ADHD Boredom Linked to Poor Working Memory, Attention Control

September 1, 2025

Poor working memory and attention control may help explain why people with ADHD experience boredom more often and more acutely than do their non-ADHD peers. “Part of the reason individuals with ADHD often experience boredom is due to difficulty controlling their attention and using their working memory effectively, leading to interpretations of that situation as boring,” explains a study published last month in the Journal of Attention Disorders.¹

In the small study, young adults completed self-reported measures of ADHD symptoms (using the Barkley Adult ADHD Rating Scale and the Wender Utah Rating Scale) and propensity for boredom (on the Short Boredom Proneness Scale). They also submitted performance-based cognitive measures of working memory and attentional control. Based on their ADHD symptom self-reports, 31 participants were placed in the ADHD traits group and 57 in the control group.

Participants in the ADHD group experienced significantly higher levels of proneness to boredom compared to the control group (d = 2.09), confirming previous research findings. Researchers also discovered that proneness to boredom and inclusion in the ADHD trait group were associated with significantly worse performance on working memory and attention control tests. “Both attention control and working memory factors partially mediated the relation between ADHD and boredom, accounting for 5.8% and 6.4% of the variance in ADHD-related boredom, respectively,” researchers explained.

The findings of the study, the first to connect ADHD traits and boredom to performance-based executive function measures, support the Cognitive Theory of Boredom, which suggests that the experience of boredom is a result of the inability to direct attention on the task at hand.

One of the researchers who originated this theory, John Eastwood, Ph.D., co-author of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, discussed the close association between boredom and ADHD in the recent ADDitude article, Why ADHD Brains Go Over-Bored,

“Boredom points to our need to have agency, to be the captain of our own ship,” Eastwood says, adding that the struggle to be self-directed is common among people with ADHD, who are often corrected and directed by parents and teachers from a young age.

“When a feeling like boredom is uncomfortable, we are sometimes unable to hear its deeper message because we just try to make the feeling go away,” explains Eastwood. “But boredom often has a message for us. I would encourage people to take boredom seriously, try not to be afraid or intolerant of it. There may be an opportunity to see how you can live in a way that gives fuller expression to who you are.”

Eastwood also offered pragmatic interventions for those who experience chronic boredom, recommending adaptive, intentional responses to replace automatic, stress responses.

• Instead of using avoidance-based coping strategies, such as a long break in the bathroom during a lecture, try engagement-based strategies, such as gamifying the experience – for instance, noting whenever the professor uses a three-syllable word.
• Strategies that help people tolerate intense emotions with a minimal stress response, such as active forms of mindfulness, such as yoga or mindful walking, may also be effective with boredom

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Updated on September 1, 2025