Part 2: Where does boredom live on the emotional floorplan?
And how does it relate to "seeking"?
Hello again, friends!
(CW brief mention of sexual violence in the second to last paragraph)
I recently wrote about sexual boredom and where it lives on the emotional floorplan. I said I’d put it in the “thinking mind,” which is not part of the primary process emotions, and that I’d address sexual boredom by considering the meaning of the sex available to you and asking what kind of sex is worth your attention.
Boredom, as a reminder, is the uncomfortable experience of your brain trying and failing to find something to pay attention to.
In the previous newsletter, I focused on the role of meaning in boredom—if something doesn’t matter, if it serves no purpose, of course it doesn’t hold our attention.
Here, I want to focus on the role of motivation.
For most people, boredom is unpleasant. For others (hello, ADD/ADHDers/PDAers/and other neurodivergent folks!) boredom can be an actual, literal form of torture. For these folks, your brain may be “boredom-prone,” wired in a way that makes boredom happen in situations where other people would never feel bored. You may also identify with phrases like “sensation-seeking” or “novelty-seeking” or “risk-taking.” For you, boredom is so uncomfortable that you might rather self-administer a painful electric shock than simply sit doing nothing, letting your mind wander.
If that’s you, if you’re like “Boredom is not just cognition, it’s so unpleasant it can be agony,” it might help you more to think about it as part of the SEEKING primary process emotion. SEEKING, after all, is curiosity, exploration, adventure, novelty. It’s the “Oooh, what’s that?” space.
A hyper-simple way to think about motivation is that we can be motivated either to move toward something that feels good or away from something that feels bad. Most of the time, SEEKING is not merely pleasure-favorable but actually pleasurable; it’s a positive state that we are motivated to experience (move toward) because it’s a context in which our brains are able to experience pleasure. Curiosity is really pleasurable!
Far from being the absence of curiosity, boredom is curiosity with nowhere to go, and it suuuuuuuuuuucks.
Why is it so painful?
Well, attention is a valuable and limited resource, so allocating it is an important task. If your brain decides it is wasting attention on something, it will punish you first with straying attention and then with a spike of boredom.
And some brains are wired to allocate their attention not in large chunks but in small bits that it strings together to create new ideas. Boredom is a cue to move away from a situation where your attention doesn’t belong, for whatever reason, and move toward something better. Some brain reasons to stop paying attention to something:
Your brain has already experienced similar-enough stimulation and strongly prefers more novel experiences. It wants something new to learn!
Your brain has experienced what it considers “enough” pleasure or reward from whatever you’re paying attention to, so it’s time to seek more and different pleasure elsewhere.
What you’re attending to isn’t pleasurable or rewarding enough, so you should cut your losses and look for something more rewarding or pleasurable.
Your brain feels like something is trying to force it to hold attention in one place, tune out distractions, and/or inhibit impulses, and it responds by feeling trapped, which triggers, among other potential responses, boredom, to motivate you to shift attention.
There are more, but the overall pattern is that boredom is a motivational state that urges you to put your attention somewhere else, somewhere better, presumably. Somewhere you can learn more (hence novelty). Somewhere more pleasurable. Somewhere your brain feels it can choose freely, rather than staying somewhere it feels trapped.
Look, my brain is a “big chunks of attention” brain. I think in chapters, not paragraphs. Some people think in sentences, not paragraphs. Neither pattern is better or worse, though both come with benefits and costs. I’m married to a sentence-thinker. I’m pretty sure this newsletter would be too long to hold his attention all the way to the end, except that he feels that it’s meaningful to read the stuff I write. [editor’s note: he does feel that it is meaningful.]
If you have a small-bits-strung-together brain and it’s affecting your sex life, allow me to point you to ADHD After Dark, by Ari Tuckman. Even if that neurotype isn’t part of your relationship, it’ll have tips for dealing with sexual boredom that arises from a craving for novelty and an aversion to forcing your attention onto anything for too long.
Let me also note that there’s an important, complicated, ill-understood link between sexual boredom and sexual risk-taking, which is a whole other thing, and the ideas in ADHD after Dark and the previous newsletter can all help, as can therapy.
There’s so much more to this – brains are so complex and there’s a really important relationship between attention and memory, between memory and motivation, and therefore between memory and boredom. There’s also an important and underexplored link between boredom and sexual violence. But I hope this newsletter-length explanation of boredom’s place on the emotional floorplan is useful for those who struggle with boredom in the bedroom.
PS: As part of my research for this post, I read Out of My Skull by James Danckert and John D. Eastwood, which I found both entertaining and an accessible gateway to the research. If you’re interested in knowing more, it’s a fun place to start.
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Stay safe and see you next time.
