Sarah Pichardo When was the last time you were actually bored? And I don’t mean sitting on the couch scrolling through TikTok because there’s nothing good on Netflix or checking Instagram while you wait for an appointment. I mean genuinely having nothing to do and spending some time alone with your thoughts.
For a lot of us, that probably doesn’t happen very often anymore.
We’ve gotten incredibly good at filling every empty second of our lives. Waiting in line means checking our phones, while eating lunch alone usually involves finding something to watch. A drive somewhere comes with a podcast, audiobook or playlist keeping us company. Even folding laundry apparently requires a show playing in the background.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but somewhere along the way, constant entertainment became so normal that having nothing to do started to feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s time we got a little more comfortable with being bored again.
We’re Never Really Bored Anymore
Boredom used to be a normal part of life because sometimes there genuinely wasn’t anything to do. You waited for your friend to show up, stared out the window during a long car ride or sat in a doctor’s office flipping through whatever outdated magazine happened to be sitting on the table.
Now we carry an endless supply of entertainment around in our pockets, so we can almost always find something to fill our attention. Another video waits to be watched, another post gives us something to read, another notification wants our attention or another person on the internet explains something we didn’t know we needed explained.
Five minutes of scrolling obviously isn’t going to ruin your life. The bigger issue comes when we fill every five minutes of empty space with something. Your brain doesn’t get much of a chance to wander because the second it runs out of something to focus on, we give it something new.
Your Brain Doesn’t Need to Be Entertained 24/7
Somewhere along the way, we started treating doing nothing like wasting time. Sitting on the couch usually means finding something to watch, while a walk becomes an opportunity to catch up on a podcast. And if you happen to have a free hour, there’s probably something productive you feel like you should be doing with it.
That mentality makes it really hard to just exist for a while without feeling like you should be accomplishing something.
There are plenty of times when being productive matters, but life also needs room for time that serves absolutely no purpose. Your brain needs downtime, and swapping work for a different kind of stimulation doesn’t always give it much of a break.
Sometimes sitting around and doing nothing for a little while is perfectly fine, even if it feels strange at first.
Boredom Gives Your Brain Somewhere to Go
Think about how many random ideas you’ve had while taking a shower, driving somewhere familiar or doing some boring household chore.
When you do something that doesn’t require your full attention, your mind has room to wander. You remember something you forgot about, come up with an idea or suddenly figure out the solution to a problem you’ve been thinking about for three days.
There’s actually some research behind this. In a 2014 study, researchers Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman asked participants to complete boring activities before moving on to creative tasks. The participants who experienced boredom first showed increased creativity, with some types of boring activities producing an even stronger effect.
The researchers suggested that daydreaming may help explain the connection, which makes a lot of sense when you think about where some of your best ideas tend to show up. Once your brain gets enough space to wander, it can start making connections without constantly processing something new.
When you constantly take in new information, your brain doesn’t have much time to do anything with the information already there. Google, TikTok or a Reddit thread can certainly help you figure something out, but sometimes staring out a window for a while might do more good than consuming another hour of information.
We’ve Made Silence Weird
Try sitting somewhere by yourself without looking at your phone and pay attention to how long it takes before you feel the urge to reach for it.
Try it while waiting for an appointment, eating lunch alone or standing in line at the grocery store. For some of us, the urge will probably show up pretty quickly.
Habit explains a lot of it. We reach for our phones so automatically that sometimes we’re already looking at them before we consciously decide there’s something we want to check. Being visibly unoccupied can also feel a little uncomfortable now. Suddenly you’re wondering where you’re supposed to look, what you should do with your hands and whether everyone around you thinks you’re weird for just sitting there.
They probably don’t. They’re most likely too busy looking at their own phones to notice.
Boredom Can Help You Figure Out What You Actually Like
Constant stimulation also means there’s almost always something or someone telling us what we should pay attention to next. There’s another show everyone is watching, another product everyone apparently owns, another place you need to visit and another trend you’re already somehow late to.
After a while, figuring out what you actually feel like doing when nobody is suggesting something to you can become surprisingly difficult.
When you let yourself get bored, eventually you have to figure it out. Maybe you pick up a book or decide to go outside for a while. You might remember that you used to like drawing or end up reorganizing a closet because apparently that’s where the day takes you.
Whatever you choose, you chose it because you actually wanted something to do, not because an algorithm handed you the next thing.
You Don’t Need to Throw Your Phone Away
Getting comfortable with boredom doesn’t require throwing your phone into a lake, deleting every social media account you have and disappearing into the woods.
Technology is part of our lives, and we have plenty of good reasons to use it. The goal is simply to stop automatically treating every quiet moment as something we need to fill.
Start by leaving your phone in another room while you make dinner, taking a short walk without headphones or waiting in line without immediately opening an app. You could even drive somewhere without turning on a podcast or music and see where your mind goes.
Ten minutes is plenty to start. You might be surprised by how difficult it feels at first, which is probably a pretty good indication that it’s worth doing more often.
Let Yourself Be Bored
There’s no need to turn boredom into another thing you have to accomplish correctly. You don’t need to create a 30-day challenge, download an app to track your screen-free minutes or find some way to optimize how effectively you’re doing nothing.
Just give yourself a little empty space every once in a while and see what happens.
Your mind might wander somewhere weird. You might remember something you haven’t thought about in years, come up with a good idea or finally work through something that’s been bothering you. Or you might spend ten minutes thinking about absolutely nothing important.
That’s okay too.
We’ve spent years getting better and better at making sure we never have to be bored, and somewhere along the way, we may have forgotten what boredom gives us: room for our minds to wander.
Maybe being bored every once in a while isn’t such a bad thing.
