Boredom Solution

Educational title for gifted and advanced learners.

The specific guidelines to the clinical management of the bored or boring patient--offered in this provocative book--will be valuable to all psychotherapists. Contributors discuss the fascinating theories and therapies of boredom--why it is both a necessity and an obstacle to a person’s development. Fresh insights into the meaning of boredom for the patient or the therapist (or both) are presented through the discussion of such topics as the type of person most prone to boredom, boredom as a launching point into other experiences, boredom as a defense against strong affects and drive derivatives, the manifestations of boredom in marital therapy clients, and much more.

Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life culls together the scattered fragments of Henri Lefebvre’s (1901–1991) unrealized sociology of boredom. In assembling these fragments, sprinkled through Lefebvre’s vast oeuvre, Patrick Gamsby constructs the core elements of Lefebvre’s latent theory of boredom. Themes of time (modernity, everyday), space (urban, suburban), and mass culture (culture industry, industry culture) are explored throughout the book, unveiling a concealed dialectical movement at work with the experience of boredom. In analyzing the dialectic of boredom, Gamsby argues that Lefebvre’s project of a critique of everyday life is key for making sense of the linkages between boredom and everyday life in the modern world.

Whether we like it or not, boredom is a major part of human life. It permeates our personal, social, practical, and moral existence. It shapes our world by demarcating what is engaging, interesting, or meaningful from what is not. It also sets us in motion insofar as its presence can motivate us to act in a plethora of ways. Indeed, in our search for engagement, interest, or meaning, our responses to boredom straddle the line between the good and the bad, the beneficial and the harmful, the creative and the mundane. In this volume, world-renowned researchers come together to explore a neglected but crucially important aspect of boredom: its relationship to morality. Does boredom cause individuals to commit immoral acts? Does it affect our moral judgment? Does the frequent or chronic experience boredom make us worse people? Is the experience of boredom something that needs to be avoided at all costs? Or can boredom be, at least sometimes, a solution and a positive moral force? The Moral Psychology of Boredom sets out to answer these and other timely questions.

Maximizing student outcomes in education presents a significant challenge, as traditional assessment methods often fall short in providing actionable insights for improvement. Perspectives on Learning Analytics for Maximizing Student Outcomes addresses this challenge by offering a comprehensive solution. Edited by esteemed scholars Gürhan Durak and Serkan Çankaya, this book provides innovative knowledge and practical experiences on emerging technologies and processes in learning analytics. It covers topics such as data collection, visualization, predictive analytics, and ethical considerations, serving as a guide for academic scholars, technology enthusiasts, and educational institutions. This book empowers professionals and researchers to leverage learning analytics effectively, enabling data-informed decision-making, improved teaching practices, and tailored educational programs. By presenting best practices and future directions, it equips readers with the necessary tools to optimize learning environments and drive student success. With a focus on the transformative potential of learning analytics, this book propels education toward a more efficient and effective system that prioritizes student outcomes.

This comprehensive text is a unique handbook dedicated to research on boredom. The book brings together leading contributors from across three continents and numerous fields to provide an interdisciplinary exploration of boredom, its theoretical underpinnings, its experiential properties, and the applied contexts in which it occurs. Boredom is often viewed as a mental state with little utility, though recent research suggests that it can be a powerful motivator of human behavior that shapes our actions in many ways. The book examines boredom from a range of perspectives and is comprised of three parts. Part I delves into the theoretical approaches to boredom, presenting methods for its measurement, explaining when and why boredom occurs, and scrutinizing the impact it has on our behavior. Part II focuses on the psychological and neural properties of boredom and its associations with a multitude of mental and interpersonal processes, such as self-control, mind-wandering, flow, and aggression. Part III presents boredom in practical contexts like school and work, and sheds light on its role for health-related behaviors, psychosocial well-being, and aesthetic experiences. The book concludes by summarizing the state of boredom research, identifying promising areas for future research, and providing directions for how research on boredom can be advanced. As the authoritative book on boredom, this handbook is an essential resource for students and researchers of psychology, sociology, education, sport science, and computer science.

Boredom is an enduring and troublesome problem. This book explores the ways that teachers can support students in their struggle with boredom.

No one likes to be bored. Two leading psychologists explain what causes boredom and how to listen to what it is telling you, so you can live a more engaged life. We avoid boredom at all costs. It makes us feel restless and agitated. Desperate for something to do, we play games on our phones, retie our shoes, or even count ceiling tiles. And if we escape it this time, eventually it will strike again. But what if we listened to boredom instead of banishing it? Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood contend that boredom isn’t bad for us. It’s just that we do a bad job of heeding its guidance. When we’re bored, our minds are telling us that whatever we are doing isn’t working—we’re failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Too many of us respond poorly. We become prone to accidents, risky activities, loneliness, and ennui, and we waste ever more time on technological distractions. But, Danckert and Eastwood argue, we can let boredom have the opposite effect, motivating the change we need. The latest research suggests that an adaptive approach to boredom will help us avoid its troubling effects and, through its reminder to become aware and involved, might lead us to live fuller lives. Out of My Skull combines scientific findings with everyday observations to explain an experience we’d like to ignore, but from which we have a lot to learn. Boredom evolved to help us. It’s time we gave it a chance.