Ep.18 - "Boreout" & Lost Meaning: 5 Ways to Bring it Back.

Do you feel like your life or work lacks meaning?

In this episode, I explore a little-known type of burnout called 'boreout'. Boreout is a syndrome of experiences that can leave us feeling that the work we do has little meaning.  

What You'll Learn:

• the difference between burnout and boreout
• what boreout feels like
• the two main types of boreout
• 5 ways to bring meaning back into our life
• why it is important to address boreout.

I talk about why continuing to develop is critical to our sense of meaning.

I wish you and your family all the best.

With love,

Melisa

References for today's episode:

A. K. Schaffner (2025).  "Boreout Burnout: When to explore and when to exploit, Psychology Today.

Coach with Melisa:

Email - 7genproject@gmail.com

Follow the show:

Instagram - @live.differently.podcast

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Music attribution: 

"Wallpaper" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
 Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey and welcome to Live Differently. This podcast is about coming back to who you really are and having the courage to build a life that fits with who you are now. If something in your life feels off or you know that you're meant for more than the way that you're currently living, then you're in the right place. We talk about the real stuff: health, relationships, purpose, endings, and new beginnings. All the moments that ask you to grow, shift, and choose differently. As you listen, take what feels right and leave the rest. This is your life, your pace, your way. If this episode resonates, then share it with someone that you care about. It might be exactly what they need to hear today. And if you're ready to make changes in your own life or you need help getting clear, aligned, or figuring out how to move forward, please contact me to discuss coaching support. You'll find my details in the show notes. Alright, let's get talking. I am so glad to be here with you today. I really hope that you're doing well. Today I want to focus on soul alignment and I have a question for you. Do you feel like the work that you're doing is meaningful? I'm not just talking about paid work. What I'm talking about is the way that you spend your time and the way that you contribute to the world. So do you feel like the work that you're doing is meaningful? If not, there may be a reason. We're all familiar with the term burnout. We've actually talked about it on the podcast a couple of times. That's that state of exhaustion that we might feel when we're exposed to prolonged stress, and that might be the prolonged stress of work or the prolonged stress of caregiving that leaves us feeling irritable, isolated, trapped, drained of energy or drained of motivation. We might feel body aches associated with burnout. We might feel pain, so where that burnout or that stress is starting to manifest in our body, and that feeling of stress that just won't go away. But what if what you're feeling isn't the typical burnout? So when people talk about burnout, you might think, you know what, I'm not really feeling connected with what I'm doing, but I don't actually feel those symptoms that you just described. Those symptoms are related to that sense of being overstimulated. So what if you're not feeling overstimulated? What if you're feeling under stimulated? To the point where the work that you're doing has lost its meaning. So there's a type of burnout that doesn't get much attention. What if your burnout is related to feeling understimulated or bored? What if you're just feeling completely bored by the work that you're doing? The term that describes this syndrome is called bore out. Not burnout, but bore out. And it's actually incredibly common. So up to 53% of people who are working can feel this way. So that's more than half of the workforce. So is this you? Let's take a look at what bore out feels like. Bore out can cause you to feel like you have little energy or little motivation. That's common with burnout, but there's a difference because in bore out we can feel that sense of disengagement from our work. We might feel trapped in life or trapped in work, and we can feel like the work that we're doing is pointless or useless, and we might see ourselves as being unproductive. What if I told you that these feelings are related to stagnation? We feel this way because we're no longer growing, we're no longer learning, we're no longer encountering new ideas or new people. We no longer have things in our life that challenge us, that cause us to feel curious, we feel dispassionate, and we feel restless. So bore out actually shows up in two different ways for people. There's an internal expression or an external expression. The external expression is called impulsive, whereas the internal expression has more of a fear-based or is referred to as being fearful. For the people who are in the impulsive camp, these people are the people who need continual stimulation or continual challenge. And they zone out when they've got tedious work to do. And the fact that their work is too easy for them is the thing that's getting in the way of them feeling like their work is meaningful. For the people who are in that fear-based camp, they can feel cautious about taking on new challenges. They may want to stay in their comfort zone, but they can actually feel stuck when they're doing the same routine over and over again. And these folks, unlike the impulsive people, might not actually realize that they're bored. Bore out is common when people do work that has limited social interaction, and this includes the people that work from home or the people that do remote work. So it's really common in people who are feeling like their work is not challenging or that they've outgrown their work. And this is where soul alignment comes in. I want you to take an honest look at your work. Do you feel like the work that you're doing gives you an opportunity to express yourself? Do you find the work that you're doing to be stimulating? Are you being challenged in new ways? Or have you stopped growing? Have you stopped feeling like you're making a contribution? Are you doing the things that you're good at? Or are you doing the things that you feel drawn to? When you get still and quiet, what does that little voice inside you whisper to you? What keeps coming back as a wild and crazy thought? What did you want to be when you grew up? But you shoved it in the drawer when you had to face the realities of being an adult. Here's the truth. Human beings need to be exposed to new things. That's how our brains were formed. We had to figure things out. We had to use our opposable thumbs. We had to learn how to make fires, how to shelter and keep our families alive. We had to make new technologies and evolve humanity through the generations. We are hardwired to be curious. We are also hardwired to explore our world, to explore our inner world as well as our external environment, so our outer world. We are also hardwired to learn. And if we remember back to episode 9, brain researcher Associate Professor Andrea Bulgaric actually shared with us that the purpose of life is to learn. And that's because our brain is hardwired to do that. So our brains are hardwired to be curious, and our brains are hardwired to learn. We are designed to explore our world and to figure things out. Psychologists talk about how important it is for us to step just outside of our comfort zone, okay? And that's connected to the fact that our brain is hardwired to be curious. And so I want us to just take a little bit of a breath and a little bit of a step back from that for a second. Because when we think about stepping outside of our comfort zone, sometimes that can be intimidating or it can feel frightening because that represents change, right? That represents transition and transformation. But what I want us to recognize is that when we're stepping just outside of our comfort zone, it means that we're not taking a massive leap. We actually don't have to take a massive leap. What it's asking us to do is to just challenge ourselves just a little bit to explore something that's just beyond the limits of what's in our everyday, what's in our day-to-day, what's comfortable, what's familiar, what might have become a little bit rote or routine. And in that space that's just outside of our comfort zone, that's where the possibilities of new ways of being, new ways of doing, new ways of thinking and new ways of feeling actually exist. So these new ways of being, doing, thinking and feeling don't actually exist in the space that's mind-numbing, in the space that's the same old way of doing things day in and day out. We're not going to experience something new in the same old, obviously. I mean, that's pretty logical. And this lack of novelty, this lack of spark, this lack of passion, this lack of stimulation can be one of the main reasons why we feel so dissatisfied with our lives and why we're feeling so dissatisfied with the work that we do. So I've got some questions for you. When was the last time you felt challenged? When was the last time you had something to do that required a sustained effort? What is something new that you can discover? What can you explore? What can you open yourself up to? Okay, so what can we do about bore out? How can we start to bring meaning back into the work that we do? And essentially at the heart of it, the solution is development. Boredom is your brain's signal to you that you don't find what you're doing to be meaningful. If it was meaningful, you wouldn't be bored. So I want to ask you, how can you embrace effort? And I'm asking you that because when we engage in something that's sustained, when we do something that's long-term that requires effort, we actually release dopamine. So our brain rewards us for doing things that require a sustained effort. Okay, so I asked the question: what can we do about this? How can we bring meaning back into the work that we do, either our paid work or our unpaid work? And here are five ideas for you. So the first way is that you can take on a new creative project. So creativity is what makes us uniquely human. Believe it or not, we're all creative. So what do you like to do? Do you like to write? Do you like to paint? Do you garden? Do you like to build stuff? Do you like to act? Do you like to dance? Do you like to organize things? Are you a crafter? Are you a quilter? Do you love making things with textiles? Do you love pottery? What's the thing that you could lose yourself in if you were doing that thing where you just lose track of time? Or if you're not sure where your creativity lies, what can you watch for hours because you just love it? That's a really good clue for where your creativity might lie. So at the beginning of last year, I realized in my life that things had to shift, something had to change. So I got back into dancing and I tried a new style of dancing this time because I needed a bit of a challenge. I needed to spark things up, and actually I needed to wake myself up, is what I felt like. And so I'm learning to dance flamenco. And I gotta tell you, I think I chose the most difficult dance style. It is definitely a challenge, and it's something that will definitely keep me challenged for a long time, which is actually the goal. That's actually the goal. So it's creative, but it's also stimulating. Okay, so number two, the second thing that you can do to shift this up a little bit and to bring meaning back into your life is to develop new skills. So I heard somewhere, I think it was on a podcast or something, that every year this person does something new or learns a new skill. And so when we're learning a new skill, we want to do something that's random, or we can just do something that we're interested in. So it doesn't have to be something that's like completely off the wall or completely novel or completely unique. But just learn something new, just bring something new into your life to develop a new skill. The third way that we can approach this is through networking. So find new people, connect with others, build your relationships. This can bring new opportunities, it can bring new perspectives, new ideas, it can open your mind to seeing things in a different way or seeing opportunities that you didn't know existed. And it can also include travel. So it's about broadening your horizons. And if we think back to those definitions that I spoke of earlier with regards to bore out, one of the ways that actually contributes to this is that feeling of disconnection with new ideas and new people. So networking is an amazing way that we can fill that gap and start to bridge that for ourselves. Another way is to find a mentor. So think about who you know or who you're aware of who's walked the path that you want to walk. One of my previous mentors actually explained this to me in a beautiful way, and she said that mentorship actually has three levels. And so there's the person before you, there's the person with you, and there's the person ahead of you. And so we can mentor somebody coming up. So that's us being the mentor, but we can also look for mentors who are on the same path as us. So someone who's doing something that we're doing, and that can help us to approach things in a new way or to look at different ways for us to address or approach our challenges. It can also introduce challenge into our life because we're looking at what somebody else is doing and we're thinking, how can I challenge myself in a similar way, or how I might, how might I challenge myself differently? And the other one is the mentors who have walked our path. And so that's the person that we typically think of when we think of mentors, but I want you to broaden that out and think of there's other ways that we can engage in mentorship, and even when we're mentoring other people, that can be really rejuvenating and really stimulating because we're thinking about things in a different way and we're sharing and we're giving back, okay, and that can be really rewarding as well. And the last way is connected back to what we were talking about just previously, and that's stepping outside of your comfort zone. So, number five is step outside of your comfort zone because it helps you to reduce your fears. So that thing is no longer intimidating or frightening or concerning. We can get familiar with this thing and bring it into our life in a way that it becomes more natural and more expected, and then we can continue in that way to grow and grow and grow what we feel comfortable with. So that comfort zone expands and expands and expands as we continue to address the things that we might be a little bit afraid of or a little bit intimidated by. So, what can you do that is just outside of what you're already really good at or what you're already great at? So this might look like applying for a new job. Do you need to switch departments? Do you need to take a sabbatical? Do you need to start exploring how you might translate the skills that you've already developed into a new model, maybe a new business? Do you want to go back to school? Do you maybe want to volunteer to do something new? So think outside of the things that you can already do in your sleep that you're already good at. Think about the thing that's a little bit intimidating that you think, oh, I don't know if I'd be that good at that. Maybe lean into that a little bit. Why is this important? When we are bored, we can lose confidence because we're not growing. We can feel apathetic, we can feel disconnected, disconnected to ourselves, disconnected to others, disconnected to the things that bring us meaning in life. We lose interest in what we're doing. And this is true for us at any age. So this is not just about when we're in the workforce, it's not just about doing paid work, as I said at the beginning. What I'm talking about is the things that we do to contribute our unique gifts to the world. And so maybe you're experiencing bore out because you're not sharing your gifts. What if now is the time for you to do that? I'm just gonna leave you with that little nugget. So thank you for being here with me today. Thank you for caring for yourself and showing up for yourself. I appreciate you, and I look forward to connecting with you again in the next episode. From my heart to you and yours. Bye for now. Live Differently is made on unceded Warundri Land in Melbourne, Australia. It's an independent production of the Seven Generations Project, founded and led by its host. Live Differently is possible because of our listening community. My thanks to all who listen and give by sharing and supporting the show. Alright, one more thing. The information shared in this podcast is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed are based on personal experience, research, and perspectives in the area of health, spirituality, and alternative living. This podcast does not provide medical, mental health, or professional advice, and nothing discussed should be used as a substitute for consultation with a qualified healthcare or licensed professional. If you have a medical question, health concerns, or are considering making changes in your life or wellness routine, please seek guidance from a licensed healthcare professional or local provider or local professional who can address your individual needs. By listening to this podcast, you acknowledge that you are responsible for your own health decisions and well being. Awesome. I'll see you next time.