By Renwar Have you ever felt that what you are doing right now is not interesting, watching the clock on the wall minute by minute, wondering when it is going to be over? Or have you recently been losing interest in what you used to love to do? Why? Is there a reason for being bored with something? Looking at it scientifically, human emotions are just a complex and strategic way for the brain to show us what our status in life is, whether we are happy or whether we lack something. Humans have many emotions, each one of them expressing the situation that we are in. As we can see from The Plutchik wheel pictured here, we can classify different emotions depending on their intensity into different levels. Basic emotions like happiness, which most of the time occurs when you get something that you wanted, regardless of what it is, is a way of your brain rewarding itself and encouraging you to be more successful. But why do we reward ourselves? We humans have learned to survive through the ages by learning new strategies and adapting ourselves to new challenges. Our brains have developed in order for us to survive. We need to do or experience new ways of living, so that we can manage in more difficult situations. Also, when we experience new difficulties our brain cells are making new connections and making old connections stronger; in other words, when connections get stronger it means that we gain experience and our brain can meet the challenge much faster than before. For example, when a person is trying to play the guitar for the first time, he or she will struggle until some time has passed. But maybe after 6 months he or she can do it with their eyes closed! Emotions like boredom are a way that our brains tell us that what we are doing right now is not important anymore. This may be because we already learned how to deal with it and doing it over and over again is not essential for survival. The brain will not reward itself anymore, which leads to a feeling of boredom, and this will push us to do or to experience something new. Going back to the guitar playing example, why don’t guitar players feel bored after 6 months of playing? Probably because guitar playing can also be challenging as there are many kinds of music to learn. In other words, the guitar player didn’t finish learning everything about music, and there is always the possibility to discover more notes and to be more successful in it. To take another example, students learning calculus may seem to be bored after 12 years or more of studying it, because they have probably being doing the same steps over and over again and there is nothing to challenge them anymore.
One way of pushing ourselves out of the feeling of boredom is to look for something interesting in the subject that we are studying or something interesting in a project that we need to accomplish. That can be done by looking at it from a different angle. Things are not always black and white. Sometimes what you think you know is not exactly correct. Or maybe ask somebody else who looks excited about what you are doing why they think the subject is interesting! Try doing something that interests you but still pay attention to where the original topic is going. That way, your brain will have more than one challenge to deal with, which is both doing something new and keeping track of what you already know. a
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May 2024
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