Gemma Speig
speaker
1,085 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 7 May
Gemma Speig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And also more solutions because it switches on a curiosity exploratory mindset.
When everything is the same as it's always been or has been for a while, you know, our brain is kind of like a zoo animal or like an animal in captivity.
It like becomes accustomed to things simply being the way they are.
And it's kind of like gnawing at the bars being like, let me out.
So boredom is a big factor here.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly.
Boredom doesn't get a research spotlight.
It has been researched far less than other emotions like happiness or sadness or the big flashy ones because I think scientifically people think of boredom as quite trivial, but it's such an unexplored emotion and it sits so closely to other more headline-grabbing emotions like loneliness and sadness when it comes to our emotional well-being.
Here's the thing, boredom, when practiced, when welcomed, can do wonderful things for your imagination, wonderful things for your creativity, because your brain basically has to entertain itself and be imaginative.
But when boredom is involuntary, persistent, chronic, it literally shrinks our perspective of the world and makes it narrower.
For example, a study from 2015 on like, it was like 800 students found that boredom
Students who scored high on a boredom scale also tended to score very high on a depression scale.
Boredom is a psychological feature of depressed states, which we know are linked to being in this funk-like state as well.
It can also make us more impulsive, can drive us more towards harmful behaviors.
A very famous study from the University of Virginia in 2014 recruited like hundreds of undergrads, hundreds of community members, and they got them to take part in these like what they called prolonged thinking periods.
Participants were placed in these like
empty rooms on like a chair with a desk in front of them and they were asked they weren't allowed to bring in any of their belongings no books no nothing no pens no phones and they were asked to sit there and think and during that time they were given the option to give themselves an electric shock if they wanted to or to just sit quietly
The results were drastic.
Even though all participants had previously stated they would not even accept money to be shocked and they would pay money to avoid being shocked, when they were in this situation of boredom, 67% of men, 25% of women, chose to continue to inflict themselves with this electric shock rather than sit there and think quietly and be bored.
Sometimes, like that's a great example of how much we try and avoid boredom.
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