Let Yourself Be Bored
If you're reading this there's a good chance that you'll get bored and stop after a few sentences. It's probably because your judgement deemed that there are other things that's worth your attention. This is what Amanda Markey and George Loewenstein have posed in their "scarce-capacity" theory of boredom.
"So you have mental resources, they’re scarce and they’re really important and valuable, and boredom develops as this signal that mental resources are not being used wisely, they’re not being used on valuable pursuits."
- Amanda Markey
As I usually do whenever I do mundane tasks like washing the dishes or cleaning up my place, I listen to podcasts. And the other day, I came across this Freakanomics Radio episode (Am I Boring You?) wherein they explored boredom – which oddly enough I found interesting.
On this episode, they talked about a 2014 study called "The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind" in which students were placed in a room alone for 15 minutes with nothing to do but to think. The participants were also given an option to – albeit just a mild one – electric shock themselves.
They discovered that majority of the participants found the experience of just sitting there and thinking extremely uncomfortable that they started shocking themselves. One participant even did it 190 times in 15 minutes! Of course this is just a small sample size, but let's try to simply take this as it is – there are people who would rather inflict pain to themselves than to just sit down and think.
That sounded crazy but it got me thinking about my relationship with boredom. I've gotten better at it these past few years but admittedly, there are still times that I catch myself mindlessly distracting myself because I feel bored. Having my phone always within arm's reach made it even easier to get that dose of "electric shock". Be it to aimlessly browse Reddit or to spend an extraordinary amount of time on the YouTube wormhole, I'd do it at the slighest hint of boredom. This might seem harmless at first but there's already a lot of studies done about the negative effects of being continuously stimulated by our phones.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
- Blaise Pascal
Embrace Boredom
When smartphones came to our lives, it became extremely difficult to be bored again. How can you be bored when you have a constant stream of media right in your pocket? Whenever I'm waiting in some kind of line, my first impulse was to pull out my phone and check the final score of an NBA game even though I already did the same thing 10 minutes ago. It felt like I'm on auto-pilot.
In Cal Newport's Deep Work, he argued that the problem for most of us is that we try so hard to stave off any hint of boredom that we constantly engage with low quality activities like scrolling through a social media feed which leads to an inability to focus on cognitively demanding tasks.
I know that this sounds a bit woo-woo but this is why meditation has been a game changer for me. It taught me how to develop some kind of tolerance to boredom by absolutely doing nothing, letting my mind wander and just let it rest.
Boredom As A Gateway To Novelty
In many ways, I can attribute this blog and why I started it to boredom. The same can also be said as to why I started a podcast. I was just bored.
If we let it, boredom can give us a taste of adventure and introduce us to things that we've never thought of doing before. When I was starting this blog, I even asked myself: "Who starts a blog in 2021?".
To conclude, as extremely uncomfortable it might be, boredom is not something that should be avoided altogether. It cultivates creativity and focus, and it can also give us an insight on what we truly value the most.