Q. When you get up in the morning, you never want to go to work. Your job is repetitive, uninteresting and offers no challenges. When you are there, the clock barely moves, and you can’t wait to leave.

In short, you are bored. What is to be done?

A. People who are bored need to create more challenges and find more meaning in their work lives. They need to find a way out of the feeling that “there’s nothing to do, they’re forced to do things they don’t want to do, or they don’t know what they want to do,” said John D. Eastwood, an associate psychology professor at York University in Toronto who has studied boredom.

Over all, boredom is a state of “being disengaged from one’s environment,” he said, and it reflects a passive relationship to one’s work.

Q. What are common symptoms of boredom?

A. A telltale sign is that time seems to pass very slowly, Professor Eastwood said. This can be accompanied by difficulty concentrating and feelings of depletion and lethargy. Low-energy states may alternate with feelings of agitation and irritability as the sufferer struggles to find some kind of engagement, he said.