What do you usually do when you start to feel bored? Do you try to keep yourself busy and/or entertained as often as possible? When was the last time you just let your thoughts wander?
Today more than ever before, having nothing to do is optional: homes are filled with ways of staying busy and a source of endless entertainment is almost always in your pocket. As a result, a growing number of people spend almost no time without being occupied and stimulated in some way.
Yet many people also report feeling high levels of disengagement. Despite being entertained so much of the time, they feel that their lives are uninteresting and they struggle to engage with anything for very long, even with things that were once a source of excitement and joy.
If you typically try to stay entertained or busy as often as possible, you can’t make important discoveries about who you are and what you like or build the skills that enable you to truly engage in a variety of types of activities.
Although boredom itself isn’t pleasant, being alone with your thoughts can be enjoyable, especially if you’re aware of the many different ways you can benefit. It often starts out as boredom, but it can turn into satisfying daydreaming and reflection.
Through understanding the value of boredom, you can choose to give yourself opportunities to be alone with your thoughts so you can experience the benefits.
What is boredom?
What types of situations do you describe as boring? How do you typically feel when you’re bored? Can you enjoy boredom?
Everyone experiences boredom but not everyone understands what it is.
Boredom isn’t an emotion; it’s a mental state characterised by a lack of interest, stimulation or engagement. Generally considered unpleasant, there are a variety of ways people can respond: restlessness, apathy, discontent, and often a drive to distract or busy yourself.
Although one’s environment is often blamed – believing that you have a boring job, feeling stuck in a routine, having nothing at home you find entertaining, needing to find new hobbies – internal factors are often more responsible than your external situation. Children will complain of being bored even when they’re surrounded toys, while some people can meditate for hours without ever getting restless.
Rather than meaning that you have nothing to do, boredom is often a result of wanting to do something but being unsure what you would be rewarding.
Generally, you can choose things that are largely for their entertainment value, like going on your phone or watching TV, especially when you want to relax. Or you can decide to do something more ambitious, such as working on a creative project or one of the items on your to do list because you want to feel accomplished and proud of yourself.
In order to feel recharged yet fulfilled, it’s necessary to find the appropriate balance between spending your time in ways that are relaxing and undemanding, and those that require more of you but also provide a valuable sense of fulfillment.
Having a way to entertain yourself is often easy, especially with phones and social media almost always available. Finding something fulfilling to do can be more challenging since it requires personal reflection, and this is only possible if you’re willing and able to listen to your thoughts.
But many people spend very little time alone with their thoughts and will entertain themselves whenever they have nothing to do or are doing something low stimulation like driving or watching a show that doesn’t fully capture their attention. It’s common to see people on their phones while waiting for a light to change.
This has consequences for your mental health and even has impacts at a neurological level because your mind needs to have times when it isn’t being stimulated.
When your brain isn’t receiving stimulation, the Default Mode Network can be activated. This brain system allows information, thoughts, and feelings to be processed and committed to memory. It enables you to remember more and learn from your experiences and what you read or listen to. You can reflect on what you learned, come to your own conclusions (including if you agree with all of it), consider possible alternatives, be curious, and practice critical thinking.
But not everyone is comfortable being bored. Some people think it’s a waste of time and that doing something, even if they know it’s not good for them, seems better than doing nothing. This is especially likely for people who believe they must be as productive as possible, and productivity is measured by how much you get done. Even if you’re scrolling on social media, you can tell yourself that you’re keeping yourself informed of events or taking in educational content.
They can also think boredom just unpleasant and unnecessary so there’s no reason to experience it.
Being bored does involve the feeling that you have nothing to do, but doing nothing doesn’t have to be boring.
Being alone with your thoughts has the potential to be useful, informative, and even enjoyable, especially if you understand how it can benefit you. When you’re happy to sit with your thoughts to experience and learn from them, doing nothing can take on a different meaning and stop being uncomfortable.
The same way that being alone doesn’t have to feel lonely, having nothing to do doesn’t have to be boring.
The benefits of boredom
It’s important to let yourself be bored so you can learn how to create your own entertainment, meaning, and purpose.
If you’re always entertaining or distracting yourself in some way, you won’t have the opportunity to reflect on your life, your dreams, your problems, etc. You’re also likely to struggle to focus and feel engaged when doing anything that isn’t consistently stimulating because you’ve trained your brain to crave high stimulation. So ironically, always being entertained creates more feelings of boredom and dissatisfaction.
Motivating yourself to tolerate the discomfort that often comes with letting yourself experience boredom is much easier when you understand and can recognise the benefits you’re getting and the skills you’re building.
The most valuable of these include the following:
1) You learn about yourself
The more you learn about yourself, the better you can know yourself.
Knowing yourself means that you’ve identified your beliefs and values, you know your ambitions and dreams for your future, you’re aware of your boundaries, how to take care of yourself and much more. You’re also able to recognise your challenges and identify possible solutions.
But how do people get to know themselves?
Most people agree that the best way to get to know someone is to have conversations with them and do activities that involve interaction and collaboration. If you only ever sat with someone while both of you were busy and distracted, would you consider this person someone you know well?
Getting to know yourself is a great deal like getting to know someone else. You have to spend time with yourself without distractions so you can learn about who you are.
Being alone with your thoughts, both in the small moments when you have nothing to do and potentially dedicating longer amounts of time for introspection, can allow you to learn about yourself. A mind that is wandering will eventually turn inwards, leading to personal reflection and questions about who you are and where you’re going.
Since this can be boring, especially when you have highly stimulating alternatives available, many people choose to occupy themselves instead of being alone with their thoughts, even though this keeps them from getting to know themselves, the challenges they face, and the ambitions they would benefit from pursuing.
Being alone with your thoughts can be uncomfortable. It can lead to you thinking about challenges that could seem unsolvable and ambitions you have but feel incapable of pursuing. This can make it seem better, even healthier, to avoid letting your mind be unoccupied so you don’t have to experience these uncomfortable thoughts.
But even if you don’t fully identify or acknowledge challenges, they can still be harmful. You can only address them if you recognise that they exist and know what they are. You can then ask yourself what steps you could take to improve your situation. If you don’t think you can change anything, you can then attempt to accept it so it doesn’t have to keep making you upset.
While thinking through your challenges and ambitions might not be considered boring experiences, this is often how they start out. So it’s only through letting yourself feel bored can your mind identify the challenges you’re facing and opportunities to be happier.
If you always distract yourself, you’re denying yourself the opportunity for self-discovery.
2) You can do more of what you enjoy
Being bored doesn’t just mean having nothing to do – it’s not knowing what is worth doing.
Boredom is often the catalyst to engage in meaningful activities by giving you the time and motivation to discover what they are. But today more than ever, being bored is optional. The majority of people always have their phones within reach and plenty of things to keep them occupied everywhere they are.
While scrolling on the couch for a few minutes or watching before bed TV can be relaxing and entertaining, it rarely provides the same levels of satisfaction you can get from doing something meaningful.
Things that have meaning are rewarding, enriching, and make you feel proud of yourself and accomplished afterwards, yet they’re entertaining as well. They typically reflect your interests, what is important to you, and potentially your beliefs and values as well. Working on a creative project, organising a closet, and calling a friend can all be meaningful and enjoyable activities.
Most people want to spend their time in meaningful ways, but they aren’t sure what these are. This is especially likely for people who turn to quick entertainment whenever they get bored so they don’t have the opportunity to reflect on what they could do instead.
If you resist the urge to distract yourself when you get bored and pause to listen to your thoughts, you can learn about what you enjoy doing the most; not only what you think is fun but what can leave you feeling refreshed and like the best version of yourself so you know what types of activities are meaningful for you. This becomes easier as you get to know yourself better through spending time alone with your thoughts.
You’ll certainly want and need time that you spend purely for relaxation doing things that provide only entertainment. But if you too rarely spend time meaningfully, you won’t be as fulfilled as you could be.
3) You have better focus
When you’re working on something, whether it’s voluntary or tasks you have to do such as work and chores, how often do you get distracted and want to do something else, typically something easier and more entertaining?
It’s normal to feel bored, have your attention wander, and then bring it back to what you’re doing. So the ability to focus, especially on things that take a long time and are low in stimulation, requires being able to cope with boredom.
But because so many people always have an alternative to boredom available, not everyone is able to ignore these feelings. This makes it hard for them to be productive and enjoy activities that have the potential to be enjoyable and fulfilling.
If you think boredom is a sign that you should find a different way to entertain yourself, especially when you’re trying to do something low in stimulation like reading a book, going for a walk without headphones, or even just working on one task at a time, then staying focused will be difficult because you’re used to boredom being a cue to shift your attention to something more stimulating.
This can prevent you from enjoying many different fulfilling pastimes and make it very challenging and unpleasant to be productive, especially on things you don’t want to do but are necessary.
Getting distracted doesn’t mean that you can’t focus, especially if you’re willing to bring your focus back to what you’re doing. Attention naturally wanders and it’s common to consider other more enjoyable ways you could spend your time instead. But this doesn’t mean that you have to act on these impulses.
Understanding that you’ll feel bored while working on things, including those that are for fun, but it will be temporary and you can keep doing what you’re doing can reduce a lot of mental noise as well. Instead of asking yourself if you want to find something else to do, determining what it will be, weighing your options, and then shifting your attention to something else, you can tolerate these small moments of discomfort to then re-engage in what you were already doing. And the more often you do this, the less frequent and intense these feelings will be.
4) You can be more creative
The ability to tolerate boredom without finding something to distract yourself is necessary to having creative ideas and being able to carry them out.
Creative projects, from drawing to cooking to music and much more, all begin with ideas for ways to amuse and potentially challenge yourself. And wanting to relieve your boredom can be excellent motivation for coming up with these ideas.
You can also think of creative solutions to problems and challenges, such as how to fix something broken, how you could spend the afternoon, what you could say to make up for a fight with your partner, games to play with your child, and much more.
You have could been aware of the need for solutions to these for some time but hadn’t been able to think of something until you let yourself be bored so your mind could wander. Anyone who has made a revelation in the shower has experienced this.
5) You can reexamine unpleasant experiences
When you let your mind wander, it will automatically begin to review different experiences you’ve recently had, from brief interactions with strangers to conversations with friends and family. You’re especially likely to recall interactions you recall as negative.
While this can seem like it would harm your mental health and best avoided, it can actually lead to fewer painful memories and feelings.
People are instinctively drawn to negativity and are more likely to have unfavourable interpretations of neutral experiences. Criticisms that weren’t about them can feel personal and innocent comments can be ruminated on and become damaging. Even if your day was largely positive, your thoughts are likely to return to the few negative experiences.
But when you review experiences, you can learn from them and possibly realise that your initial interpretations were inaccurate or that there are different possibilities you hadn’t considered. You could realise that you were brave rather than stupid to take on a challenge you ultimately failed or realising that a friend was yelling at you because of a hardship they’re experiencing so you feel compassion instead of anger.
There will be experiences that are unquestionably negative, but you still have the potential to change how you feel about them through thinking them through, such as acknowledging that although you made some mistakes at work, your boss’s angry reaction was unfair and you’re not at incompetent as you were made to feel.
But if you rarely let your mind wander so it can review your experiences, you won’t have these opportunities so you’ll maintain your initial negative impressions.
The more you understand about the benefits of letting your mind wander and the consequences of spending too little time alone with your thoughts, the more that you can enjoy time spent peacefully and be willing not to entertain yourself whenever you have a few free moments.
How to practice boredom
Being bored so you can listen to your thoughts requires very little: only the absence of distractions. But you can do this more effectively if you create an ideal environment for it to take place while understanding what you’re trying to accomplish and what you should aim to avoid.
An ability to tolerate boredom is one that can require practice and intentionality, especially for those who have the habit of distracting themselves any time they aren’t being stimulated.
Being alone with your thoughts and having this be a pleasant experience is often easier when you don’t have too many alternatives available. You can commit to sitting still without doing anything for a certain amount of time and set an alarm. You could also go for a walk or find somewhere peaceful to sit away from home without bringing your phone. (If you aren’t comfortable leaving it behind, have it turned to airplane mode.)
You could present yourself with a problem you want to work through, use this time to think of what you could do next, or just let your thoughts wander. When you feel restlessness and/or discomfort, remind yourself of what you’re trying to accomplish.
The goal is to feel at peace while doing little else besides listening to your thoughts, whether you’re setting aside time for this or choosing not to entertain yourself right away when you have nothing to do.
Boredom can be unhealthy for people who are prone to ruminating, catastrophising, depression and anxiety when they let their minds wander. But the solution isn’t to avoid boredom, it’s to learn how to manage these types of thoughts. This can involve reality-checking, reconsidering your internal story, and potentially working with a professional to uncover what is fuelling these thoughts and replacing them.
Being alone with your thoughts can be very challenging for those who are processing hardships or who have experienced trauma in the past. If you’re concerned you’ll have thoughts that are too painful and difficult to manage, you could consider working with a mental health professional. They can help you feel safe and capable of processing painful experiences.
Boredom can be unpleasant and potentially a catalyst for harmful thoughts, but it’s unavoidable. So instead of aiming to never feel bored, it’s much healthier to understand that boredom doesn’t have to be escaped from. It can even be fun to have nothing to do except listening to your own thoughts, have new ideas and possibly find solutions to challenges.
Although boredom is uncomfortable, it’s a useful experience because of the discomfort that it causes.
Because there are always alternatives to boredom available, boredom can not only seem unnecessary, it can also feel like a waste of time. But time spent without anything to so isn’t time wasted.
When you can let yourself be bored without automatically searching for a way to be entertained or occupied, you can be more content and fulfilled because you know what you enjoy doing, you can identify your problems and their solutions, and be more connected to yourself as an individual, all of which are highly rewarding.
By learning to be comfortable with your thoughts appreciate unstructured time as it allows you to explore ideas, make discoveries you otherwise wouldn’t have, gain a sense of control over your emotions and external circumstances, discover ways you can meaningfully alleviate your boredom, and much more.
Although few people like to be bored, plenty of people enjoy daydreaming, considering different possibilities for their future, working through challenges, and even just thinking about something they watched or read recently. These aren’t possible if you always find a way to occupy yourself whenever you have any free time, but if you’re comfortable being alone with your thoughts, rather than being bored you can learn to enjoy your own company.
