Intermediate 
What surprised researchers was not how hard people found the challenge but how far they would go to avoid it. The task? To sit in a chair and do nothing but think.
Some found it so unbearable that they took the safe but alarming opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks to break the tedium.
Two-thirds of men pressed a button that gave them a painful shock during a 15-minute period of solitude.
Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The difference, scientists suspect, is that men are typically more sensation-seeking than women.
The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities tries to answer the question of why most of us  nd it so hard to do nothing.
In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that people hated being left to think, regardless of their age, education, income or the amount of time they spent on smartphones or social media.
Timothy Wilson, who led the work, said the  ndings were not necessarily due to the pace of modern life or the spread of mobile devices and social media. Instead, those things might be popular because of our constant need to do something rather than nothing.
In the  rst experiments, students were taken  alone, without phones, books or anything to write with  into a room and told to think. The only rules were that they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. They were told that they would have six to 15 minutes alone.
The students were questioned when the time was up. On average, they did not enjoy the experience. They struggled to concentrate. Their minds wandered even with nothing to distract them.
In case the unfamiliar setting reduced the ability to think, the researchers did the experiment again with people at home.
They got similar results. In fact, people found the experience even more miserable and cheated by getting up from their chair or checking their phones.
To see if the effect was found only in students, the scientists tested more than 100 other people, aged 18 to 77, from a church and a farmers market. They also disliked being left to their thoughts.
But, the most surprising result was yet to come. To check whether people might actually prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students were given the option of giving themselves a mild electric shock.
They had been asked earlier to say how unpleasant the shocks were, compared to other options, such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing the sound of a knife rubbing against a bottle.
All the students chosen for the test said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks.
To the researchers surprise, 12 of 18 men gave themselves up to four electric shocks and six of 24 women did the same.
The scientists said that the most surprising thing was that being alone with their thoughts was so hard for many people that they gave themselves an electric shock  something the participants had earlier said they would pay to avoid.
Jessica Andrews-Hanna at the University of Colorado said many students would probably give themselves an electric shock to cheer up a tedious lecture. But, she says we need to know more about the motivation of the shockers in Wilsons study.
Imagine  a person is told to sit in a chair with wires attached to their skin and a button that will deliver a harmless but uncomfortable shock, and they are told to just sit there with their thoughts, she said.
As they sit there, their mind starts to wander and it naturally goes to that shock  was it really that bad?