Slashdot Mirror
Turns Out You Actually Can Be Bored To Death
A study conducted by researchers at University College London shows that boredom can kill you. The researchers found that people who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study. Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report said, "The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom."
maybe because by doing nothing and being bored, you are likely to not be as healthy...
The participants were 35-55 years old in 1985-88 when surveyed about their boredom. 25 years later, maybe they just died because they were almost 80 when the surveyors checked up on them last April...
In other news, despite headlines claiming otherwise, correlation is found to not be causation.
//phil dokas
A) If boredom leads to a less health lifestyle, and that lifestyle leads to decreased longevity, isn't that just an indirect way to say that boredom decreased longevity? Wouldn't treating boredom still increase longevity?
B) Even if boredom is just a symptom and not cause, isn't this still useful information? Can't we use boredom as a symptom of poor health to diagnose and help people improve their lifestyles and thus their longevity?
C) Have you considered that boredom is perhaps a symptom of a non-lifestyle-related cause of poor health? Maybe people who are more susceptible to disease X are also more susceptible to boredom, or to the perception of boredom?
I know it's cool to say correlation is not causation and pretend that you're smarter than the folks who did the study, but it's really quite petty to dismiss the study offhand simply because it does not conclusively establish causation, particularly in the medical field. How exactly do you propose that we impose boredom on a group of people, because unless you can control the treatment there's really no way to establish causation. But don't let ethics, a lack of practical tools for manipulating mood, or the enormous cost a of a 30-year clinical study take away from your slashdot oneupmanship.
I rarely post here, but this is so stupid I can't help myself.
I would love to see what percentage of participants were over the age of 50 twenty-five years ago. Not only that, but maybe those 37 percent were not only over 50 yrs old, but also reported boredom since having been a civil servant for many years.
And I could be way off, but my guess is you could survey 7524 people in that age group about ANYTHING and find that about that same percentage of them had died over that kind of time span.
How many died in accidents or by unrelated disease? What percentage reported boredom in the first place? And finally, how many died in murder-suicide pacts? After all, we are talking about civil servants here, they are ALL bored.
And you still watch tv.
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