You’re at the doctor’s office, waiting for your name to be called. You have a bit of downtime at work. You’re standing by the counter waiting for your food pickup order to be ready. You’re waiting in the airport for your plane to board. What do you do? You probably don’t let yourself be bored. After all, we’ve got a solution to this problem in our pockets.

At the risk of making myself sound older than I am – I think it’s the phones. Now, I’m not saying we should strive to always be bored. I think that might get us into trouble – but small amounts of boredom are a good thing.

No one is bored anymore, and if there’s a time where we should be bored, we grab for our phones and shoot off a quick text, scroll Reddit, browse YouTube, or read the news. What did you do as a kid? 

At the dentist’s office, I’d try to find everything hidden in the Highlights magazine. At the restaurant, I’d sit there and people watch, wondering what kind of lives the people around me had and what kind of person they were. Riding in a car, I’d pretend I was running outside of it and jumping over fence posts and ziplining along powerlines (don’t tell me I was the only one!). Boredom was nice, it fed my imagination, I made up stories that I was a super spy ninja out to save the world. Or, I’d pretend I was Susan Pevensie. Either way, I don’t do that much anymore – and I actually miss it.

I sometimes feel that I don’t have the imagination I used to. I hit walls for this blog, where I stare at a blank page and I have no idea what to write. Sometimes it feels like my creativity is broken, and I think it might be because I don’t let myself be bored like I used to. There’s always a TV show on in the background, or music on, or I’m scrolling through Reddit. While I might still technically be bored, I’m still giving my brain constant input. 

The good scientist I am, I decided to look at why boredom is a good thing. Boredom, it turns out, is the emotional indication to pursue an alternate goal (Bench & Lench, 2013). In fact, boredom is what signals our brains that it’s high time to pursue a new goal (Bench & Lench, 2013). Maybe that’s learning how to draw (more than a stick figure), or making up a story in our head that we turn into a book, or dream of how we would start a home bakery and build that business plan. Boredom encourages us to look out for new experiences and make new goals (Bench & Lench, 2013). 

This week, try being bored for a little. Waiting in line? Don’t automatically distract yourself. Let yourself be bored for a couple minutes. I’ll work on it this week, too – who knows, maybe I’ll start saving the world again (or join Top Gun)!

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Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions below or you can contact me here! I love hearing from you! 

Source: Bench, S. W., & Lench, H. C. (2013). On the function of boredom. Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), 3(3), 459–472. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs3030459