Blogging and Boredom

 When writing my weekly blog post earlier today, I thought it was ironic that the focus of my writing was my current struggle in regulating my focus on important things. This week, we have our anatomy midterm, and this weekend, my brain was much more interested in making a Halloween costume for my cat than studying for said midterm. This motivated me to spend this week's blog post talking about the topics of special interests and hyperfocus within the autistic community, and how these topics applied to me. This is a topic that I find pretty interesting, especially given the fact that I created my blog because of a special interest in autism itself. 

I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to finish this week's post, given the business before a midterm, but I was thankfully able to complete it with some time to spare. For future weeks, I have plans of writing about a variety of media depicting autism and my opinions on that media. It'll be interesting to see what other topics come up as I continue my blogging.

As I have worked on my blog, it has been enlightening to apply it to the concepts discussed in class. For example, last week I had the opportunity to lead the Learning Through Discussion Group, and that week we read an article by Westgate & Steidel (2020) which talked about the nature of meaning and boredom, and how boredom should be seen as an emotion. Within this article, the authors created a diagram that organized tasks by the amount of challenge they provided and the amount of interest or engagement felt by the person doing the task. 

When working on my blog, I'd say that I usually fall into the enjoyment category, where there is a high level of meaning and interest, but a relatively low level of difficulty. It is something that I can invest a little time into without feeling overwhelmed or overly under-stimulated. However, when this blog is combined with my other responsibilities, it is possible that my experience of this occupation would fall more into the attentional boredom category, although this would be more from external responsibilities than the occupation itself. This makes sense, because while I find blogging and writing relatively easy and low stress, when combined with a mountain of other writing, memorizing, and complex mental work, I may be overwhelmed by the idea of writing in my blog that week. 

When thinking about the concept of boredom in relation to my occupation, I find it pretty funny that I talked about regulating attention in my blog this week. I talked about special interest, which are great sources of interest and enjoyment for autistic people, and these interests can encourage us to pursue occupational engagement, social spheres with others who share this interest, and they can drive us to focus better when we're able to focus on that topic in our pursuits. I also talked about hyperfocus, which is a tendency for many neurodiverse individuals where we will experience feelings similar to an intense state of flow, but we will have difficulty focusing on anything else, even to the point of neglecting responsibilities or bodily needs like eating or using the bathroom in a timely manner. 

As an autistic person, my experiences of boredom are heavily influenced by these ideas, which I talked about more in my blog this week. Often when I am bored it is because I am having trouble taking my attention away from a topic of interest and would rather be focusing my energy on that subject. 

Before I had a diagnosis to explain these tendencies, I thought I was just irresponsible and lazy when I felt bored in these circumstances. I would still have times where I struggled to pull myself away from something, and I would feel bad about it. Now that I understand my brain more, I know that giving myself twenty minutes to engage in these interests mid-study session can be a great way to scratch that metaphorical itch rather than letting my boredom increase and result in an hour of unproductive "study" time. When I have a hard time pulling myself away, I can give myself grace, knowing that I am not perfect, and that I have the discipline to get my work done, even if I don't get it done right that second. And when I am in the middle of these periods of hyperfocusing, I can better recognize what I am doing, which can help me remember to set a timer for when I need to stop and make dinner, rather than waiting until 11 pm and eating a spoonful of peanut butter instead. 

In the figure I mentioned below, non-optimal experiences of boredom included a suggestion for how to improve the person's experience of an occupation. For meaningless activities with little effort, it suggested to seek interesting activities. For those with high effort and low meaning, it suggested to seek enjoyable activities (lower effort, higher meaning). In understanding how my brain works, I am essentially able to follow these instructions, spending some time engaging in my interests to give my brain a breather before diving back into difficulty subjects like anatomy that are important, but not significantly meaningful to me. 

In implementing my new occupation, I use a similar strategy for picking my blog topics each week. I've been meaning to write a book review on "The Reason I Jump" for the last three weeks, but because my attention has been on other things, I have found that I am more likely to write well if I choose topics like impostor syndrome or special interests. I still plan on doing this, but I appreciate the lack of deadlines in a self-appointed occupation, and given that this occupation is a hobby, first and foremost, I want it to be more enjoyable than overstimulating, so I give myself grace when I don't finish a post every single week. By finding a balance between boredom and hyperfocus, as well as overstimulation, I am able to better engage in my occupations and have more meaningful experiences with each of them.

References:

Westgate, E. C., & Steidle, B. (2020). Lost by definition: Why boredom matters for psychology and society. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12562

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