The science of bordeom...wait, there's a science to that?! Of course, there is!
Boredom is something that affects all of us at one time or another - whether you're stuck at work, in line at the store, or waiting at the doctors office, you've been bored before. But most of the time we're told to brush it off, find something to do, and move on.
Dr. John Eastwood is a Clinical Psychologist and an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at York University in Toronto, and he joins Dr. Pam to talk
boredom: why he studies it, how being bored is a form of stress, where trauma plays into boredom, and how to deal with it during COVID-19.
Featuring:
Dr. John Eastwood
Dr. John Eastwood is a Clinical Psychologist and an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at York University (Toronto, Canada) where he trains future psychologists and conducts research on the intersection between cognition and emotion. He examines how attention is allocated to affective and socially relevant information, the influence of mood and motivation on attention, and the affective consequences of attention failures. Dr. Eastwood seeks to better understand the feeling of thinking and how such feelings are an inextricable part of cognition. In particular, he studies how the feeling of boredom is associated with the unengaged mind. He recently obtained a research grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying boredom. In his clinical practice, Dr. Eastwood provides psychotherapy to adults struggling with anxiety, depression, and relationship problems.
