Boredom may be a common part of most people’s lives, but it can also be full of possibilities
“I’m bored” is a constant refrain from irritated children the world over. Parents tend to hope — and often pray — that they’ll one day grow out of it. The truth is, though, that none of us ever do. From university students, through working people to the elderly, boredom in one form of another is just about always with us.
In our hyper-active, work- and achievement-obsessed culture, admitting that you’re bored is a little like admitting you’re constantly fantasizing about kinky sex, or that you haven’t much sense of purpose — extremely common, vaguely shameful and likely to provoke a swift response along the lines that it’s high time you pulled yourself together and found something useful to do instead.
One of our society’s besetting sins is filling every waking moment with activity — and forcing our children to do the same. Maybe it comes from the old-fashioned notion expressed in the saying: “The Devil makes work for idle hands.” Maybe it’s a fear that anyone who isn’t constantly ‘on the go’ will grow up to be a loser. Maybe it’s a notion that to be bored is also to be diminished in some way; to be in a state of temporary uselessness.
But what if being bored is useful? What if it’s even close to essential for provoking you into more innovative and creative ways of thinking? What if human beings need to be bored some of the time for the health of their brains?
Our brains certainly use periods of boredom
Benedict Carey, writing in The New York Times, has found that research is suggesting a very different value for those times when our brains are apparently idling:
Yet boredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.
Researchers in Britain reported that boredom is central to learning and creativity. Brain-imaging technology shows that the brain is highly active when disengaged, consuming only about 5 percent less energy than when involved in routine tasks. Something is going on inside. What it is, isn’t so clear.
What can you do to make periods of boredom more useful?
If boredom was simply some period of relative mental and physical activity, I suspect it wouldn’t be much of a problem. What causes people to complain of being bored is the frustration and irritation that comes with it. You’re there, in the third meeting today, and someone is droning on and on about a topic of no interest whatsoever. For a while, you amuse yourself doodling on your pad. Then you watch a fly crawling up the window. Then you go back to doodling. Yet, all the while, something inside you is screaming: “Let me out! I don’t want to be here! I have so much else I need to be doing. If this goes on much longer, I’ll start to eat my own leg.” That’s boredom. So what can you do?
- Mental ‘noodling’. One of the most useful ways to cope with periods of enforced boredom is to spent the time playing with odd ideas. When you’re busy, there’s no time for tinkering with some notion that popped up out of the blue. You have something more important to do. But when you’re bored, with nothing else you can do, a bit of mental noodling can sometimes throw up incredibly valuable ideas you would never have got around to otherwise.
- Constructive day-dreaming. Not all day-dreaming is mere self-indulgence. Everyone has heard the story of Einstein conceiving the Special Theory of Relativity while day-dreaming about what it would be like to fly around the Universe on a ray of light. All those ‘what if?’ ideas you haven’t time to indulge might produce something for you too, if you let them. Periods of boredom are the ideal times.
- Chewing over a problem. Pressure — and we have plenty of it today — tends to push people into grabbing the first plausible solution to whatever problems they face. Because you feel you have to get on a solve the issue without wasting time, you move from “Here’s an idea” into implementation almost before you’ve realized it. Worse, because you’ve now committed yourself, you won’t be at all keen to change you mind. A good deal of time is wasted everywhere in trying, again and again, to make something work that wasn’t much of an idea from the start. Use those periods of boredom to chew things over and help you avoid getting into something you’ll later regret.
- Playing a mental game. An itch comes with a strong urge to scratch. Boredom comes with a similar urge to be doing something. That something might be a mental game that challenges your creativity and understanding. At the very least, you’ll be giving your mind the work-out your body is denied while you’re stuck wherever you are.
- Finding a better way. I suspect boredom is essential to creativity. Not only does it provide the spur to find a better way than putting up with the same boredom again, it provides a mental gap in other activity in which creative thoughts can grow.
- Resting. A great many people don’t get enough rest. They’re hyper-active, not by choice, but because that’s what’s expected. That boring meeting or tedious get together can provide time and space for resting. And since falling asleep is a natural response to boredom, you also need boredom to go to sleep at night. Probably one of the commonest causes of insomnia is an over-active brain. Instead of allowing your mind to go on going on, try finding the most boring topic or memory you can think up and stick with it. You’ll probably drop off in a few minutes.
Burnout or boreout?
Burnout is being chronically over-worked and over-challenged. Boreout is the reverse: too little work, too little challenge. They often go together where the boss cannot delegate and so burns him or herself out, while simultaneously inducing chronic boredom amongst the rest of the team. People simulate work, to avoid being seen as unnecessary, but know what they are doing is largely useless. Over time, the constant boredom produces almost as much stress as over-work.
Maybe as many as 15 per cent of office-based staff are on the way to boreout, according to The Times of London. And while burnout and stress are socially acceptable problems, boreout is usually labeled as slacking.
You could surf the web, spend time gossiping, or even do all your on-line shopping and banking. Or you could do something along the lines I’ve suggested: something that might stir up your mind to find a way out, whether by finally talking with your boss about the issue, of thinking up the right approach to getting a better job elsewhere.
Boredom is always going to be frustrating — at least initially. That’s its nature. You can either allow that frustration to grind you down, or use it as a spur to tackle the boredom by using the empty time constructively.
Many people complain they have no time for anything. Is that true? Have they included those periods of boredom on the plus side? A tedious meeting might be just the time to come up with fresh ideas for something that matters far more. So long as you don’t fall asleep or show outwardly that you’ve left the building, you have minutes of blessed freedom to spend how you will. You may even come to enjoy the way some colleagues never know when to sit down or shut up!
Technorati Tags: creativity, boredom, innovation, day-dreaming, using your time well,
