Americans don’t like being bored. It doesn’t sound like fun; it doesn’t pay the bills. Plus, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” right?
As a kid, if you whined to your mom that you were bored, you probably got a response like, “Oh, really? Well now you can do some chores.”
Well-deserved as that response may have been, it is true nonetheless that wasting time is pretty much a sin in our culture. And as adults, we see boredom as a waste of time. We think if we have time to be bored, we must be lazy or unimportant, so we fill our lives full of busyness and then weirdly complain-brag to our friends about how busy we are.
We’ve written about this before, the importance of resting and all that. We know better sleep, for example, yields better performance at work, and potentially a higher paycheck. Not to mention improved health.
But recent studies suggest that boredom, too, is a kind of valuable rest—it is actually good for us!
A recent piece by NPR reported that scientists believe boredom, when our minds wander, is the brain’s “default mode.”
In other words, when we’re “wasting time” daydreaming, our brain is actually resting and performing necessary functions.
“Our brains are doing some really important work when we think we’re doing nothing,” said Manoush Zomorodi, a New York podcast host who is launching a project called Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out. “Research suggests we get our most original ideas when we stop the constant stimulation and we let ourselves get bored.”
Since the advent of smartphones and tablets, our brains get less boredom than ever before.
In the past we might have gotten bored standing in line for a snow cone, waiting at the train station or enduring an interminable stretch of elevator music on hold for “the next customer service representative” who’ll “be with you shortly.”
But now, what do we do when we’re waiting? We check emails, text people, read stuff, play Angry Birds, etc. The digital world is our oyster.
Psychologists and neuroscientists have just begun in the past few years to research the impacts of smart phone use upon our brains. They believe boredom is good for creativity and tapping into the subconscious, and they’re concerned that a lack of boredom keeps us from setting personal goals.
Here at Urban Mattress, where we think a LOT about sleep, we wonder if this isn’t also part of what’s keeping so many of us awake at night. Insomnia is a virtual epidemic in the U.S., affecting one in 10 Americans. And while they might not qualify as full-fledged insomniacs, 63 percent of women and 54 percent of men suffer from insomnia at least a few nights a week.
If our brains had more time to wander where they would, to process and think outside the box a bit, perhaps they wouldn’t be racing so much at bedtime!
Hmmm—we’re going to be thinking about this for a while. In the meantime, consider making boredom a priority in 2015. There could be amazing stuff hidden in that brain of yours … it just needs a little rest to show up.