Feeling bored? Your brain may actually be pushing you toward a mental challenge.
Researchers in Austria and Germany have found that boredom can trigger an intrinsic drive to seek more demanding tasks, offering a functional explanation for what is often considered an unpleasant emotion.
The 2025 study, published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, suggests that boredom may serve an important evolutionary function.
Rather than simply causing disengagement, boredom acts as an internal signal that prompts individuals to shift activities—particularly toward more mentally challenging tasks.
The study examined the motivational effects of boredom, specifically whether feeling under-stimulated leads people to deliberately choose difficult tasks even without financial or external rewards.
Led by psychologist Christopher Mlynski of the University of Vienna, together with researchers from TU Dresden, the study explores how cognitive effort itself can serve as a natural way to “cure” boredom.
To measure how boredom affects motivation, the researchers conducted an experiment involving nearly 300 participants, who were placed into different emotional states through a video-watching task.
Participants were divided into three groups and exposed to different stimuli designed to induce varying emotional states.
One group watched a dull, unengaging video intended to induce state boredom.
Afterward, participants were asked to solve 50 mental arithmetic problems and were allowed to freely choose the difficulty level of each task—from very easy to highly challenging—with no external rewards or performance incentives.
SEEKING CHALLENGE OVER MEANING
To analyze how boredom influenced decision-making, the researchers used structural equation modeling to distinguish between two psychological drives: the search for challenge and the search for meaning.
The “search for challenge” refers to how boredom increases participants’ self-reported desire to engage in demanding tasks.
On the other hand, boredom did not appear to significantly trigger a parallel desire to seek meaning in the immediate task.
After the experiment, participants who chose and solved more complex problems reported reduced boredom levels, while also showing lower boredom in the control group over time.
The findings suggest that humans do not always avoid cognitive effort. Under conditions of low stimulation or boredom, engaging in demanding mental work can become intrinsically rewarding.
By framing boredom as a functional signal that promotes cognitive engagement, the study offers insights into workplace productivity, learning environments, and self-regulation strategies. — Photo from Josh Hagan/LinkedIn
