First of all, thanks for your comments on my thread – I was touched.
I am very interested in boredom as a trigger, because I would say that it was one of mine when I was in action, yet these days I would say that I am very rarely bored.
I used to work as a Careers Adviser – with teenagers! One of the standard answers when I asked about subjects they disliked at school was “it’s boring!” Yet that never got us very far, because boring varies so much between people. What I find boring, you might find really interesting and vice versa. So I would ask them what they meant by boring – as if I didn’t understand the term and usually they replied by saying they would much rather be doing something else – so they “switched off.”
I think that “switching off” is what we do when we gamble, but perhaps it is stopping us from getting the most out of life.
Maybe boredom is a barrier that we need to work through – I know people who have said that they found learning to play an instrument boring after the initial interest, but once they worked through that, they found it interesting again.
Or perhaps boredom is a state of mind. People might say that sitting, doing nothing for an hour, is boring; others would call it meditation and look forwards to it (especially as a break from a busy day.)
I also wonder if boredom is a sign that I am not living the life I really want. I sometimes used to ask myself the question, “if I could do anything what would it be?” Then I had a goal to work towards (in my case travelling.) When I was first trying to stop (and looking for other things to do rather than gamble,) I worked out that I didn’t have a lot of experience of things; perhaps I could call them “outside my comfort zone.”
I hadn’t travelled outside my home country at that stage (I was 31!) I’d never been on a plane. I made a list of things I had never tried that might be fun to do – and worked through them. Some I did find “boring” (a chess club!) Some became almost new addictions (jive dancing!) The important thing was that I didn’t let the thought, “oh that will be boring” get in the way of me trying them out.
This year I decided to make a new list of 52 things I have never done and then work through doing them … except I couldn’t think of 52 things. So I worked on 52 treats instead.
So far I have done three – all new things, with mixed results, but I keep trying to make life more interesting and less boring.
Anyway I hope I have given you some ideas of things to try to work through the trigger. So, as I am in danger of becoming boring myself, I will leave it there. I wish you well!