Trying to cure your boredom makes you boring
There was a time when there was no cure for boredom. If nothing caught your interest, you had no choice but to sit there and accept the absence of entertainment. You had to wallow in the boredom, exist in it, accept it and hopefully push through it as if it were a boulder impeding your progress and eventually hope you stumbled upon a way to entertain yourself.
Now the boredom lasts about four seconds before we whip out our phones, swiping and swiping, hoping that something will get our dopamine receptors to squirt a little bit of that good, good, feel-good juice, and each swipe feels emptier than the last.
Therein lies the problem: the idea that boredom must be defeated. It’s been the dominant theory for nearly 20 years now, and it’s no wonder the theory was invented by tech companies, who conveniently came armed with a cure. Boredom exists for a reason, not just as an indicator that we need to get up and do something constructive, or more likely, do something that simulates feeling constructive when you’re not actually accomplishing much of anything.
Listen to your brain, not the call of the void
Scientifically speaking, boredom is not your brain lacking stimulation. Psychologists claim that boredom acts as a regulatory signal where your brain basically says that this activity you are currently doing is not good enough, so try again. Again, it sounds like lack of stimulation, but there is a fine difference, pointed out in a research paper published in the journal Behavioral Sciences back in 2013. The team from Texas A&M University describes boredom as motivating us to pursue new goals when the current one ceases to be meaningful.
From that lens, we can see boredom not as the absence of entertainment, but as the search for meaning. With that framing, the quest to kill boredom has a much deeper, deeper weight. You are not looking for something to kill time. You are looking for something that means something to you. You are looking for a deeper emotional connection. Something that awakens a sense of life in you. It’s a productive version of rage that stops with the boring YouTube videos you watch, or the derivative video game you play, or the uninspiring book you read. Boredom ultimately tries to push us toward novelty, which is ultimately a search for creativity, either externally or internally crafted.
Studies have shown that people who are forced to perform boring, mind-numbing tasks often perform better on subsequent creative exercises. There’s a simple logic to it, one that you’ve probably followed at several points throughout your life, but probably less so in recent years, thanks to the dopamine slot machines we all carry around in our pockets. Your brain wants to be stimulated. When it’s understimulated, it starts making its own entertainment.
The result of your brain trying to entertain itself is what we call creativity. Inspiration. Innovation. You use your body’s natural biochemistry and electrical impulses to create entertainment where there was none. It’s just sad that today’s conveniences are almost explicitly designed to be so readily available, so algorithmically packed with the most potent industrially manufactured boredom-killing properties, that we rarely allow our brains to follow that path toward self-generated entertainment and exploration of our own limitless creativity.
Your stimulation baseline is way too high
Boredom can feel like your brain is attacking you. As if there is something physically wrong with your body and with your environment. It’s probably because you’ve built up such a high baseline for stimulation that the lack of it feels like a threat, as if having nothing to do for a few minutes might as well be a lion chasing you on the savannah.
Modern neuroscience on the subject tells us to lean into that pain because soon enough something good will come out of it. Speaking to National Geographic, University of Waterloo psychology professor James Danckert says that just as physical pain tells us that something is wrong in our body, the pain of boredom tells us that something in our head needs to change.
Many of us try to avoid pain altogether instead of pushing through it. This is where the eternal war against boredom becomes darkly funny. Research has found that the more we try to avoid boredom, the worse it gets. For example, a 2024 University of Toronto Scarborough study found that today’s boredom-avoidance tactics like doomscrolling actually increase boredom rather than alleviate it. These shortcuts that modern technology has convinced you are the ultimate weapon against boredom are actually just shoving you deeper into boredom than you were before. You tried to escape the boredom and all you did was create Boredom Premium Plus.
Kill your boredom-killing devices
If you assume you can avoid all the modern boredom-killing devices that actually do anything to alleviate your boredom, and you embark on the path of sitting with your boredom in the hopes of some sort of self-entertaining creative breakthrough, you’ll probably quickly recognize boredom’s real value: it creates space. It offers a mental void, a beautiful one full of potential, that you’ve been aggressively filling with notifications and autoplay videos for years. Staring into that void can be terrifying. It’s an unlimited space that can be filled, but it’s up to you to fill it.
The space is important. Without it, your brain never wanders and stumbles upon new things. It never connects ideas in strange, unexpected, delightful ways. Without it, creativity, problem solving, and maybe even having the occasional life-changing epiphany couldn’t happen
Boredom feels like the end of the world. But it doesn’t have to, and frankly, it shouldn’t. It should feel like the start of a whole new world, for which you are responsible and with which you can do anything. You just have to stop numbing yourself the second the door opens because you’re afraid of what’s on the other side, even though what’s on the other side is the true escape from boredom.
