The Benefits of Boredom
Why We Should Get Bored More Often
When was the last time you squirmed in your seat thinking, “I gotta get out of here!”? How often do you feel that way? For me, the squirm is not a rare experience. Whether in an unproductive meeting, on point two of a droning ten-point lecture, at the end of a snaking line, or looking for excitement on New Year’s Eve 2020, I occasionally feel the desire to escape boredom. Being bored is “a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied,” argues Sandi Mann, author of The Science of Boredom: The Upside (and Downside) of Downtime. She adds, “If we can’t find that, our mind will create it.” That last statement catches my attention because I’m feeling more than the occasional desire to escape boredom these days.
My claim that I rarely get bored is no longer true in the pandemic. Even young people unfamiliar with boredom altogether are feeling this vacuous emotion. As a silent disrupter, boredom may be harder to spot, but it leaves you feeling unproductive and less valuable than when you’re engaged, attentive, and busy. I’m tempted to snub it, “Hi! But no. Please, won’t you just go away?” and pick up my phone to scroll and swipe. But avoidance denies me the benefits of boredom.
A plethora of studies on the benefits of boredom leads me to my own boredom project. First, what are the benefits? Later I’ll tell you about my boredom project. Boredom is like an aged garden gate with peeling paint and a rusty latch overgrown with vines that block entry and obscure the view. Behind that gate is a secret garden. Behind boredom lie creativity, novel solutions, new projects, and most significantly, the ability to self-regulate. If boredom is the inability to find external stimulation, then pushing through it is a gateway to something more fulfilling than your current experience.
What’s the mechanism that opens the gate? Manoush Zomorodi, the author of the book Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self explains that boredom activates a network in the brain called the default mode, the seat of creativity and original thinking. This means, “We take disparate ideas and then push them together and come up with new concepts.” Multiple studies conclude that distractions and information overload zap our ability to pay attention, which in turn decreases creativity and problem-solving. Tolerating boredom leads to possibilities beyond external stimuli. It turns out that necessity is still the mother of invention.
Don’t confuse boredom with things you do to relax because they probably don’t meet the definition of trying and failing to find stimulation. In order to tap into boredom, Mann suggests doing an activity that requires little or no concentration—walking a familiar route, swimming laps, or otherwise unplugging from our phones without music or external stimulation. Mundane tasks encourage our minds to wander and discover useful ideas and solutions. Our attachment to phones, she argues, is paradoxically both destroying our ability to be bored, and preventing us from ever being truly entertained because we need more and more dopamine to curtail the boredom. Allow your mind wander and daydream, and you may be surprised by what you come up with when you do.
That brings us to the question of how to be bored in a good way. Unbridled, boredom can lead to vandalism, destructive behavior, substance abuse, and dangerous risk-taking. Parents worrying about the negative social impact of the pandemic feel guilty that their kids are feeling bored and step in to solve the problem for them. This is especially true for remote learning that often affects a child’s ability to focus, resulting in disengagement from class and poor performance. Mann suggests offering resources to kids to “unbore” themselves, but only occasionally and only to steer them beyond their boredom. Parents set the stage, but the rest is up to them. If done right, boredom can lead to exploration of new ideas. Children will build the cognitive resources to focus their thoughts, emotions, and actions. Children—and adults—with this skill can truly entertain themselves. Learning how to self-regulate is a secret-garden discovery of great worth.
One of the best benefits of boredom is that it motivates the pursuit of new goals. That leads to my boredom project. A few months after the launch of my new website on January 20, 2020—I had hopes that this date would be the harbinger of a great year and decade—I thought about putting my weekly posts into a book form. So, I set a goal of writing a book by the end of 2020. This process kept unfolding with numerous revisions and changes that ultimately led to an entirely different focus than when I started. My cancer story became a springboard to my personal story from childhood to today circling around universal themes of control, security, self-discovery, and faith in the context of life disrupters of many kinds. I came to see that disrupters are increasing and so is the need to navigate them honestly and with hope. I was excited to reach my goal on New Year’s Eve, but there’s still much work to be done.
Phew! It’s out there now. As you might imagine, letting my readers know about my boredom project is scary because it might not go anywhere. Nevertheless, I’m committed to my dream, and I’m finding great satisfaction and joy in the process. Whether it leads to a book or not, there’s value in finding a secret garden. If you have young children, your secret garden might be a less solitary place that includes your kids. Regardless of your age and place in life, I invite you to nudge—or prune the vines and pry—open the gate. It’s worth entering and exploring the dreams contained therein.
Dreams
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
(Langston Hughes)
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