The Uncomfortable Truth About Workplace Boredom

And Why 67% of Men Would Rather Electrocute Themselves

Here's a statistic that will make you question everything about human nature. When researchers put people in a room with nothing to do except sit with their thoughts, 67% of men chose to give themselves painful electric shocks rather than endure the boredom. Twenty per cent of women did the same.

Really.

This isn't some quirky psychological experiment, but empirical research that reveals something profound about our relationship with boredom and how we think about work.

I recently sat down with Professor Cynthia Fisher, one of the world's leading experts on workplace boredom, for The Floor Plan podcast. What started as academic curiosity has become urgent workplace reality. Cindy pioneered this research over 30 years ago when she stumbled across Marines living in identical conditions, some bored to tears, others thriving.

That discovery led to a career studying something most of us experience but rarely examine: the complex emotion of boredom at work.

While we live in an age of infinite distraction, workplace boredom persists. We can scroll through our phones the moment we feel unstimulated, yet between 25-87% of people report being bored at work at least occasionally. The range is wide because, as Cindy explains, boredom isn't just one thing.

Three Types of Boredom

In case you are already anxious or curious about your own boredom at work, workplace boredom falls into three distinct levels:

Trait-level boredom which describes people who are chronically bored across situations. These are the colleagues who seem perpetually understimulated, often seeking external stimulation through risky behavior, rule-breaking, or workplace mischief.

Attitude-level boredom is when someone consistently finds their job boring. It's stable over time. Ask them next month, and they'll give you the same answer. They are also the colleagues you might go out of your way to avoid at the coffee machine so you don’t have to hear the latest rendition of how boring their job is.

Emotional boredom is the most interesting and actionable form. It's situational: "Right now, I'm bored." This fluctuates throughout the day, even the hour. It's also the type organisations can actually do something about.

The Unique Nature of Boredom

What makes boredom different from other emotions is its relationship with arousal. Most emotions have fixed arousal levels. Anger always comes with high energy, sadness with low energy. Boredom is unique because it can manifest as either high or low arousal.

You know the difference. Low-arousal boredom is the "bored to sleep" feeling – disconnected, tuned out, passive. High-arousal boredom is that restless, itchy feeling where you'd do anything to escape a tedious meeting, including checking your phone under the table or, apparently, electrocuting yourself.

This dual nature explains why bored employees might either zone out completely or engage in disruptive behaviours. Both responses serve the same evolutionary purpose. Boredom signals that what you're doing isn't advancing your goals, so you should redirect your energy elsewhere. That tiger could be along any minute to steal your lunch.

The Real Causes of Workplace Boredom

Cindy's research identifies two primary drivers of workplace boredom.

Attentional difficulties: When your mind doesn't want to concentrate on the task at hand, you have to work harder to maintain focus. That effortful attention feels uncomfortable and time crawls. Researchers have manipulated this in labs by adjusting clocks, proving that our perception of time directly influences how boring we find tasks.

Participants entered what they thought was a straightforward experiment, complete a task that would take exactly 15 minutes, with a wall clock clearly visible showing it was 9:00 AM when they started. They were told they'd finish at 9:15.

The deception was elegant in its simplicity. In one condition, researchers secretly sped up the clock so that when it reached 9:15, only 10 minutes of actual time had passed. Participants who experienced this reported finding the task reasonably interesting, time had flown by, after all.

In the other condition, the clock ran slow. When it finally showed 9:15, participants had actually been working for 20 minutes. These people consistently rated the identical task as significantly more boring.

This isn't just about time perception but what researchers call metacognitive cues. Our brains don't directly measure boredom. Instead, we look for clues. Is time dragging? Am I checking the clock frequently? Do I feel restless? These signals then get interpreted as "I must be bored."

The implications are striking. Two people doing the exact same work can have completely different experiences of boredom based purely on external cues about time passage. It suggests that our sense of workplace boredom might be more malleable and more influenced by environmental factors than we typically assume.

This research also explains why meetings that run over feel particularly excruciating, or why tasks feel more tedious when you're constantly aware of how much time remains.

Lack of meaning: Even simple tasks can feel engaging if they connect to something personally meaningful. But when a task lacks significance, either personally or in terms of broader impact, attention drifts to more important concerns.

The task itself matters too. Jobs that are too simple, repetitive, or routine create classic boredom. But counterintuitively, tasks that are too complex can also be boring if they're beyond your current capabilities. Imagine sitting through advanced calculus without the prerequisite knowledge.

I can’t imagine sitting through any type of calculus.

Then there's quantitative underload, literally having nothing to do. Cindy recalls her own summer job with the Air Force where she typed pilot reports on Mondays and spent Tuesday through Friday going to the mailroom twice daily. The rest of the time? Reading paperbacks and watching the clock.

The Hidden Costs and Surprising Benefits

Bored employees are more likely to procrastinate, break rules, have accidents, create conflict, and ultimately quit. Organisations lose productivity, engagement, and talent retention.

But boredom isn't entirely negative. Some people respond constructively however. They might seek additional responsibilities, find ways to improve processes, or use quiet periods for reflection and creativity. The Marines in Cindy's original study exemplified this, some used their downtime for bodybuilding, soccer teams, or correspondence courses.

Recent research suggests that brief periods of routine, automatic tasks can actually provide cognitive respite after intense work. Hello email. But Cindy warns against intentionally boring people in hopes of spurring creativity. The people who respond creatively to boredom tend to be those who would be creative anyway.

The AI and Remote Work Questions

As automation handles more routine tasks, will workplace boredom increase or decrease? Cindy sees both possibilities. AI might eliminate boring work, but it could also create more vigilance-based jobs where humans monitor automated systems, think airline pilots spending hours watching autopilot systems.

Remote and hybrid work introduce new variables. Working from home reduces some interruptions but creates others. Your brain might wander to walking the dog or starting laundry. The emotional labour of appearing interested in meetings might decrease when your camera is off, but that doesn't necessarily reduce the underlying boredom.

Designing Work That Doesn't Bore

The solution isn't revolutionary, we've known the key job design principles for decades. Work should offer skill variety, task identity (completing whole pieces of work rather than one repetitive part), autonomy over how and when tasks are done, feedback on progress, and some sense that the work matters.

But Cindy emphasises that meaning is highly individual. What energises one person might bore another senseless. She personally can't stand Excel or academic policy discussions, while others might find these engaging.

The key is matching people to roles that align with their strengths and interests, providing opportunities for growth and challenge, and maintaining that sweet spot between task demands and individual capabilities.

For those choosing careers or employers, Cindy recommends looking for roles that offer variety, autonomy, feedback, and alignment with your natural strengths and interests. But she also acknowledges that not everyone wants their primary meaning from paid work.

Some people prefer predictable, undemanding jobs that leave mental and emotional resources for family, hobbies, or side projects. There's nothing wrong with this approach. Meaning can come from many sources, and turning a passion into a paycheque sometimes diminishes the joy.

That shocking electrocution statistic reveals something important about human nature: we're wired to seek stimulation and meaning. When work fails to provide either, we'll find it elsewhere and sometimes in destructive ways.

Understanding boredom as an emotional signal rather than a character flaw changes how we approach it. Boredom tells us something isn't working, the task doesn't match our capabilities, it lacks personal significance, or our attention is pulled elsewhere by more pressing concerns.

Smart organisations will design work that minimises chronic boredom while accepting that occasional boredom is human and normal. Smart individuals will recognise their own patterns and preferences, seeking roles that provide the right mix of challenge, meaning, and stimulation.

And maybe, just maybe, we'll all resist the urge to reach for that electric shock button when the going gets tedious. Though given the statistics, I'm not holding my breath. I can say from personal experience though, it’s not recommended. I had horses most of my life and have unintentionally zapped myself many times over the years on electric fences. It really hurts.