Recently, my friends and I embarked on a camping trip to a site located 4,600 feet above sea level. After a long 7–8 hours drive, we finally arrived at our destination, exhausted but happy to spend our long weekend together. I was thrilled to be surrounded by nature and escape the chaos of city life. It had been so long since I could breathe in the fresh, crisp air of the forest without worrying about air pollution.
After parking our car, we gathered our bags and went on a quest to locate the perfect spot for our camping site. Fortunately, we were accompanied by a friend with extensive tent construction knowledge. He brought all the necessary tools and patiently guided us through the process. Although I had prior experience in building tents, I still found it to be a challenging task. But we persisted, and we successfully set up our tent after a while. With that out of the way, we proceeded to organize our belongings, which included setting up a small table for cooking, gathering food, and arranging portable chairs and other camping essentials.
When we were engaged on something, we didn’t realize that time passed us by. It was 4pm already. I was bored as I got nothing to do. There was a battle inside of me between opening my phone and embracing the boredom. So, I decided to walk around the camping site to enjoy the scenery. The camping site isn’t huge as it is built for private experience. Surrounded by giant trees, there were not many things I could see aside from forest, bushes, and a small farm. But, it was a good experience to spend time outside in the nature as it lacks of external distractions. I can be alone with my own thoughts.
When the evening came, I laid on a hammock and gazed at the dark blue sky, pondering the mysteries of life. I decided not to open my phone to distract myself from boredom. I was embracing my boredom. The moment was tranquil. I was fully present, enjoying the peacefulness of the moment. It was a reminder to take more moments like this in my life, allowing my mind to wander and letting any nagging thoughts rise to the surface. Additionally, the weather was chilly, but the air was crisp and pure, allowing me to breathe without any concerns about pollution harming my lungs. I felt really grateful about my life.
What boredom is trying to tell us
The modern world demands a lot of our attention, affecting how we spend our time. We are being re-programmed on what to put our attention into. We consume junk news daily. We eat ultra-processed food whenever we get bored. We distract ourselves to phones and social media from what really matters to us. Then, we switch to binge-watch Netflix series overnight. We never give ourselves a piece of boredom that we are currently lacking. Boredom is fading away from our lives.
A 2014 study from the University of Virginia found that people “typically didn’t enjoy spending six to 15 minutes in a room by themselves” and that “many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.”
In his book, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, Michael Easter writes about how boredom is indeed dead:
One scientist way up north in Ontario, Canada, is discovering that this is bad. A type of bad that’s infected us all. He believes that our collective lack of boredom is not only burning us out and leading to some ill mental health effects, but also muting what boredom is trying to tell us about our minds, emotions, ideas, wants, and needs.
He is James Danckert, a cognitive neuroscientist and an expert on the psychology of boredom, stated that he was fascinated by the notion that boredom is not a social or cultural thing. It’s something within the brain that processes pleasure, reward, and engagement.
He also added that boredom can be pretty damn uncomfortable no matter how healthy you are.
Philosopher Martin Heidegger accused boredom of being “an insidious creature.” Søren Kierkegaard called boredom “the root of all evil.” But Danckert had a different view on this since he has been inside the human mind, searching for what areas of the brain are at work when a person is feeling the discomfort of boredom:
Boredom is neither good nor bad. How you respond to it is what can make it good or bad. When we’re bored, our minds tell us that whatever we are doing isn’t working―we’re failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Too many of us respond poorly. We become prone to accidents, risky activities, loneliness, and ennui, and we waste ever more time on technological distractions.
According to Danckert, our brains have two modes: focused and unfocused. Focused mode is a state where our brains are engaged in something such as checking phones, playing games, watching movies, talking with friends, and completing work tasks.
On the other hand, unfocused mode occurs when we’re not paying attention. It’s inward mind-wandering, a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently in the focused state. Time in unfocused mode is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more. After all, we can’t lift heavier weights every time. We need rest somewhere in between.
In the past, our ancestors dealt with unfocused time by resting and planning for the next hunt which is essential for our brain health, productivity, personal sanity, and sense of meaning. But there’s been a cosmic shift in boredom. The way we now deal with it is “like junk food for your mind.”
Now tell me, when did you last give yourself time for rest without any external stimulus distracting you? I bet the time spent on your phone has all the answers.
Why we get bored
Russian classic writer Leo Tolstoy described the state of boredom as “a desire for desires”:
It is defined as “an aversive state of wanting but being unable to engage in satisfying activity.”
Psychologist Viktor Frankl once wrote:
“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
The feeling of meaninglessness manifests as boredom. Purposeful actions infuse your life with enthusiasm and ambitions. A lack of purpose sucks the joy out of one’s life. In other words, we can’t sustain interest in what we’re doing when we don’t fundamentally care about what we’re doing.
Dr. John Eastwood, a psychology professor who runs a ‘boredom lab’ at York University in Canada, defines it as:
“The uncomfortable feeling of wanting but being unable to engage in satisfying activity.”
There are two key psychological mechanisms at play when we feel a bout of boredom coming on: the “desire bind” — desperately wanting to do something but not wanting to do anything in particular — and the “unoccupied mind” — the issue that whatever we’re doing isn’t exercising our cognitive capacity. There’s a mismatch between skill and challenge.
And the discomfort we feel when ennui strikes are written into our biological makeup. Eastwood adds:
“We’re wired to want to be engaged with the world, exercise our abilities and realize our potential to stop us stagnating as a species, so we’ve evolved to find the state of being unoccupied quite aversive.”
Why boredom is important for well-being
June 29th, 2007, is the death of boredom, according to Michael Easter, when iPhone first launched into the market.
Boredom is neither good nor bad. Boredom is supposed to tell us something. It can be an emotional feeling that we have been neglecting our whole lives. It can be a moment to reflect on something missing in our lives. Or it could be letting our minds rest and reflecting on what really matters.
Nowadays, we rarely do that anymore. We numb our minds using our phones. We open social media while sitting on the toilet. We play games when we don’t have something to do. We binge-watching 12 episodes of Netflix in a weekend. We don’t listen to our minds anymore. We lose the ability to be okay with doing nothing while being alone with our thoughts.
We never let our minds wander, which can also improve creativity.
Aaron Sorkin, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and director behind The Social Network and The West Wing found that no matter how hard he racked his brains at his desk, inspiration would most likely strike while he was unwinding in the shower. So, naturally, he had one installed in the corner of his office and proceeded to bathe eight times a day.
I know it feels like a cliche, but it is a cliche for some reason!
Similarly, Bill Gates realized the power of nothingness while he was leading Microsoft, carving out a biannual ‘think week’ when he would head to a hideaway to do nothing but ponder the big technological questions of the day.
Boredom can be a helpful way to relieve stress and generate fresh ideas for the problems that have been weighing on our minds.
“Boredom is a signal emotion like pain or anger, warning us that something needs fixing, that what we’re doing isn’t good for us. So doing something to distract from that feeling, like getting drunk to numb pain or passively consuming something to alleviate boredom, isn’t addressing the underlying problem.”
Do nothing or take a walk
I know it is hard to deal with boredom. Technology has been rewiring our brains to open and check the phone occasionally whenever we feel bored because we lose the capability to deal with boredom. We’ve been guilty of this.
It is hard to just stare at a blank space, ceiling, or wall and then wander about something. It’s uncomfortable. But we need to reset our relationship with boredom once and for all. We can’t let external force dictates how we should feel about our lives. We must regain control of our lives by neglecting the feeling of always being open and checking phones occasionally.
In a study where people were asked to leave their phones behind and step into the empty, soundproof room, many were screaming, but those who managed to stay felt pleasant after a while. Eastwood adds:
“The value of downtime is that it allows us to reclaim our agency. If we’re constantly being stimulated from the outside, we can literally lose sight of who we are, what matters to us or why we’re doing anything.”
Finally, if you find yourself unable to focus on an empty space or wall, taking a walk is another option. Without any outside distractions like music or podcasts, simply be in the present moment and enjoy the experience. Let’s take control of how we use our time.
