Let yourself be bored

Dec 02, 2023

Kirissa and I spent the weekend after Thanksgiving at Dawn Ranch in Guerneville (a small town in Northern California). Picture clusters of small cabins, tall redwood trees, foggy overcast, cold mornings, and a wood fireplace in the lodge.

I didn’t bring my laptop on the trip.

During the drive, I had other things to occupy my mind. Watching the road, checking Google Maps, listening to music, talking to Kirissa.

When we got there after dark, I focused on parking the car, getting unpacked, checking the map of the ranch, showering, watching a movie before bed.

It was the next morning when the void opened up.

When I’m at home, I have a routine: wake up, stretch, meditate, drink water, then walk to a coffee shop, open my computer, and start working.

That morning, waking up in the cabin, I didn’t know what to do.

I lay there and tried to think of things to do.

Eventually, Kirissa woke up. We walked to the lodge, ordered a coffee, sat by the fireplace, talked.

Then it happened. The conversation went in an interesting direction. Something I hadn’t thought of before. I started taking notes.

This continued throughout the trip.

Perusing shops, walking on the sidewalk downtown, eating breakfast at the diner.

Fresh, new ideas continued to pop into my head.

I didn’t dwell on them. Just wrote them down with my phone and then continued with whatever we were doing.

Before the trip, I was stuck on a project, not making much progress, and feeling a bit burned out.

After the trip, not only did I have some breakthroughs about what I needed to do to move the project forward, I also had new ideas at a higher level about how I wanted to spend my time and how the project would fit into that.

Boredom creates space inside your head

Your mind is filled with recent thoughts.

I notice this when I meditate.

When I sit back in my awareness and watch the thoughts that pass through my brain, most of the thoughts are related to my recent experiences—a Zoom meeting, a project I’m working on, a YouTube video, what happened at dinner last night.

Especially if you’re living your life at a fast pace and having experiences at a high rate, your mind is chock-full of these experience-related thoughts.

In addition to the rate of experiences (and resultant quantity of thoughts), there is also the complexity of each thought. For example, the information that gets sent to your brain when staring at a white ceiling is less complex than when watching a YouTube video designed to retain your attention with bright colors and quick flashes.

So, there are two characteristics of the thoughts that normally fill the space inside your head:

Quantity
Complexity

When you’re bored, things are slowed down and simpler.

Over time, the thoughts in your head related to recent experiences gradually vacate. Your mind gets more and more empty.

I believe there is an emotional aspect to this as well.

When you’re living at a frenetic pace, you tend to increase your levels of anxiety, stress, excitement, motivation, etc.

When you give yourself time and space to be bored, these emotions gradually dissipate.

What you end up with is a more empty human vessel that’s primed for inspiration.

When you go into a new situation, you’re receiving more of what’s going on around you, instead of being so preoccupied with the thoughts and emotions clogging up and swirling around inside your internal space.

Internal space is a vacuum that sucks in inspiration

If there’s not as much going on inside, you have more mental-emotional bandwidth to pay attention to what’s happening outside.

What you’re paying attention to are sensory inputs.

Primarily sight and sound.

Physical touch becomes more pronounced if you close your eyes and explore bodily sensations.

Smell and taste most often in the background but can leap to the forefront, e.g., smell of coffee in the morning, first bite of breakfast.

These sensory experiences translate to thoughts in your head.

As a writer, I’m often inspired by overheard conversations, lyrics in a song, even billboard copy. These words from my surroundings, whether spoken or written, type out inside my head. I can see the letters. I break them into verse and start a poem or imagine the next sentences at the beginning of an essay.

For artists of different forms, I imagine different sensory inputs are particularly noticeable. A painter is more impressed by sight, shape, color. A dancer, by the steps of pedestrians. A musician, by the rhythm of coffee dripping into the pot.

And this extends beyond traditional art forms. A businessman realizes a business opportunity in food supply chain while eating at a restaurant. A mother picks up a parenting strategy from another mother consoling her child after falling.

You can also pay attention to what’s happening inside.

A feeling you’ve been repressing.

You might be more in touch with your desires. If you’re not busy, you can do exactly what you want to do. Take a nap when you’re tired. Eat a snack when you’re hungry.

The point is that your consciousness isn’t clogged.

Picture a desk with a bunch of papers and stacks of books on it.

One page goes unnoticed.

Now picture a desk with one single page on the desk and one word on that page. That word gets a lot of attention.

Our phones and social media prevent us from being bored

According to a 2023 survey:

89 percent of Americans check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up
75 percent use their phone on the toilet
60 percent sleep with their phone at night
57 percent consider themselves addicted to their phones

“On average, Americans have a screen time of 4 hours and 25 minutes each day on their mobile devices … Overall, the average American will spend over two months (65 days) on their phones in 2023.”

It’s difficult to be bored nowadays.

Your phone in your pocket. The TV mounted to your wall. Your computer on your desk.

Screens with access to the internet.

Audio-visual experiences specifically designed to hold your attention.

If you want to reap the creative benefits of boredom mentioned above, you have to stay off these devices.