ADHD Boredom Linked to Poor Working Memory, Attention Control

September 1, 2025Poor 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.1In 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.