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...
who never post anymore ...
Does that mean that C-SPAN is guilty of crimes against humanity? I knew it...
No no, you don't get it. This story is actually a part of the follow up study.
He laughed at me when I said my ultimate technique was the Long Winded Anecdote With No Point (Napping Crane Style). But now I'm 37% more likely to have the last laugh!
The enemies of Democracy are
"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."
How long did this study take?!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
This explains the corpse in the back of that lecture hall in the math building.
I've been exclusively reading Slashdot news all day, and not even one is remotely interesting enough to *hurk* *ack* *ug.*
Perhaps he was dictating?
If boredom could kill, the german military in the 80's would have run casualties higher than at Stalingrad. I've never been so bored before or after ever. You were given a task that would you take 5min at a crawling pace, 4 hours of time and the order not to leave the room while being denied anything to read and bereft of all company. If boredom could kill, i would have been a casualty then.....
Exercise does not defeat boredom, at least not in the broad strokes you paint. It might help some people, and it certainly has physiological and mental health benefits for most people, but it's absurd to say that exercise prevents or treats boredom as a general rule.
For one thing, if you make exercise an unvarying part of your daily routine it might actually be a part of your boredom, and stopping the excise might help relieve your boredom by virtue of changing your routine.
I also think you'd find a more than a few people who would find exercise itself boring, whether it's part of a routine or not. Riding an elliptical for 2 hours a day can be mind-numbingly dull; not that there aren't more interesting methods for exercise, but use of an elliptical is definitely a form of exercise, and not a terribly exciting activity for most people.
You're also missing the possibility the boredom is a symptom of already poor health -- it's possible that self-reported boredom is the result of some other factor (lifestyle or otherwise) that results in lower longevity, rather than being the cause of lower longevity. Or that boredom, as a self-reported mental state, might reflect knowledge of a lower-than-average lifespan based on genetic, economic, social, or other factors. Or that the link found in this one study is ephemeral and does not reflect a general link between boredom and longevity at all.
I don't know about you. But I am board listening to the same old Rant. STOP SHORTENING MY LIFE SPAN!!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
As study is underway to see if you really can "Freeze your ass off".
correlation is found to not be causation.
I see that comment so often it bores me.
Ow...ow, chest pain...numb left arm...aaaaghgghgh!!!!
Yes! Exactly! Correlation != causation!
If only researchers would read slashdot. Then they could benefit from our superior knowledge, and we would never have to say "correlation != causation" again.
*sigh*
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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.
The participants who reported high levels of boredom were significantly more likely to have died than the participants, in the same age group, who didn't.
[sigh] TentireFA is about ten lines long; it doesn't give much information, but it's enough to get that much. Actually, even an intelligent reading of the summary would have given you that little bit of information. Probably too much to ask here, I know.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
No, no, no.
In Soviet Russia, dead horse beats you.
The Long Winded Anecdote With No Point (Napping Crane Style) is no match for the Everending Rehashment Of Stale Joke (Slashdottian Ape Style):
Now, I'm not sure that the ISR joke above is actually funny -- not sure that people will understand that the reason to stop beating a dead horse is because it's boring. I think it is funny, slightly -- but the great thing is, I'm not concerned. Because anyone who finds it not funny will be bored by it, and therefore will be nudged slightly closer to a premature death. And anyone who has read this far into my post is surely even more bored by now. Mwuah-ha-ha-ha.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
God, why do you synaesthesiacs always have sound so fucking indigo?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
And you still watch tv.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It has already been established that stress can kill. The most stressful periods of my life have been when I have been bored. If you are bored it generally means you are under utilized. Knowing this you will be quite stressed. Besides, having nothing to do is like sensory deprivation, a psychological form of torture. This it is not terribly surprising that people who are "bored" also tend to end up stressed, and ultimately dead.
Next time my inlaws try to make me watch one of their vacation slide shows, I can have them charged with attempted murder!