I’m soooooo bored. There’s nothing to doooooo.

Remember saying that as a kid? And then your parents would tell you to find something to do or they’d find something for you to do? (and it was never going to be anything fun!).

You’d disappear pretty quickly and find some way to entertain yourself. You might have read a book or played with your lego or pulled out your paint set or built a fort out of pillows or created an elaborate battle scene for your Star Wars figures.

Some of your most creative moments came out of being bored! But as adults, we never really seem to let ourselves have the opportunity to BE bored. Being busy is a badge of honour, a status symbol. Filling awkward moments of emptiness can be done by picking up our phones or looking at a screen. But does that really help with creative energy?

The inspiration for episode 19 of The And She Looks Up podcast came out of an article called The Benefits of Being A Bored Blogger, written by Tiffany Mayer, a journalist and writer out of Southern Ontario, and published on Food Bloggers of Canada.

Listen To the Episode

Here’s a direct link to Episode 19 - or you can listen via the players below:

Sometimes, we just need to let our brains embrace boredom so they can have a fighting chance to catch up with all the information and stimulation we bombard them from the moment we get up in the morning until we turn out the lights at night.

When we welcome boredom or allow ourselves to feel it, magical things can happen with our creative energy. Once the brain has finished processing that mammoth stack of files you keep piling on it's desk it has a chance to breathe and look around and think “hmmmm… what could we do now that might be interesting?”.

Your mind begins to wander and daydream and think. And that’s when things start to percolate!

If only we weren’t all so damn busy, right?

Do You Need to Be That Busy?

As adults, we always have things to do. Repairing, cleaning, researching, prepping, chauffeuring – our chore lists are endless and taking the time to be bored or to escape can feel like an indulgence or worse… laziness.

Not being busy can bring feelings of guilt. And stillness can make a lot of us very uncomfortable.

And somehow, we’ve attached the concept of being busy to meaning we’re important, that we bring value, that people need us. If we’re not busy, do we have a purpose?

One of the interesting aspects of this pandemic is that a lot of us have had our busy-ness taken away and at first, the idea of sitting and watching Netflix and eating Doritos for a week with no guilt (we were flattening the curve and protecting those who were vulnerable) had a lot of appeal!

But, just like those summer vacations when you were 9, the appeal started to wane as time went on. It wasn’t long before we were all jumping on the social media sourdough bread bandwagon!

Eventually though, creativity started to pour out of the woodwork. Art, music, imagery and written words started to flow all over the internet.

Musicians who couldn’t tour got to connect with their fans in ways they never could have imagined via livestreaming. They teamed up with other musicians and recorded and performed separately together from their basements. Dancers live streamed their performances, artists doubled down in their studios, actors read bed time stories and recited Shakespearean sonnets over the internet and people everywhere fell in love with the goofy mashup possibilities of Tik Tok.

And why did all of this happen?

Because suddenly, we had time. We weren’t busy. We could give our brains and our bodies the freedom to follow random thoughts and ideas and dive down rabbit holes and experiment with new mediums and materials. Boredom begat creativity.

Our Brains Need Downtime

Our mind needs time to be bored. We need time to process all the stimulation we are constantly firing at our brains so that there’s room, time and freedom for the new ideas to percolate. We need to give our brains and our bodies a break from the constant state of fight or flight many of us are caught up in all the time – both from a mental and a phsycial health stand point.

Yes, we need to fill our creative wells by having inputs but we need to give our brain time to process that input so it can give us output! This is where boredom can help. Besides boredom - or giving our minds opportunities to wander - the only other chance our brains get to process information is when we sleep. And let’s face it – the vast majority of us don’t get enough of that either!

Evaluate How You Spend Your Time

Going through a pandemic has given all of us a gift – the opportunity to evaluate what’s truly important to us and to reassess all the things we were doing that were contributing to unnecessary busy-ness. Working from home has meant releasing us from the stress of a hectic commute. Not being able to run a 100 errands a week has let us see which of those errands were really necessary – and that we’re capable of combining errands into one day or into fewer stops.

Yes, there are a lot of things we can’t WAIT to get back to but think hard about what those things are: they’re probably related to being able to spend in person time with loved ones and to explore new places and see new things or revisit beloved places.

They’re likely not related to running errands or commuting to work or living in front of a screen Think carefully about what you reintroduce into your life in the coming months.

Some thing You Can Do To Encourage Boredom or Wandering Thought

There are lots of things you can do to encourage boredom or to give you brain the opportunity to meander and daydream.

give yourself permission! Know that allowing yourself some time to let your mind wander is good for your mental and physical health and it doesn’t mean you’re being lazy or unproductive or that you’re not needed
Take a vacation every year – a vacation where you do very little except lie in a hammock or wander the beach
Disconnect from your devices periodically – especially on vacation but also on weekends or for several hours multiple times a week
Find activities that keep your hands busy but that allow your brain to wander: doodling, knitting, washing dishes, chopping veggies
Head outdoors – go hiking, sit and listen to waves on the beach or wind in the trees, watch campfire flames or clouds floating through the sky. Natural elements like wind, water, earth and fire all help our minds wander
People watch – this is great for letting your imagination run away with itself
Listen to silence. Silence is very rarely silent. Pick out the sounds and let your brain follow them

Meditation is not usually a good way to let your mind wander. While meditation is important it’s focused thought, not unfocused thought.

Changing Our Attitudes

It’s important for us to work to change our attitudes around boredom and this can be really hard given how being busy and productive in hammered into our heads constantly!

Stop thinking being bored or doing nothing is lazy or indulgent (it’s hard!).
Build in time to be bored and to disconnect from too much stimulation
When somebody asks you how you are, try to refrain from replying “busy!” Instead, try responding with one interesting thing you accomplished recently and one bit of downtime you embraced like “I just finished a big commissioned painting for a client and then I took a glorious day off to recharge” or “we just had a week of homeschooling the kids and now the whole family is heading to the beach for the day to relax”
If somebody tells you they just took some downtime, reframe how you process that in your head – instead of thinking “must be nice” in your head think “wow, I really need to make some time for that this week – I’m going to do that tomorrow”.

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ASLU 019: The Creative Benefits of Being Bored