The Case for Being Bored

We have engineered boredom out of our lives. That may be one of the most damaging things we have ever done.

Last Christmas, I did not go to Thailand. I did not go to Bali. I stayed in Wuhan, alone, by choice, and spent the days doing what I usually do when I travel solo: cafés, long walks, meals eaten without company or commentary. I am used to being alone. It does not unsettle me. But one afternoon, sitting on the sofa with nothing particular in front of me, something shifted. There was no music. No podcast cued up. No scroll to default to. Just a strange, flat feeling, something between emptiness and sadness, I still cannot quite name it, and the sudden, uncomfortable awareness that I almost never let this happen. That I had been filling every pocket of silence for so long that silence itself had become foreign.

There is a moment, fleeting, increasingly rare, that most of us now sprint past before it can settle. The queue at the coffee shop. The three minutes before a meeting. The commute when you have forgotten your headphones. For a fraction of a second, the mind goes quiet. Then, almost involuntarily, the hand moves to the phone.

We do not think about this. It has become as automatic as blinking.

But beneath that reflex lies something worth paying attention to: we have become profoundly, pathologically unable to be bored. And the science suggests this is costing us far more than we realise, our creativity, our capacity for self-reflection, possibly even our sense of who we are.

The Brain’s Hidden Shift

When the mind is unstimulated, something remarkable happens. A network of brain regions, the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the angular gyrus, begins to activate. Neuroscientists call it the default mode network, or DMN. For decades, it was assumed to be the brain idling. A rest state. Background noise.

Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at Washington University, overturned that assumption when he began studying what the brain does when it is not focused on an external task. Rather than going quiet, the brain lit up differently. A whole architecture of activity came online, one that only emerged during stillness.

Research by Jonathan Schooler and colleagues highlighted that people often come up with solutions to difficult problems during periods of mind-wandering. This process, known as incubation, suggests that stepping away from a problem and allowing the mind to wander can lead to breakthroughs that structured thinking cannot achieve.

This is what happens in boredom. The focused attention networks disengage. The DMN steps in. And the brain begins to do something that deliberate concentration actively prevents: it free-associates. It pulls together unrelated ideas. It wanders across memory, future scenarios, half-formed connections. The bored group generated significantly more creative answers. The researchers proposed that boredom, by disengaging the brain’s focused attention systems and activating the default mode network, creates exactly the kind of diffuse, unconstrained thinking that creativity requires.

In other words: the shower thought is not an accident. It is the brain doing exactly what it is designed to do when you finally leave it alone.

The Phone Book Experiment

In 2013, Dr Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire ran a deceptively simple study. Forty people were asked to carry out a boring task, copying numbers out of a telephone directory, for 15 minutes, and were then asked to complete another task that gave them a chance to display their creativity. It turned out that the 40 people who had first copied out the telephone numbers were more creative than a control group of 40 who had just been asked to come up with uses for a pair of polystyrene cups.

In a second round, they pushed it further. A third group was asked only to read the phone numbers, more passive, more mind-numbingly dull. The researchers found that the people in the control group were least creative, but the people who had just read the names were more creative than those who had to write them out. This suggests that more passive boring activities, like reading or perhaps attending meetings, can lead to more creativity, whereas writing, by reducing the scope for daydreaming, reduces the creativity-enhancing effects of boredom.

The mechanism Mann and Cadman pointed to was daydreaming. Boredom, they argued, is not the problem. It is the gateway. It forces the mind inward, into the associative, imaginative territory where new ideas actually form.

This is what Neil Gaiman meant when he said you have to let yourself get so bored that your mind has nothing better to do than tell itself a story. It is what Anne Enright, the Booker Prize winner, described when she said: “Boredom is a productive state so long as you don’t let it go sour on you. I wait for boredom to kick in because boredom, for me, is a very good sign.” They were not being romantic about idleness. They were describing a cognitive process the neuroscience now confirms.

What We Have Done Instead

The problem is not that people dislike boredom. It is that we have made avoiding it effortless.

In 2014, a psychologist at the University of Virginia named Timothy Wilson published one of the most quietly disturbing studies in recent memory. In 11 studies, Wilson and colleagues found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.

The shocks were not theoretical. Of 409 participants, nearly half said that they did not like the experience. In one telling experiment, each of 55 participants was seated alone in a quiet, empty room with nothing to do, except they had access to a button that would deliver an electric shock to their ankle which they had previously described as unpleasant. In their 15 minutes of solitude, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women chose to shock themselves instead of simply sitting quietly.

One participant pressed the button 190 times.

Wilson’s conclusion was stark: most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.

This was 2014. Before TikTok. Before the short-form video algorithm had spent a decade conditioning billions of brains to expect a new stimulus every six seconds.

The Algorithm Did Not Create This Problem. It Perfected It.

What social media understood, and exploited, is that the human brain is already disinclined toward stillness. The platforms did not invent our restlessness. They just made it infinitely easier to feed.

The design logic of social media is deeply rooted in intermittent reinforcement, where platforms continuously stimulate dopamine release through unpredictable reward placements, such as randomly appearing likes and the pushing of popular content, exacerbating reward prediction errors and gradually transforming social interaction from functional behaviour to addictive behaviour.

This is the same mechanism as a slot machine. The unpredictability is not a bug. It is the product.

Likes and comments in social media have been found to stimulate the ventral striatum, which is rich in dopamine and is involved in reward anticipation. Each notification, each new video, each algorithmically surfaced post is a micro-dose of novelty, and the brain, wired for novelty-seeking, responds accordingly.

The consequence of a decade of this is beginning to show in neuroimaging research. Individuals with high short-video use tendencies showed significantly lower markers of prefrontal executive function, alongside poorer self-control abilities. MRI research found that compulsive short-video users exhibit increased gray matter volume in key reward-related regions, as well as heightened neural activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, and cerebellum. Such neurobiological alterations may underlie the behavioural changes, including attention deficits and learning impairments, reported in excessive short-form video use.

Put plainly: the architecture of the brain is shifting in response to habitual scrolling. Not metaphorically. Structurally.

I noticed it in myself before I had language for it. My attention when reading, something I have always loved, had quietly shortened. I would get a few pages in and feel the pull, that low-grade itch, the urge to check something, anything. I was doom-scrolling without registering it as a problem. It felt like normal life. It was only sitting in that flat Wuhan silence that I understood: I was losing the ability to stay inside my own head for any sustained length of time. And I was losing it in small, unremarkable increments, every single day.

Smartphones, social media, and constant notifications keep the dopaminergic system overstimulated. Every swipe delivers a tiny hit of novelty, training the brain to expect continuous reward. When external stimulation pauses, dopamine dips sharply, leaving you agitated.

And so the phone comes out again. Because the alternative, stillness, quiet, the discomfort of an unstimulated mind, now feels unbearable.

Boredom as Signal

Here is what the constant stimulation drowns out.

Boredom also functions as an emotional compass. It tells you when you are spending your finite cognitive resources on something that does not matter to you. In this sense, chronic boredom, the kind where nothing in your life feels engaging, is worth paying attention to.

Boredom, the neuroscience suggests, is a signal, not a malfunction. When you feel bored, your brain is essentially saying: this activity is not meaningful, go find one that is.

This is what scroll culture systematically suppresses. The algorithm keeps the dopaminergic system busy enough that the deeper signal, this is not where I want to be, this is not what I want to be doing, never gets the quiet it needs to surface. We mistake stimulation for satisfaction. We confuse motion for direction.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal observed in the seventeenth century that all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He was not prescient. He was simply describing what happens when the signal is ignored. The consequences have not changed. Only the tools for ignoring it have become more sophisticated.

What We Lose When We Never Stop

The default mode network does not only generate creative ideas. It is also where we process who we are.

Spacing out is so important to us as a species that it could be at the crux of what makes humans different from less complicated animals, according to neuroscientist Jonathan Smallwood. It is involved in a wide variety of skills, from creativity to projecting into the future.

Projecting into the future is another way of saying: building a sense of self. Working out what we value. Imagining alternative paths. These are not passive processes. They require cognitive space, the kind that only opens up when external input stops.

Research by Smallwood and others has shown that, when given time for self-reflection, most people tend toward prospective bias, thinking about the future. Combine this with positive-constructive daydreaming, and thoughts begin to veer toward the imaginative.

When we never stop scrolling, we do not simply waste time. We foreclose something. The incubation period for creative and personal insight, the mental space where the subconscious can work, where future selves are imagined, where what matters begins to clarify, never arrives.

When we never allow for incubation, when we instead demand constant clarity and productivity, we starve the creative process of one of its most vital phases.

The person who is always reachable, always updated, always stimulated is also, quietly, always distracted from themselves.

Learning to Sit With It

What happened after that Christmas afternoon on the sofa was not dramatic. There was no revelation, no sudden clarity, no article idea that arrived fully formed. What came back was simpler and, in its own way, more significant: I started doing things with intention again. Not on autopilot. Not in that human default mode where the body moves through a day and the mind is somewhere else entirely, half-present in the scroll.

I stopped putting a podcast on every morning. I stopped reaching for music the moment I walked into the gym. On walks, I let the city be the only input. It was uncomfortable at first, that restlessness Wilson’s study described is real, and it does not dissipate immediately. But underneath the discomfort, something was waiting. A quality of attention I had not felt in a long time. Real awareness, not default movements. Doing things with purpose and presence rather than simply filling time.

None of this is an argument against technology. It is an argument for the deliberate reclamation of something the technology has quietly taken.

Timothy Wilson remained convinced that the mind may be freed up if it is mildly engaged in the world, going for a walk, or looking out a window. Not meditation, not productivity. Just the particular quality of attention that comes when the primary input is the world itself, rather than a curated feed of it.

Boredom is not laziness. It is an aversive motivational state driven by the brain’s need for optimal cognitive engagement. Brain imaging shows boredom activates reward-seeking circuits, the opposite of the motivational shutdown seen in laziness. People who are bored are often motivated to do something but cannot find anything engaging enough.

That is the productive tension. Boredom is the pressure that precedes the search. The discomfort that precedes the insight. The quiet before the idea arrives that no algorithm could have served you.

Dr Mann put it this way: children who are bored find ways to entertain themselves. The capacity to generate one’s own stimulation, to reach inward rather than outward, is a skill. Like any skill, it atrophies without practice.

We have spent a decade not practising it.

The most countercultural thing you can do right now is sit in a room with your thoughts and resist the reflex to pick up your phone.

Not because it is comfortable. It is not. The discomfort is the point.

That restlessness, that itch, it is the brain looking for something. Not the next video. Not the next notification. Something that only emerges when everything else finally goes quiet.