Stimulation for Brain Health: Finding Your Optimal Balance to Encourage Neurogenesis and Extend Cell Life

Boredom is an uncomfortable feeling that everyone experiences. Despite being trivial, boredom is still important as it is an indication of being disinterested in the outside world and the inner world of one's thoughts. But why do we get bored, and why does it matter? In this article, we will delve into the science of boredom, including its impact on the brain and the body.

The process of enlarging a hole, such as the barrel of a gun, is called boring. It is a slow process requiring repetitive movements from a tool that goes in circles. Perhaps this is why things that are slow and repetitive and don't appear to be going anywhere came to be described with the same word.

According to evidence, boredom has been found as far back as ancient Pompeii. While boredom is a feeling we don't like, it is uncomfortable, but it's trivial. Today, we have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, texting, and Candy Crush to keep ourselves occupied. However, boredom is different from physical pain, heartbreak, and nausea, which are caused by dangerous and serious toxic things. Boredom occurs when one is merely disinterested in the outside world and the inner world of one's thoughts, when one is alone with oneself.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher, said that "if life possessed in itself a positive value in real content, there would be no such thing as boredom. Mere existence would fulfill and satisfy us." However, boredom exists, and Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet, wrote in a letter to his father that "boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of profound despair and not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs."

When bored, brain activity only drops about 5%. Magnetic resonance images of people's brains while they were bored actually showed greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, conceiving the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events - imagining. Boredom historically has been "an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self." It's an imposed state that leaves us to think about ourselves, notice things we may have overlooked, and get "ancy" enough to take productive actions we might have otherwise put off, like cleaning, writing, or challenging the mind with puzzles and games.

The boredom proneness scale, BPS, assesses an individual's propensity for getting bored, in a sense their ease of being attentive. Average scores range between 81 and 117. People who know themselves well can easily label their feelings, have high levels of self-awareness, and tend to have a lower propensity score feeling bored. However, when it comes to feeling boredom frequently, the culprit may be one's physiology. Individuals with fewer dopamine receptors in the brain tend to need more excitement to stay stimulated, meaning chronic boredom may be a symptom of the way one's body is. A symptom that if left unchecked can become something worse, such as depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, hostility, poor social skills, bad grades, and low work performance.

Our brains need stimulation to be healthy, not so much that they're overwhelmed but a perfect balance unique to each individual, under which they can perform optimally, with energized focus, what psychologists call flow. Too little stimulation, and our brains will act out, hoping to find some somewhere to prevent something worse from happening. Our brains have thaasophobia, the fear of boredom. The monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial for maintaining brain plasticity. Variety and stimulation encourage neurogenesis, new brain cells, and can extend the lives of cells that already exist in the brain. However, too much stimulation, such as excessive stress or multitasking, can cause chronic activation of the body's stress response system, leading to increased levels of cortisol, which can have negative effects on brain function over time. Therefore, it is important to find the right balance of stimulation to keep our brains healthy and functioning optimally. Engaging in activities that challenge us, learning new things, and maintaining social connections can all help to stimulate the brain in a healthy way and promote overall well-being.