The magic of boredom
Instead of resisting boredom, try leaning into the feeling. You might be surprised.
When I think of boredom, I think of long summer days during my childhood — traipsing around my large backyard, finding undiscovered corners of my house, snooping in my siblings' rooms. I’m certain that “mom, I’m bored” was frequently repeated in our house of four children, ages ranging over a decade. It’s a familiar experience, one that you might have had too. What I find interesting is, looking back, I feel nostalgic for this time. While I know I hated feeling bored at the time, my childhood summers are some of my fondest memories. And yes, there were the long days spent at the pool, riding bikes through my neighborhood, ringing the doorbell of my friends house to “come out and play,” but I also can viscerally remember being bored. A lot.
As an adult, I fight boredom with the attitude of a petulant toddler. I refuse to stand in a long line without picking up my phone to scroll. I listen to podcasts or audiobooks on long walks with my kids. I scroll an endless social media feed during lazy Saturday afternoons.
Boredom is an emotional restlessness. I quite like Tolstoy’s definition of boredom in Anna Karenina – “the desire for desires.” In an essay in the Guardian, Elle Hunt fleshes this out by describing boredom: “It is not an emotion, as such, but an ongoing cognitive process where we wish to engage our minds, but nothing seems to satisfy.”
It is not that there is nothing to do, but there’s nothing that seems to satisfy our wanting.
Today’s world is vastly different from the one of my childhood — it is one of overabundance, overstimulation, and instant gratification. As we get deeper and deeper into our relationship with technology, our dopamine centers are becoming increasingly overloaded. We require more frequent stimulation to satisfy our desires. Or as Tolstoy might say, our desire to desire is stronger than ever.
Boredom can have devastatingly negative effects on people. From Columbia University, “People who are bored easily are susceptible to depression, anxiety, anger, academic failure, poor work performance, loneliness and isolation.” Further, “Chronic boredom is associated with impulsivity and risky behavior, including careless driving, compulsive gambling, drug and alcohol abuse, reckless thrill-seeking and other self-destructive behaviors.”
Conversely, boredom can reshape our brains in a positive way. We can become more creative, better problem-solvers, innovative, and more motivated.
So what’s the distinction here? How can we harness the good and not the bad that comes with boredom?
Always adapting
Another strong memory I have of being bored during childhood is during weekly Sunday mass. Religion never came naturally to me, and as an elementary-aged child, the repetition of ritual combined with our monotone priest nearly bored me to tears. Stuck in my pew, unable to explore undiscovered corners of the church, I found new ways to cope. One tried and true way to pass the time was counting the recessed lights on the ceiling of the church. I could never manage to get to the same number which was frustrating, but also motivating, as a small perfectionist. There were a couple flaws with this approach, one being that it really could only satisfy a short ten minutes of the hour long mass. The more glaring flaw —there’s really no reason to be staring at the ceiling during mass, as we were more of the pray-to-the-floor type of parishioners.
Eventually I settled on my go-to church activity: daydreaming elaborate fantasies. These fantasies had a wide range of subject matter. At times, I’d find an interesting looking person in a pew ahead of me. I’d settle into my seat and start scanning the pews for an unique subject for today’s fantasy. What a thrill when the boy from last Sunday returned to the same spot! My story could continue with new twists and turns. Sometimes, I would be a part of the story in my head — we’d bump into each other during communion and it would be the beginning of a grand adventure. Other times, I wouldn’t be a character, just an invisible witness to their unique home life, say living in a mansion with robot nannies and a mini fridge in their room.
This day-dreaming technique stuck with me. I’d use it during boring school days, while waiting for my siblings' sports practices to end, and on long road-trips. I can still vividly remember a fantasy that I invented during a Spring Break trip to the beach. In it, my 3rd-grade crush’s parents rear ended our car as we were driving down to the beach. Of course, his family paid for the damage that I knew my parents couldn’t cover, and our families hit it off so well (Hah! What a coincidence that we bumped into you here!) that we spent the rest of the vacation together. Me and the crush of course fell in love and began an epic romance.
All of this to say: I adapted to the boredom. I’d like to think that this was a somewhat healthy response. I found a way to fill my time, I exercised my creative writing — rather, thinking — skills, and I was able to stay rooted in reality. I didn’t expect to be dating said crush come Monday after Spring Break.
So ultimately, it appears that we have three choices when it comes to being bored:
Be bored
Find a healthy response to boredom
Indulge in an unhealthy response to boredom
Just be bored
We are so fearful of being alone in our own head, that we are willing to do anything to resist. A study remarkably found that people would rather be electrically shocked than be left alone with their own thoughts.
Allowing our brain to wander, following our thoughts wherever they might go, is not only an incredible step in self-discovery, it can open up new brain pathways and invigorate our creativity.
I love the quote in this article on the importance of children being bored. Psychologist Peter Gray says, “Now when my son tells me he is bored, I say, ‘That’s great honey!’”
It might be easy to tell our children “it’s good to be bored!,” but practicing what we preach can be challenging. It’s a bit like taking on meditation or mindfulness. We resist this space in our own head, but as the studies above outline, this time can be priceless.
Healthy responses to boredom
While allowing yourself to be bored might be the ultimate goal, I like to live in reality. First of all, It’s not the easiest choice – even if it might be the most rewarding in the long term. But it might also be unrealistic to achieve during every moment of boredom.
You can retrain your brain, though, to have healthy responses to boredom, and this might look different for everyone.
Hunt writes in The Guardian of long holidays spent at sea, “On those trips I read every book on board, regardless of interest (a dictionary; a medical encyclopedia) or age appropriateness (pulpy Dick Francis thrillers, replete with rumpy-pumpy); and when I ran out of other people’s stories, I wrote my own.”
Grace Atwood, a writer and influencer who’s writing I enjoy, picked up a couple new hobbies that I found inspiring: mahjong and needlepoint. Mahjong is a great hobby for community building, but I really love the idea of picking up needlepoint because it requires using your hands and your focus.
If you’re looking for a new hobby to pick up to fight the boredom in your day, I recently compiled a master list of what to do instead of scrolling that might help you.
Indulge in unhealthy responses
And here lies the easy path: indulge in the simple and easy relief of a doom scroll.
A couple weeks ago, I woke up a little early, well ahead of my alarm clock. This is rare for me. I could have made a healthy decision and got up for some stretching, read my book, or started preparing school lunches early. Did I? Of course not. I picked up my phone. I had deleted the Facebook app at the start of the summer, but I’ve started another new habit by just logging in on my Chrome browser (I know, I know!).
Here’s what's absurd about me engaging in this behavior – on the browser, the user experience is incredibly worse than the app. It’s designed to get you to download the app, so not only are features missing (I can’t actually see who has chatted me despite that annoying red notification telling me I have an unread message), but I am pretty certain there are more ads and more ‘suggested’ posts and accounts. And unlike the more sophisticated algorithm of the app, the targeting is a bit flimsy. I am constantly being served suggested accounts that are so far off my radar of things I care about. This results in me only reading and somewhat caring about maybe one in twenty posts in my feed. And those posts surely they at least give me something that makes this all worth it? But no. It’s objectively more boring than sitting in my bed and staring at the ceiling.
And yet, because my dopamine centers and habit loops are all out of whack, I still lingered there for an extra five minutes after my alarm finally went off. I deeply indulged in an unhealthy response to boredom, and I am left with the consequences:
I started my day with negativity - the posts I did read included some drama on our local moms group that wasn’t even relevant to me.
I let my goals get further out of reach - I know this is a habit I want to break, and I hurt those efforts
I traded half an hour of my life. Thirty minutes – that would have been better spent doing nothing or at bare minimum something productive – I threw away.
We all have those days where you are so busy up to your eyeballs you barely have a second to breathe, let alone be bored. I’d wager to guess a good bit of those have a lot of times we are bored, and it’s time to start looking at these moments as opportunities.
Here’s my challenge for you (and me!):
Practice being bored in the short boredom spurts. I’m talking waiting in line, walking the dog, sitting in the waiting room. These are good opportunities to get to know your brain, to follow your thoughts wherever they go, or simply, to notice the world around you.
Discover healthy responses for long boredom periods. This is going to look different for everyone and it requires taking some inventory of yourself and how you picture your life. Maybe you want to start taking a book or crossword puzzle with you wherever you go so you pick that up instead of your phone. It could be time to pick up a new hobby like Grace or hone in on a skill you’ve always wanted to master. Are audiobooks and podcasts okay? This is for you to determine.
Revisiting Tolstoy's quote “the desire to desire”: Desire is a good thing. It means we are alive! Don’t diminish that feeling, but find ways to let it serve you, not control you.