Why too little challenge can be just as exhausting as too much
«I sit there for eight hours and I’m still completely drained by the evening.» – «I open windows on my screen so it looks like I’m working.» – «I can hardly complain that I have too little to do.»
You’re allowed to talk about stress. About being overloaded, too. But who likes to admit that they’re bored at work? That’s exactly the taboo two Swiss management consultants addressed almost twenty years ago: in their 2007 book «Diagnose Boreout», Philippe Rothlin and Peter R. Werder coined the term for a phenomenon many people know and almost nobody says out loud – being under-challenged at work to the point of illness. A concept with Swiss roots, then, that has since travelled around the world.
1. The three elements of boreout
Rothlin and Werder describe boreout as the interplay of three elements:
- Boredom: The working day drags, the clock seems to stand still.
- Being under-challenged: You could do more – in quality or quantity – than is being asked of you.
- Disinterest: Your identification with the work or the company has been lost.
On top of that comes the behaviour that makes boreout so insidious: the concealment strategies. Those affected look busy when they aren’t – papers lie conspicuously on the desk, emails get delayed until the evening, private errands stretch the day out. Not out of laziness, but out of shame and fear: admitting you have too little to do means risking your job or your standing. And that is precisely the crux of it: people affected by boreout want to perform – they aren’t allowed to. Boreout has nothing to do with laziness, quite the opposite.
2. What the science says – honestly assessed
Part of the truth is this: boreout is not a recognised diagnosis – neither in ICD-11 nor in DSM-5. The term comes from consulting practice, not from clinical research. Nor do reliable figures exist for how many people «have a boreout» – anyone quoting you a specific percentage is guessing.
That doesn’t mean the phenomenon is invented. Boredom at work is a well-established field of research. The Dutch work psychologists Madelon van Hooff and Edwin van Hooft showed in 2014 that boredom at work is associated with more depressive moods, a higher intention to quit and more errors on the job. A large survey by the consultancy Korn Ferry among more than 5,000 working people also found that 43 per cent are regularly bored at work – an indication of how widespread the underlying feeling is, even though no boreout prevalence can be derived from it.
In short: the label is popular science, the problem behind it is real and well researched.
3. Boreout and burnout: opposite triggers, similar end state
At first glance boreout and burnout look like opposites: too little challenge on one side, too much on the other. And formally their status differs too – burnout is recognised in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon (you can read what exactly that means in What is burnout?), boreout is not.
And yet the end states resemble each other strikingly: exhaustion, loss of meaning, inner distance from work, low mood, often physical complaints as well. The body apparently distinguishes less by whether the chronic stress comes from overload or from agonising emptiness – lasting dissatisfaction wears you down in both directions. That makes telling them apart difficult in individual cases: someone who comes home exhausted from an under-challenging job often assumes they are «burnt out». A closer look at the cause is worth it, because the solutions run in opposite directions: with burnout it’s usually about reducing – with boreout it’s about enriching.
4. What actually helps
🟢 Job crafting: actively reshape your work. Work research – for example by Lotta Harju and Wilmar Schaufeli – shows that people who actively help shape their own tasks suffer significantly less from boredom at work. Concretely: look for tasks that stretch you. Offer to take on a project. Change how you handle routines. Small margins for shaping the work exist almost everywhere – and using them is the most effective first step.
🟢 Seek the conversation with your manager. This takes courage, because it breaks the silence. But frame it as an offer, not a complaint: «I have capacity and I’d like to use it – where can I take on more responsibility?» For most managers that’s good news.
🟢 Invest in further training. New skills create new fields of work – and give you back the sense of development that is the first thing to disappear when you’re under-challenged.
🟢 Ask about meaning. Often the problem isn’t the amount of work but the missing significance. What about your work is valuable, and to whom? And if the honest answer is «nothing»: perhaps it’s time for a more fundamental stocktake.
Important here too: if the emptiness turns into a lasting despondency that takes over your whole life, that belongs in professional hands. I’ve described the warning signs worth taking seriously in Recognising and preventing burnout – many of them apply just as well to the under-challenged variant.
Conclusion
Boreout is not an official diagnosis, but it is an apt name for a real, well-researched problem: lasting under-challenge and boredom at work are linked to exhaustion, low mood and inner resignation – the end state resembles burnout, the trigger is its opposite. The way out begins where the hiding stops: with an honest look at your own situation, with actively shaping your tasks and with a courageous conversation. Boredom at work is not a character flaw – but it is a signal you’re allowed to take seriously.
Do you feel under-challenged at work and don’t know how to move on?
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