Boredom Is Your Brain’s Way of Saying, “Let Go Explore!”
Summer is here! BBQs, trip to the pool, and kids’ cries of “I’m bored! What can I do?!”
At least that’s the way it used to be. In the device-deprived free-range 1970s summers of my childhood, the days were both lusciously long and peppered with boredom. And the solution to that boredom was usually found through doing something. Heading outside to see what was interesting. Losing ourselves in books and art supplies. Playing with friends. And sometimes doing things that got us into trouble.
A recent study from my studio
Letting kids mostly deal with boredom on their own was not a parenting strategy, it was just a part of life.
But things have changed. We live in a world where boredom balms – social media, Netflix, doomscrolling, online puzzles – are quick and easy to find. In fact, they are sometimes hard to avoid. Perhaps because of the ease with which we can now sidestep boredom, it seems we have become more boredom averse. Children who can’t yet reliably work their fingers are handed screens at the first sign of fidgeting. And many of the rest of us instinctively turn to our own digital worlds when there is nothing else going on.
What’s wrong with these responses? In the short term, probably nothing. Being bored is no fun and we are motivated to look for a fix. Passive entertainment is an easy and captivating one.
The problem is that boredom evolved for a reason and being passively entertained is not it.
What’s so great about boredom?
Boredom, coupled with curiosity, is nature’s way of leading us out of our well-worn ruts and into new territory. Just like the pain of hunger motivates us to feed our bodies, the pain of boredom motivates us to feed our brains. Boredom signals that there’s not enough going on and that it’s a good time to explore our world or ourselves and learn something new. It pushes us to the fertile edge between familiarity and exploration where knowledge is gained, discoveries are made, and creativity flourishes.
The problem is that boredom is a blunt signal. It tells us that our brains are not sufficiently engaged but it doesn’t tell us why or what to do about it. Like any pain, physical or mental, the overriding concern is getting rid of the feeling as quickly and easily as possible. And these days, the big business of passive entertainment is more than happy to help us out.
But if relieving our boredom passively is all that we do, we will suffer from the cumulative effects of lost opportunity – opportunities to explore and engage with people, places, and information on a deeper level. And this in turn makes it less likely that we will make discoveries, think creatively, develop our skills, and build the sturdy knowledge structures that we, as a species, have evolved to depend on.
What is boredom telling you?
In their book, Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, James Danckert and John D. Eastwood liken boredom to the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon. Our brains are crying out for something else, but they can’t quite say what.
Do we respond with the quick fix of brain candy? With a trip to the fridge? With a trip to the bar? With impulsive or risky behavior? Or do we try and make choices that will be more enriching or productive in the long run?
If we pause and listen to what the boredom signal is telling us, we might be able to give ourselves both what our brains want in the short run and what we need in the long run.
Are you bored simply because you are not interested in what’s going on? If you can’t switch to something else, you can try and trick yourself into being interested by cultivating curiosity. Ask yourself questions like: Why would someone else find this interesting? What could this have to do with me? What’s coming next? What could I or we do differently to make this more interesting? As a longer-term strategy, you can bolster your ability to intentionally focus and engage your mind by preserving and restoring your capacity to pay attention.
Are you bored because you are not challenged? Look or ask for greater challenge at work. Get out of an artistic rut by exploring a new medium. Learn a new skill. Explore an area of interest more deeply.
Are you bored because what you are doing is monotonous but necessary? Try softly engaging your brain. You could doodle, listen to music, or put yourself in nature. As long as it’s not too distracting, this gives your brain something to do while leaving just enough mental focus for the monotonous task.
Are you bored because you are captive in a place where there’s nothing obvious to do? Instead of pulling your phone out the next time you’re on the metro or in a waiting room, practice being in the here and now. Let your mind wander or practice mindfulness. As Andy Warhol famously said, “You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”
Are you bored because you just don’t see the purpose of what you are doing? Peter Toohey, in his book Boredom: A Lively History calls this “existential boredom” which can go hand in hand with apathy, depression, and feeling trapped. Addressing this kind of boredom in an adaptive way might require some soul searching – possibly assisted – directed at finding more meaning in what you are doing or making changes that bring more purpose to your life.
Use it or lose it
Figuring out how to adaptively respond to boredom is a skill – one that must be developed in childhood and exercised throughout life.
Unfortunately, many parents – both from an abundance of love and from a need to keep their children occupied – short circuit their children’s ability to recognize and solve the problem of boredom on their own. In doing so, they remove an important catalyst for building the knowledge, skills, and flexible thinking that help make us our best selves.
As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips points out in his essay On Being Bored in the book On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life:
“How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him – as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.”
Circumventing boredom isn’t just a problem for kids.
Even as adults, if we overly rely on quick and easy boredom fixes, we can end up weakening our capacity to respond to boredom in beneficial ways. We stop pushing ourselves. We become complacent. We start to lose our capacity for engaging in the kind of reflection and creative mind-wandering that can provide an antidote to boredom through self-directed engagement of the mind.
A somewhat alarming 2014 study conducted by researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts and a single possible external diversion – a button that delivered a painful shock. Astonishingly, almost half the participants ended up pressing the button, even though they had previously experienced the shock and said they would pay money to avoid it. The study duration? A mere 15 minutes. It’s as if people have become so accustomed to having an endlessly stimulating world at their fingertips that they have forgotten other ways to engage their minds.
Paradoxically, the quick boredom fixes that we often turn to may actually end up increasing boredom in the long term. A 2021 study from Radboud University in The Netherlands found, not surprisingly, that people who were more bored at work were more likely to use their smartphones. What was surprising was that after having used their smartphones, these people were actually more bored than before.
Should we embrace boredom?
Despite the usefulness of boredom as a motivator for learning and exploration, it has something of a bad reputation. It can be seen as a sign that you’re not doing enough, that your world isn’t rich enough, or that you aren’t disciplined enough.
Maybe as a backlash, I’ve noticed a recent trend of calling for people to “embrace boredom” as the psych-du-jour way to “unleash” creativity and productivity. But the call to embrace boredom seems as misplaced to me as the call to embrace failure. Neither are really what we’re after. It’s how we respond that counts.
The point is not to embrace boredom, but to listen to what is it telling us, decipher what we can learn from it, and embrace our own agency to act in a way that is more intentional than passive, more helpful than harmful.
Sometimes pure entertainment or distraction is really what we’re after. But sometimes, if we listen, we might discover that we crave something more – challenge, connection with friends or community, a greater sense of purpose, the well-being that can come from self-reflection, or simply a chance to relax and restore our minds.
What is boredom telling you? How will you choose to respond?