Sometimes I’ve told my children, when they complained they were bored, “Good!” It helps your creativity! Yes, it is great fun being the child of this educational scientist.

The idea is that when you have nothing to do for a while, your mind starts to wander, which can lead to new ideas. Some research seems to support this idea, but the overall picture is much less clear. Previous studies have found both positive and negative associations between boredom and creativity, and sometimes simply no association at all.

A new study by Anke Zeißig and colleagues, published in Learning and Instruction, examines this question in a context highly relevant to this blog: the classroom.

For this study, the researchers followed 111 students aged 14–15 for one school week. At several unexpected moments during regular lessons, the students received a few short questions on a tablet.

They were asked, among other things, how bored they had felt just before that moment and how pleasant or unpleasant that feeling was. The researchers also asked how tense or relaxed they felt and, of course, how creative, inspired and imaginative they felt at that moment. In this way, the researchers collected 1,712 separate measurements.

An early result from the analysis of these measurements has relatively little to do with creativity. Boredom turns out to be more than just boredom.

The researchers distinguish five different profiles, in line with previous research:

• Indifferent boredom, where students are bored but still feel quite good and relaxed.
• Calibrating boredom, where the feeling is still slightly positive and tension is relatively low.
• Searching boredom, where students become more restless and start looking, as it were, for something else.

There were also two clearly more unpleasant forms:

• Reactant boredom, involving high tension.
• Apathetic boredom, where students feel very unpleasant but experience little tension or restlessness.

This distinction also matters for the association with creativity. The researchers found the highest average self-reported creativity score for calibrating boredom: 2.34 on a five-point scale. This was followed by searching (2.23) and indifferent boredom (2.21). The two clearly unpleasant forms scored lower: 1.88 for apathetic and 1.77 for reactant boredom. Overall, self-reported creativity differed significantly across the five profiles. But on closer inspection, the two more unpleasant forms of boredom scored lower than some of the other profiles.

You could now conclude that a certain kind of quiet boredom indeed links to more creativity. But there is a twist.

Students actually reported the most creativity when they were not bored. Their average creativity score was 2.60 in those moments, compared with 2.20 when they were bored. The difference was statistically significant, although, admittedly, the effect was small.

The same pattern appeared within individual students. When students felt more bored, they generally reported less creativity. But this didn’t hold when comparing students: students who were more bored on average weren’t necessarily less creative.

So, back to the beginning of this post. This study doesn’t support the simple idea that boredom is by definition good for creativity. The authors explicitly say so themselves. But it also doesn’t show that boredom is always bad for creativity. How you are bored seems to matter.

Let’s just hope this doesn’t lead to lessons designed to create more ‘positive boredom’…

Oh, wait, there is still the nuance section. You may already have spotted some important limitations between the lines.

First, this wasn’t an experiment, so we don’t know what causes what. Perhaps a particular kind of boredom makes students less creative. But the reverse could be true, or classroom conditions could influence both boredom and creativity.

Second, the study didn’t measure creative performance. Students reported whether they felt creative, inspired and imaginative at that particular moment. Feeling creative is not the same as actually producing more original or better ideas. The authors therefore warn against interpreting their findings as evidence that boredom directly promotes or inhibits creative performance.