It’s pretty amazing just how many things we have at our disposal to pass time when we’re bored. We have music to listen to and an endless feed of memes to scroll through. Whether you’re on the bus on your way to work or procrastinating yet again, there’s always a way to keep yourself entertained.
And without these things, boredom can honestly feel excruciating. You probably know just how disappointing it is when you realize you forgot your headphones before heading out. Suddenly a 20-minute commute feels like it lasts forever.
The truth is, most of us pretty much despise being bored. A team of researchers actually ran an experiment on this, where participants had to sit in an empty room for 15 minutes with nothing to do.
The only thing in the room was a button, and pressing it would deliver a painful electric shock. So the choice was simple. Sit there bored, or shock yourself. And a big majority of participants chose the shock. That’s how badly we want to escape our own unstimulated minds.
The reason we hate it so much, Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks explains, is because when we’re not occupied with anything, our brain switches over to something called the default mode network.
It sounds fancy, but it’s really just a set of structures in your brain that activate when you have nothing else to think about. And the problem is, the default mode network makes us uncomfortable.
When we have nothing to do, we often start asking ourselves a lot of big questions. Like what our purpose in life is. Or what any of it even means. A lot of existential stuff that honestly makes us pretty uneasy and that we’d rather just avoid thinking about altogether.
So we pull out our phones the second we feel even a hint of boredom and find something to keep us busy.
Brooks describes this as a doom loop of meaning. Every time we reach for our phone to escape a moment of boredom, we’re shutting down the very process that helps us find purpose and direction.
Over time, it gets harder and harder to sit with those big thoughts, and that disconnect feeds into depression, anxiety, and a lingering sense of hollowness. All of which, he points out, are at an all-time high.
Instead, Brooks suggests we embrace being bored. Because once we stop running from those big thoughts and let ourselves stay with them for a while, we start working through them.
We start figuring out what we actually want and what actually matters to us. And that, he explains, is how we find real meaning and direction in our lives.
