Not being too busy, but having too little to do. You’re staring into space, you’re bored, you don’t know what to do. You simply don’t get enough stimuli. A boreout can be just as drastic as a burnout, but what exactly is it and how do we recognize it?
Boreout
A bore-out is stress due to too few stimuli. We increasingly see that people are running around, have difficulty falling asleep due to palpitations and are more likely to snap at others, completely overwrought by (work) stress. But we forget that the opposite may be just as common: barely being productive, doing monotonous work, or waiting until the end of the workday is approaching. That also causes a lot of stress and that is why a boreout should be taken just as seriously as a burnout.
Understimulation
Just like overstimulation, understimulation is related to complaints such as difficulty concentrating, poor sleep and fatigue. You can also think of headaches, palpitations, tension in the shoulders and neck and intestinal problems. So you can really get sick if you are under-stimulated, but the link with under-stimulation is not quickly made, which means that complaints can quickly become chronic.
Signals
The environment you find yourself in has a lot to do with understimulation: The people you interact with, your job and the way you spend your free time are major factors that determine whether you feel happy and get satisfaction from your actions and people. to fetch. It is important that you are sufficiently challenged.
Need for variety
You quickly get bored when you surround yourself with the same tasks all day, day in, day out. That’s why we need variety. In this society it has become the norm that you choose a job that will give you long-term satisfaction, while many people function very well with variety. As adults, we have let go of the discovery phase we had as children to focus on the long term, even though that does not always work out well.
False diagnosis
A boreout is not as well known as burnout, and that is why this phenomenon is often not recognized well enough or too late. People are also quickly diagnosed with burnout, while this is not the case: you have to approach a boreout very differently than a burnout. In both cases it is important that you give your nervous system a rest in the first phase by resting and exercising. The next phase works differently for both diagnoses: with a burnout you often have to stop doing something, such as wanting to maintain control, being a perfectionist and wanting to please people. When you are understimulated, the idea is to take more action: see where your interests lie and what makes you happy. That often takes some searching and is not always easy.
