The Sweetness of Doing Nothing: Why We Need Boredom

Boredom is an opportunity for growth, creativity, and self-discovery for those willing to embrace it.

Boredom fosters wonder, openness, and a readiness to see the world with new eyes. Biba Kayewich

“Il dolce far niente” means “the sweetness of doing nothing.” This Italian phrase sounds foreign to American ears in more ways than one. What could be sweet about doing nothing when you have a to-do list that’s bigger than a blue whale? Not only would doing nothing detain us from getting stuff done, but stretches of inactivity would also require us to be unstimulated, unengaged, and bored.

And that means confronting our thoughts with no dopamine hits to distract us, a thought that, evidently, terrifies us: A psychology study found that 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women would rather give themselves a small electric shock than sit alone with their thoughts for just 15 minutes.

Truthfully, many of us spend our days running from boredom. The cellphone seems to have been designed with this great escape in mind. We have at our fingertips endless digital expanses of headlines, movies, podcasts, articles, games, social media, text messages, and so on. Seventy-four percent of Americans feel uncomfortable leaving their cellphones at home and 71 percent of us check our phones within the first 10 minutes of our day. And most of us, when we feel a twinge of boredom, throw ourselves immediately into the consoling arms of our little digital companion. But should we?

Boredom Is Good for the Brain

A number of thinkers and researchers argue that we should not. Boredom actually plays an integral role in healthy human psychology, in human life itself. It provides the brain with a much-needed break, opens the floodgates of creativity, facilitates self-knowledge and reflectiveness, and instructs us in the art of simply “being,” rather than “doing.”

The human brain never rests. Every activity we engage in requires something of our brain, and these cells hum with activity, endlessly communicating with one another and with the rest of the body. Only at night, when sleeping, does the brain receive some relief. Then the mind can be cleared, quite literally, of waste.

But during waking hours, too, the brain needs periods of rest. At the very least, it needs periods of reduced activity. A bow constantly at full draw will wear out and lose its strength and elasticity eventually. As Bryan Robinson wrote for Forbes magazine, times of boredom support brain health, providing it with periods of relaxation. They also improve social connections by placing the brain in a default state of openness to networking.

The Beauty Found in Boredom

Researchers and creatives alike have discovered that boredom also stokes the fires of inspiration.

Robinson wrote: “Boredom can actually foster creative ideas, refilling your dwindling reservoir, replenishing your work mojo and providing an incubation period for embryonic work ideas to hatch.

“In those moments that might seem boring, empty and needless, strategies and solutions that have been there all along in some embryonic form are given space and come to life.”

Poet, playwright, and essayist Aaron Angello experienced this firsthand when he set himself an unusual writing task. Every morning for 114 days, he woke early, sat facing forward in the same chair, and thought about a single word from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 for about 30 minutes. In other words, each morning he let himself be bored for a while. Then he would write, not stopping until he’d filled the page. The result was a book called “The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications.”

“What I realize now, in retrospect, is that I’d stumbled upon one of the most productive approaches to writing I’ve ever tried,” Angello said.

In his essay “You Can’t Have Creativity Without Boredom,” Angello compares his experience to that of people stuck on a train, who are in the perfect situation for daydreaming and brainstorming.

“It is the fact that the body is in a pre-determined position (i.e., sitting, facing forward), and the mind is freed from its usual, constant engagement with a barrage of insignificant things that allows the creative person to move from the limitations of the conscious mind to the vast potential of what I like to refer to as the ‘beyond-conscious’ mind,” he wrote.

“On the train (or bus, or chair in the living room), we move from a state of trivial engagement to a state that we might call boredom, and that state is a point of access into creative possibility.”

There’s a reason that so many great poets, inventors, artists, and scientists have their eureka moments while performing some mundane task that is unrelated to their work.

Writing for Psychology Today, Jeffrey Davis underlined the point: “In a series of studies, researchers found that subjects who were asked to do mundane, boredom-inducing tasks were more creative afterward.

“Boredom is a ‘variety-driving emotion,’ meaning that it primes us to seek out new and different—therefore creative—experiences and solutions. Boredom naturally fosters the foundational facet of wonder, openness. A ready openness to new experiences and to one’s environment leads to more potential creative insight.”

He advised making good use of the natural periods of boredom that punctuate the day, such as a commute or a lunch break, without resorting to a screen for instant relief from idle thoughts.

Alone in a Quiet Moment

In addition to serving as a catalyst for creativity, boredom also supports self-reflection and self-knowledge because of its connection to solitude.

We frequently fear being alone largely because of the silence and boredom that may follow. Yet solitude and silence are essential to the act of processing and assimilating experiences and, through them, a person’s understanding of the narrative of his or her life. This is how humans build a sense of self.

As MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in her book “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age”: “Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive.”

The person perpetually dependent on external stimulants, whether social or digital or both, in order to be comfortable in his or her own skin probably doesn’t have a very strong sense of self. But learning to rest in the present moment, to reflect on the past and future, requires an openness to some period of boredom. Those spells are doorways; they invite us into unplanned and unexpected trains of thought.

“To reclaim solitude we have to learn to experience a moment of boredom as a reason to turn inward, to defer going ‘elsewhere’ at least some of the time,” Turkle wrote. According to her, this refusal to always “go elsewhere” precisely correlates with a willingness to “be here.”

Acceptance of temporary boredom, or even the threat of boredom, allows us to be cognizant of the present moment, of what’s going on immediately around us. We can observe, notice things, and simply rest in what is.

I experienced this myself not long ago when stranded somewhere with no internet signal, waiting for a ride. All I could do was be present in the moment. It turned out to be an unexpected gift.

“Deprived of the distraction of all electronic gadgets, some miles from the city, unable to hasten my wife’s arrival, there was nothing to do but keep my solitary watch by the stream,” I wrote afterward. “It was a happy powerlessness. Time slowed. I moved from the realm of acting to the realm of merely being.

“I was not ‘someone trying to get something done,’ or ‘going somewhere else.’ I was just a human being who had stumbled upon existence, stumbled upon the world made suddenly present as it rarely ever is, marveling at its intricate beauty.”

Make Time for Boredom

Robinson goes so far as to argue that we should intentionally schedule time for such experiences into our week. Instead of just a to-do list, he advises crafting a “to-be list.” A to-be list carves out time for just practicing mindfulness, just existing, without the pressure to accomplish something.

“You give yourself elbowroom to stretch and deep breathe between appointments, time to walk around the block and clear your head,“ he wrote. ”Or meditate, pray, practice chair yoga at your desk, watch the grass grow or just contemplate the universe. Your brain will be happier and healthier when it coexists with idle moments without imperatives, nothing to rush to, fix, or accomplish.”

How few people have some chunk of time in the planner labelled simply, “Do nothing” or “Be bored.” Yet what might be possible in individual lives and society at large if more of us did so?

Boredom forces us to listen. To open up. With nothing pounding on the gates of our attention, with nothing “entertaining” us, we’re suddenly free, even if the freedom comes with a little pain and initial discomfort. We can open ourselves to the world.

As Turkle put it: “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.”