The one nobody writes down

Think about the words people reach for when they’re asked how they’ve been.

Tired. Stressed. Low. Anxious. Fine. All of them get written down, said out loud, put in a diary. And then there’s one that almost never makes the list, because saying it feels faintly embarrassing — like admitting you haven’t tried hard enough to enjoy your own life.

Bored.

A paper published on 1 August in the Journal of Clinical Psychology spent its time on exactly that feeling, and came back with something we haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

What they were actually asking

The researchers were interested in a well-documented pattern: symptoms of social anxiousness and symptoms of low mood tend to travel together. That much was already known. The open question was what sits in between — what actually connects one to the other.

Their hypothesis was that the link runs through what psychologists call reward deficits. Not sadness exactly, but a flatness in the machinery that makes things feel worth doing. They picked three versions of that flatness and modelled them together, so each one’s own contribution could be seen:

Anhedonia — when things you normally enjoy stop landing. Loneliness — the ache of not feeling connected. And boredom — the state where nothing available seems worth the effort of doing.

They surveyed 523 college students during the first year of the pandemic and ran the numbers to see how much of the social-anxiety-to-low-mood connection each of the three could account for.

Anhedonia accounted for about 20% of it. Loneliness, about 14%.

Boredom accounted for 38% — by some distance the largest share of the three.

There were two smaller findings underneath that, and they’re worth noting because they’re about circumstance rather than character. Anhedonia only showed up in the link for students who were learning remotely. Loneliness only showed up for students with smaller friend networks. Which is to say: the environment a person was sitting in changed which flat feeling did the work.

Why this is a bigger deal than it sounds

Boredom has terrible cultural standing. It’s the feeling we treat as a personal failing — a sign of a small imagination, or a phone problem, or not being grateful enough. When someone says they’re bored, the response is usually a suggestion. Go for a walk. Take up something. Get off your phone.

But the boredom in this study isn’t restlessness. It isn’t a Sunday afternoon with nothing on. It’s the harder version: the state where you scroll the options, and every one of them — the walk, the film, the friend who texted, the thing you were looking forward to last week — costs more than it seems to be worth. Nothing is wrong, exactly. Nothing appeals, either.

That version of boredom is not a small feeling being dramatic. According to this data, it’s sitting right in the middle of something that matters, doing more of the connecting work than loneliness was.

And it’s the one that almost nobody writes down.

What we’d be careful about

We want to be honest about what this study can and can’t tell you, because the finding is interesting enough that it doesn’t need overselling.

It’s a cross-sectional study — everything was measured at one point in time, which means it can show that these things travel together but cannot show what causes what. Boredom might be a route into low mood; low mood might be what makes everything feel boring; most likely there’s traffic in both directions. The sample was college students, not the general population. And it was collected during the first year of the pandemic, a period that was doing unusual things to everybody’s access to ordinary pleasures. The authors put boredom forward as a promising target for future work; we’d read the whole thing as an early finding rather than a settled mechanism.

So: a signpost, not a map. But an interesting signpost.

Why it stayed with us

There’s a quiet assumption built into most wellbeing tools, ours included, that the feelings worth tracking are the dramatic ones. The bad day. The anxious morning. The night that went badly.

This study is a small argument that the flat ones deserve a line too. Not to treat every flat day as a warning sign — a boring week is often just a boring week — but because a feeling you never name is a feeling you can never spot a pattern in. If “nothing appeals” has been true for eleven days running, that’s information you’d want to have. If it was true for two days and then passed, that’s also information, and it’s the more reassuring kind.

That’s really all the four-tap check-in in Nagi is for. Mood, sleep, energy, four taps, no essay required — and energy is often where flatness shows up first, before anyone would think to call it anything. Nagi won’t tell you what a low stretch means; it isn’t a medical device and doesn’t do diagnosis. It just gives you somewhere private to put it down, so that the pattern — rather than the single grey Tuesday — is what you end up looking at.

The reason we built it that way is the same reason this study caught our eye. The feelings that go unrecorded aren’t usually the loud ones. They’re the ones that seem too ordinary to mention.

The takeaway

If today felt like nothing much — not sad, not stressed, just flat and slightly pointless — that’s a real thing, and it’s worth noticing rather than talking yourself out of.

Notice it, note it, and see what it does over a week. Sometimes it’s a passing dull patch. Sometimes it’s the first thing to shift. Either way, you’ll only know if you wrote it down.

And if the flatness has been sitting on you for a while, or it’s getting harder to shake, that’s worth saying out loud to your GP or someone you trust. Not because something is wrong with you — but because you shouldn’t have to work out the pattern on your own.

If you want a private place to start noticing your own patterns, Nagi is on Google Play and the App Store — or in your browser at app.nagiandme.app. The first 15 messages are free. No name, no email. Just you, checking in.

— The Nagi team

Source: Hager, N. M., Milam, A. L., Hamrick, H. C., Swanson, B., & Judah, M. R. (2026). “Reward Deficits in Co-Occurring Social Anxiety and Depression: The Roles of Anhedonia, Boredom, Loneliness, and COVID-19 Social Restriction,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, published 1 August 2026, DOI 10.1002/jclp.70204. Retrieved via PubMed (PMID 42541734). Cross-sectional questionnaire study of 523 college students, data collected during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; indirect-effect models. Limitations: cross-sectional design cannot establish causal direction, a non-representative student sample, and pandemic-era data collection that may not generalise to ordinary conditions.

Nagi & Me is a mental health companion app, not a medical device, and nothing here is medical advice. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a professional or someone you trust.