How Boredom is Good for You

It can be what’s needed, to get out of your creative slump!

If you’re born in the good old 80ies, chances are, you remember the feeling of being bored. Lazy Sundays, with all your friends gone to visit their aunt Karin, you sitting around the house, not wanting to dig out the can full of Legos or play Street Fighter for the billionth time.

Boredom. I very well remember this feeling (yep, I’m that old).

But do you?

What I did, when I was a bored kid

I remember it fondly. I would possibly break out dad’s encyclopedia or mom’s medical journals and look through the pictures and read what I could understand. I would bring my globe to the living room, build myself a fort out of pillows under the dining table and play “researcher”, looking up countries on the globe (it was a time WAY before Google Earth).

Another thing I enjoyed doing back as a kid, when I was bored, was plain, old reading. I grabbed a few books that I enjoyed and just vanished in a fantasy world for hours on end. I loved the “Five Friends” books by Enid Blyton (before I got started with King, Lovecraft, Verne, Dick and Poe).

If I was really really bored, I tried to put together a puzzle. It kept me occupied for hours and even though I found it rather dull, I was in for the sense of accomplishment, when the thing was finished. Then I messed it up again and put it away, for the next really boring Sunday.

Another all-time-classic of course was and is drawing and painting. All kids love it and so did I. I was into drawing dinosaurs and little comic strips. I’d park myself at the dining table and mess it all up with my drawing utensils, feeling like some creative folks from Paris in the late 70ies (sans the smoking). It made me feel like a true “artist” and I loved it.

When we were driving somewhere, be it onto vacation or to annoying relatives, I loved to play a bit on my Gameboy, in the back of the car. It routinely made me sick, but I still loved it. Reading in the car was and is to this day not an option — it makes me even more sick. So I was stuck with the Gameboy for good.

If the batteries ran out, I’d look out of the window and imagine my remotely controlled car I had back then, driving alongside our family car, going crazy speeds and doing stunts like flips or driving up on the walls of passing buildings. I let my imagination run wild and found out, that it is way harder to imagine something real is not there, than the other way round.

So let’s look at this whole thing.

Back in the day, when I was bored, I’d read or look up countries on my globe. Basically, I worked on my cognitive skills and explored the world.

I honed my creativity by delving into fantasy-worlds of writers or drawing and painting, or imagining my remotely controlled car doing flips and crazy stunts.

By finishing puzzles I learned the sensation of “finishing things” and how to perservere. It also trained my pattern recognition and motoric skills.

Nowadays, we almost never get bored. We hardly “train” anything anymore. We don’t run out of things to do.

Boredom is a thing of the past

At least for me, it is. As an adult you get so tied up in your daily routines, your schedules and appointments — you can barely catch a break. Throw in a family to be supported and entertained and out goes any chance for boredom (you might find your marriage really boring though).

Still, there are moments, where we would be bored. Not in the sense like back in my childhood. Maybe during your time on the loo, while listening to your fiance, or while at work, or while driving to get somewhere. I created a habit of watching Youtube videos on the loo and listen to podcasts, while driving to my girlfriend, or to an appointment. The little time I spend in front of a TV, I break out my smartphone during commercial breaks, not to check social media (ugh), but to check my subscribed channels on Youtube. Still, I am glued to a screen, that’s passively feeding me entertainment disguising as information, keeping my brain busy.

We’re permanently entertained.

Thinking about this all made me more aware of how I spend “downtime”. I actively try now to put down all distractors and ways of entertaining myself during short periods of boredom. Starting with not taking my phone to the toilet with me. Imagine what happened…

I was sitting on the pot, getting bored, staring at the wall and then I just began contemplating things. Letting my imagination go unchecked for a bit. I developed a habit out of it and just after a few days I came up with a story I’m writing on currently (I might follow it up with a book called “Toilet Meditation”). It’s literally based on an idea I had while on the pot.

I realized how important it was, to give your brain a break, to let it spread it’s wings and find back to my naturally given creativity and curiosity.

Why would boredom be good for you?

A while back, I booked a session in a sensory deprevation tank. How it works, is like this: You go there, get undressed, shower and then you step into a tank full of salty water, that has your body temperature. When comfortably floating in that tank (that’s why it’s called “floating”), you close the lid and you’re now completely isolated. No sounds, visuals and not even a sense of “up and down” after a while. Since you float in the highly saturated salt-water and it has the same temperature as your body, you don’t feel where “you” stop and the water begins.

Sounds boring? Far from it.

Through this, I found a way to completely unplug from the web, get rid of all distractions and when you deprive your brain of all sensory input, it will automatically come up with something on its own. Your brain’s main duty (besides keeping all your unconscious bodily functions, like your heartbeat and breathing, running so you can stay alive) is to interpret your surroundings by means of sensory input through your eyes, nose, ears and skin.

If you take that away, you’re truly alone with yourself and your thoughts. Many of which you might not even know you had.

What was first a period of “getting used to”, soon turned into a very creative session of self-exploration.

It was there, I realized, how much of ourselves we give up, just to be entertained.

Out of convenience really. We are bombarded daily with ads, creators longing for our attention with clickbait videos, news that might or might not be true and a ton of little distractions like the “new message indicator” or small bursts of playing stupid phone games.

I think, our mind is not made, nor meant to be running on all cylinders all day. By doing that, we lose our ability to creatively think and reflect on ourselves, because we just don’t have the time, nor the ressources to do that.

All the time we gain, by the comforts of modern technology, we spend with garbage, because we’re not used to doing “nothing” anymore. By allowing yourself to be “bored” and your brain to come up with automated thoughts, you win back a lot of control, insight and creativity in your life.

Any idea what to do about that?

Well you can already see in the world, that many more people come to this (or a similar) realization. Maybe not through the same means as I did, but they do. It’s reflected in the raising trend of “awareness”, yoga, meditation and other, ancient teachings from the far east. “Being in the moment” or “being one with yourself” are crucial and central ideas in those teachings, happily turned into profitable industries.

What it basically means is: “Don’t get distracted you fool!”

May the entertainment be with you, always . The economy and entertainment industry have successfully trained us to the point, where we believe, being bored is something we should avoid at all costs like the plague.

We don’t.

Personally I believe, you entertain caged animals, so they don’t go crazy. I don’t want to be entertained. I wan’t to be “free”.

For me, boredom arises when you do nothing or something really repetitive. When you’re bored, your brain will go into a state of subtle performance (kind of like your laptop, when you’re not doing particularly demanding tasks) and your thoughts will wander, because you don’t need all that processing power of your brain for what you’re currently doing.

You’ll have ideas and insights, you might come up with something great. Whatever helps you to “unplug” and let your brain come up with thoughts worth exploring, do it. Try it out for a week and see how it changes your life.

Things you could try:

• meditation
• long walks in the forest (I love this one) without any tech
• put your phone on silent and leave it in a drawer (or get a dumb phone)
• cut down on your gaming time
• sports
• repetitive routines (like cleaning the house, but leave your headphones off)
• staring into a body of water or into the clouds
• anything that’s “boring” or repetitive

Simply, allow yourself to get bored, don’t seek out entertainment— the rest will follow automatically.

Good luck exploring your boredom.

Thank you so much for reading! :) This article is purely based on my personal life experience and opinion!