The mental torture of having nothing to do

[OCDyspraxic]

I know we all feel boredom at times when there's little to do but I really don't want to trivialise this feeling I have as boredom as it is more symptomatic to mental torture owing to having nothing to do. The feeling isn't just plain old boredom, it's this experience of being disengaged and desperately attempting to occupy yourself with inane things that don't seem to work. Did you know that the journalist John McCarthy who was taken hostage and held captive chained in a dark room played 'imaginary ping-pong' with the facing wall to stop himself going out of his mind? This is the experience I have during those disengaged moments.

I am writing this on a late Sunday afternoon, a typical time for this feeling and decided to seize the moment to try to write about my feelings as they happen. The day of rest has always been synonymous with boredom but I always find it so much worse than this, for me it seems to be something interrogating and inescapable that doesn't seem to go away until the familiar buzz of Monday mornings. Sundays are a lingering dull day of self-reflection where everything closes early and people seem to enjoy lingering around without doing anything engaging. I cannot bear spending time that way and always feel the need to escape, usually out to the cinema to see ANYTHING showing where I can at least feel properly occupied for a couple of hours. Although the other six days aren't quite as bad as this there are those lingering periods where like John McCarthy, I feel I am going out of my mind. As a teenager I would resort to defacing newspapers for amusement during those periods, particularly the lonely long Sunday afternoons I suffered which seemed to be far worse in those days.

The reason I'm expressing this is because I don't want the prospect of boredom or bored teenagers to be something trivialised or easily dismissed. I believe there are serious consequences of being unoccupied that could be the product of dyspraxia or at least mental illness. As a dyspraxic am I finding those disengaged moments that some people seem to enjoy a painful experience or is this unique to me? Does anyone else enjoy passing the time by idly chatting to their neighbour over the fence or is it something you desperately want to get away from? What I'm getting at, is boredom just a condition in itself or can it become a torturous experience for those with mental illness?

[Catwoman42]

I panic when I have nothing to do, especially if I have nothing to read. Someone once asked me if I could ever sit and do nothing, perish the thought!

[minniemoo]

Life bores me rigid. It shouldn't, but it does. I don't think it is anything to do with a mental disorder. Oddly enough I feel that it is best described by Conan Doyle when he is describing Sherlock Holmes, who does to be frank seem like a typical dyspraxic in many ways! He is bored by life in general and in particular, much of the time nothing can ease the boredom, hence his drug dependency. I'm not of course putting this forward as a good way of dealing with it. Just saying, that that level of boredom is hard for most people to understand, but it exist and can be difficult to deal with. I wish I knew the answer. I think happiness helps. But then how can we truly obtain that?