Strategies for Boredom as an ADHD Individual

Are you feeling under stimulated? Do you feel as if you aren’t able to get a task done no matter how hard you try?

The amount of sensory input you are receiving may not be meeting your unique sensory needs.

As a result, you may feel unmotivated, bored, anxious, or irritable.

These experiences of boredom are common. But they are more likely to occur in neurodivergent people. For instance, the ADHD brain consistently seeks stimulation and looks for tasks that hold your interest.

If you are a neurodivergent individual experiencing boredom, a neurodiversity-affirming therapist or coach may be of support.

Let’s delve further into boredom: what it is, how your brain looks when bored, its connection to neurodivergence, and the various strategies that you can use to manage the feeling of boredom.

What Is Boredom?

Boredom is something that we all have experienced from time to time.

It involves a state of having a lot of energy and having nowhere to channel it. You may fail to find meaning in the tasks that you are participating in or lose focus as a result of the boredom.

Signs of Boredom

Boredom involves the feeling of emptiness or understimulation.

As a result of these feelings of emptiness, you may feel frustrated or angry.

When you feel bored, you may also experience a variety of signs, including:

Apathy
Lack of interest in what’s happening around you
Fatigue
Anxiety
Depression
Lethargy

In some cases, boredom can also make you have a difficult time with focusing or paying attention and may make you feel distracted. You may zone out, fidget, or seek interests elsewhere.

Why Am I So Bored?

Different people will experience boredom for different reasons. However, here are some common reasons as to why you may feel bored:

Inadequate Rest: If you feel fatigued, your attention span and threshold for boredom may be reduced.
Lack of Engagement or Stimulation: If the material is not stimulating, you may disconnect.
Lack of autonomy: When you have a lack of control or choice over your daily activities, you may start to feel bored.
Perfectionism: If you fear making a mistake or you strive for the unattainable, boredom may be more likely to occur.
Repetitive Tasks or Monotony: Repetitive tasks can lead to diminished interest and zoning out.
External Distractions: Noise can divert attention and contribute to boredom.
Insufficient Challenge: Learning materials that are too easy
Neurodivergent Factors: Neurodivergent traits cause a lack of focus or interest.

In some cases, if you are feeling chronically bored, this may be a sign of neurodivergence, including depression or ADHD.

What Happens in the Brain When I’m Bored?

The brain is a complex organ. When you are bored, there are various ways that your brain is impacted, including:

Dopamine Levels: During boredom, dopamine levels drop, which can lead to feelings of disengagement.
Default Mode: The brain may activate its default mode network, which is linked to daydreaming, which can reduce focus.
Frontal Cortex: Low activity in the prefrontal cortex may result in decreased decision-making, making learning more difficult.

The Link Between ADHD and Boredom

The ADHD brain may require more stimulation and become bored more easily than non-ADHDers.

You may have difficulty maintaining focus on a specific task, especially if the task is mundane or doesn’t challenge them. This boredom may co-occur with feelings of frustration, depression, and anger.

There is no universal cause, but researchers suspect some possible theories for the link between ADHD and boredom. These include:

Lower Dopamine Levels: If you are an ADHDer, your brain may have lower levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is responsible for regulating mood, reward, and focus. In general, tasks may provide less motivation and satisfaction. Due to this, you may need more stimulation to take you out of a bored state.
Lower Levels of Arousal: A non-ADHDer may be motivated by future rewards, and this may be enough to motivate them to get the task done. However, ADHDers have less activity in the brain areas responsible for focus and attention. You may find it harder to focus on future rewards, and you may instead want boredom relief immediately.
Executive Functioning Challenges: Challenges with planning can make wanting to initiate tasks difficult. You may also face challenges with attention span that can make you become disinterested quicker than non-ADHDers.

Consequences of Boredom

Experiencing boredom from time to time is normal. But chronic boredom may result in various challenges in the classroom, at work, or in relationships, including:

Poor academic performance
Frequent absence from work
Missing deadlines
Engaging in problematic behaviours, such as impulse buying

You may also become frustrated with your behaviours and start to isolate yourself from your loved ones.

Strategies for Boredom

Get Moving: Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that tends to be lower in ADHD individuals. This tends to make boredom more prevalent for ADHDers. Movement has been shown to help with boredom by increasing the amount of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine in the brain. Through the increase of these neurotransmitters, short movement breaks can increase your focus, motivation, and energy.
Find What Interests You: One of the first steps to solving boredom is to find out what actually causes you to feel alive. What activities that you engage in do you almost never feel bored doing? Write this list down and engage in these activities when your brain gets bored.
Play Music: Music has been shown to stimulate areas of the brain associated with motivation and reward. This can help to improve engagement with study materials. Select upbeat or instrumental music to improve the learning process. Using music as background noise while studying also drowns out distractions and reduces your risk of boredom.
Find Your Purpose: When you have clear objectives that align with your personal values, you’re more likely to engage with the material. Take some time to reflect on what truly matters to you. Connect your learning activities to personal interests to spark intrinsic motivation. Connect what you’re learning to your life's purpose to make the process fulfilling and less boring.
Practice Being Bored: Boredom is a part of life. Allow yourself to experience moments of boredom. Instead of reaching for a distraction, take a few moments to sit with your thoughts and observe them. This practice of mindful boredom can build mental endurance and offer new perspectives that can enrich your learning experience.
Shift Your Perspective on Boredom: Boredom is not all negative. When you’re bored, it can be an opportunity to reassess your priorities, explore new interests, or develop new skills. Use boredom as a time for reflection. You could think deeply about what inspires and motivates you. This change in perspective can help you learn in your idle moments.
Find Humor: Humor encourages relaxation, which can create a more open mindset—ideal for learning. Engage with funny educational videos, humorous books, or entertaining podcasts related to your subject matter to turn dull material into engaging challenges. Embracing playfulness can reduce boredom and foster a positive association with learning.

Strategies for ADHD Understimulation

Allow for Wandering Brain Time: ADHDers often struggle with focus and maintaining attention on a task. For this reason, finding time to allow your brain to wander, worry, and daydream allows your brain the break it needs from the constant focus and attention. This reduces the chance of you getting bored. It also adds novelty to your tasks, which supports ADHD thinking. You can use the Pomodoro technique to schedule in these breaks.
Body Doubling or an Accountability Buddy: Body doubling is a technique that is used to maintain productivity and focus on a task. It involves doing your work while someone else watches you do the work and holds you accountable for staying on task. It could also involve someone doing the same task as you at the same time. This can be helpful for those who get easily bored and find it difficult to maintain focus on the task at hand.
Make Things Fun: ADHDers often need more stimulation than others in order to maintain focus or attention on a task. Any mundane or boring task is more likely to generate ADHD boredom. To counteract these feelings of boredom, you can make the tasks fun in some way by adding in something new. This could involve playing music as you study, turning on white noise, playing with a fidget spinner, adding colour to your notes with visual diagrams, and more.
Novelty & Exploration: Introduce novel experiences to boost your dopamine levels by stimulating curiosity and interest. Seek out new activities, explore different environments, or engage in unfamiliar tasks to trigger a dopamine release. This approach helps to recharge the brain by providing rewarding experiences. It also contributes to improved focus and emotional regulation.
Do the Task in Nature and Add Movement: Nature can help with ADHD boredom in several ways. If you can take nature breaks during the task, this would be the most beneficial. But if you can’t, even facing your desk to the outside can have its benefits. Nature helps to provide a calming effect and a break from the task at hand, which can increase motivation and focus. Nature also causes an increase in serotonin levels, which can improve your mood and motivation.
Explore Creative Activities: Engaging in creative activities stimulates dopamine release. Activities like painting, writing, or playing music allow for self-expression and can create a sense of accomplishment. By channeling emotions into art, you can experience a sense of fulfillment. This form of engagement helps regulate dopamine and foster a more positive mood. It also contributes to better emotional and cognitive balance.

Stimulating Activities for ADHD

ADHD has been linked to an imbalance in the dopamine systems within the brain.

Research suggests that individuals with ADHD often have reduced dopamine receptor availability or lower baseline levels of dopamine. This is particularly true in the areas of the brain responsible for attention, impulse control, and executive function. This deficiency contributes to inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity traits.

Your brain needs stimulation as an ADHDer. There are a variety of activities that you could engage in to stimulate the ADHD mind, including: