For a gifted mind, the amount of stimulation you need is specific and different from what is normal.

The bore-out angst may be a messenger that what you are doing is not aligned with your values.

You can be overworked and starved at the same time, burned out on volume and bored out on substance.

Gifted and high-IQ adults are often told they are burned out when they are not. The lesser-known condition is bore-out, chronic understimulation, and it produces the same exhaustion, cynicism, and flatness as burnout. Burnout comes from overstimulation. Bore-out comes from too little of the right kind. You can be both at once: overloaded with work that drains you and starved of work that feeds you.

For a gifted mind, the amount of stimulation you need is specific and different from what is normal, which is why standard therapy and standard coaching so often misdiagnose what is going on for you. You may be tired all the time, and your mother might tell you to take a vacation. Your partner might tell you to worry less. You may have tried all of it. The vacation helped for a few days, and then you went back and felt the same flatness, irritability, and anhedonia within a week. The conundrum is that you have a lot on your plate, but none of it truly feeds you.

Bore-out is sitting in a meeting, listening to people slowly work through a problem you have already solved. It is being talked at, micromanaged, or "explained to" by someone you do not respect. It is spending your days on conversations that advance nothing real. It is having no one to talk to who can meet you intellectually and productively. It is not being given enough autonomy to build projects or solve interesting problems. The cruelest part of a setting that bores you out is work that is boring and still demands your full attention. You may be faced with dense........

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