Is boredom good for you?
Quiet Wall ·
What boredom is, what two well-known studies found when people were left with nothing to do, and why it is worth letting some of it back into a day.
What boredom is
The feeling of wanting to do something and finding nothing you want to do. It is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the part that sends a hand to the phone.
Boredom used to arrive by itself, several times a day: in a queue, on a bus, five minutes early for something. Most of those minutes are filled now. So the question is less whether boredom is good for you than whether it is worth letting some of it back.
What happens when people are left with nothing
In 2014, the psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues asked people to sit alone in a room for six to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. Across eleven studies, most did not enjoy it.
In one of them, people could give themselves a mild electric shock during a fifteen-minute sit. Two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women did, all of whom had said beforehand that they would pay to avoid being shocked again.
The study is not about boredom being good. It shows how much people dislike an empty quarter of an hour, which goes some way to explaining why so few of them stay empty.
What boredom has been linked to
In another 2014 study, Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman had people copy phone numbers out of a phone book for fifteen minutes, then think of uses for two polystyrene cups. The bored group came up with more uses than people who had skipped the boring task. In a second study, a boring task also made the answers more creative, as rated by others.
That is a small finding about a narrow task, and it is not a promise. It is one reason to think an empty stretch of time is not simply wasted.
Why there is less of it now
The phone is the end of most boredom before it starts. It is always within reach and never runs out, so the moment a minute begins to feel empty, it no longer has to be. That is convenient, and it means the feeling of an empty minute has become unfamiliar, which makes it harder to sit through when it does come.
How to let some back
- leave the phone at home for a short errand
- wait without a screen: in queues, on platforms, in waiting rooms
- put ten minutes with nothing in them into the day, on purpose
- when boredom arrives, stay with it for a while before doing anything about it
Learn to be bored again
That line is how Quiet Wall describes itself. It is a timer for ten minutes of boredom on purpose: a reminder arrives, the phone goes across the room, and you look at a blank wall until a sound brings you back.
Is boredom good for you?
It is uncomfortable rather than harmful, and one 2014 study found people came up with more ideas after a boring task. What is clear is that empty time has become rare.
Why do people avoid boredom?
Because an empty stretch is uncomfortable. In a 2014 study, two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women chose a mild electric shock over fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts.
Read on
- How to do nothing, on purpose — Doing nothing is harder than it sounds. What it means to do it on purpose, where the idea comes from, and how to start with ten minutes and a wall.