Are You Bored? Or Are You Boring?

Why no one over five years old wants to admit they’re bored

I’m bored.

How many times have you heard that? Especially if you have young children?

Do you ever find yourself struggling to find something to do? Maybe you’ve scrolled through all your social media feeds, watched all the shows you can stream and read every article on your favourite websites.

You’re officially bored.

You might be bored as you read this article?

Years ago, I temped for a company that was so boring that I can’t even remember what they did. My job was to type up dictated letters for one of the directors. He knew the letters were boring. He knew the job was boring. So now and again, he would tell a joke in the middle of the letter to keep me on my toes and help with the boredom.

But I’m not going to do that in this article, so you can stop reading now. No, no, I don’t mean it.

Tolstoy called boredom ‘a desire for desires’ and I guess that’s right? When you’re bored, you want to do something, but you can’t think of what you want to do?

Everyone feels bored sometimes; it’s normal.

Being Bored

Do you admit to being bored? Would you tell anyone if you’re having one of those days where nothing seems to light your fire?

If I complained about being bored as a child, I was told that only boring people get bored, which didn’t do much for my boredom or my self-esteem, and the risk of being called boring might stop you from admitting you’re bored.

Professor John Eastwood of York University in Canada says that boredom is a common state. Yet, people he interviewed said things like, ‘I’m never bored. People who get bored are weak characters,’ and this kind of view might stop you from saying you’re bored.

After all, no one wants to be thought of as boring.

Maybe you feel that you shouldn’t be bored? Being bored makes you question your life. You start to analyse your relationships or your career because you think there must be a reason that you’re bored?

Maybe you should ditch everything and start again? That type of thinking will lead you down a whole different rabbit hole.

You don’t know why you’re bored when you have a busy life?

I have clients who lead busy lives but tell me they get bored if they don’t have plans for the weekend. It’s as if the busy switch is turned off, and they don’t know what to do.

They don’t give themselves time to relax and do nothing because they imagine that’s boring, so they’re bored by the idea of doing nothing.

But doing nothing can lead to creativity, can’t it?

Does being bored lead to creativity?

Kate Greene, a freelance journalist who spent four months in Hawaii on a simulated Mars mission for NASA, said, ‘On Mars I learned that boredom has two sides — it can either rot the mind or rocket it to new places.’

Is this true?

James Danckert, a neuroscientist and John D. Eastwood, psychologist authors of ‘Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom’ say that there isn’t any empirical evidence that boredom unleashes creativity. They believe that what you mean is that you want more free time to be able to daydream and let your mind wander.

You want some staring time.

Not looking at anything in particular. You could be staring at the sea, garden, or even a wall.

You need staring time. You rush around, filling your day with more and more jobs because you feel that if you do a bit more and try a bit harder, you’ll succeed at whatever success means to you.

But this is just being busy. And being busy can get boring.

And children need staring time. Allowing children to get bored is a good thing. Children are so overstimulated with technology, pre and after school classes and clubs that they don’t have time to allow their minds to wander. If they’re caught staring out of the window at school, they’re told to pay attention.

But paying attention all the time is exhausting; everyone needs staring time. Time to get bored.

What to do when you’re bored

The first thing is not to keep thinking that you’re bored. You know that you’re always feeling your thinking, and so the more you think you’re bored, the longer the feeling will last. This type of thinking keeps the feeling in place.

Recognise that your feeling comes from your state of mind at this moment. After all, nothing has changed on the outside, so eating, drinking, gambling, or rampant sex will only stop you from being bored because it’s given you something else to think about.

As Andy Warhol says, ‘You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.’

Learn how to relax.

I know how to relax, you might say. But is this true?

You might want to relax in front of Netflix or play a video game, but are you relaxing? I’m not suggesting ways to relax because relaxation for one person might be rushing around on a paintball field, whereas it’s a bubble bath for someone else.

But how often do you let your mind relax? I’ve talked about daydreaming and staring time, but can you relax your mind?

This might be meditation, although, for many people, meditation is boring, so that kind of defeats the object. But notice how often you think about one particular thing and go around in a thought loop?

And I’ll bet this one thing is something you’re worried or bothered about? Learning to let go of persistent thoughts really will relax your mind.

Don’t judge the feeling. If you’re bored, so what? No one died of boredom. Sit with the feeling, and eventually, you’ll be so bored of being bored that the feeling will shift.

Practice doing nothing. I admit I have a hard time with this one. I always seem to be doing something, so sitting and doing nothing is a stretch but the more than you learn to do nothing, no phone to scroll through, no book to read, nothing to watch or listen to, the easier it is to rest in the moment when you need to.

And enjoy being bored.