Why Boredom Is Essential for Your Brain and Creativity

Hey, it's Jay and today I want to talk to you about how to be bored. Maybe there's a lot of you out there who don't know how to be bored anymore. You're always distracted. You're always running to the next thing. You're always trying to fill your gaps, be busy. Maybe you struggle with dealing with the thoughts in your head when you actually slow down and pause. If you want to know how boredom can be powerful for your brain, this episode is for you. And if you want to know how you can change your life and actually use it to your advantage, don't skip this episode. In 1654, the French mathematician and philosopher Bla1 Pascal wrote a sentence that I think might be the most underrated, most

urgent, most terrifying truth ever put on paper. He wrote, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Think about that. This was 1654. No smartphones, no television, no radio, no newspapers delivered to your door, no telegraph. The most sophisticated entertainment technology available was a harpsacord and a good candle. And Pascal looked at the people around him, the richest, most educated, most powerful people in France, and concluded that the root cause of war, corruption, cruelty, recklessness, and misery was that nobody could just sit still. They hunted, they gambled, they threw lavish parties, they picked fights with neighboring kingdoms, they pursued scandal and intrigue at

court. Not, Pascal argued, because they actually wanted those things, but because the alternative, being alone with their own thoughts, was too unbearable to face. Now, I want you to pick up your phone. You're probably on it already, but don't actually do it. Just imagine the moment. You know the moment. I mean, you're standing in line at the coffee shop. You're waiting for the elevator. You're sitting on the toilet. You're in the first 10 seconds of an ad and you can't skip yet. and your hand moves almost before you've made a decision to the phone to scroll to the feed to anything that fills the gap. What are you running from? Pascal knew. He was watching people run from it in 1654.

This doesn't make you weak. You're not wrong. You're not a bad person. The thing you're running from doesn't have a name in polite conversation. We call it boredom like it's a minor inconvenience, like being slightly cold or having a headache, something to be treated, something to be eliminated, something that signals there's a problem to be fixed. But what if boredom isn't the problem? What if boredom is the solution and someone has been very carefully, very profitably taking it away from you? Welcome to something I call the sacred void. Now, before we dive in, I want to talk about what boredom actually is.

Scientists got this wrong for a hundred years. So, here's the truth. I need to start by rehabilitating boredom's reputation because it has been absolutely destroyed. For most of the 20th century, psychologists treated boredom as a deficiency state, a signal that something was missing. Stimulation, purpose, motivation. The implicit assumption was that a healthy, engaged, welladjusted person shouldn't experience boredom. If you were bored, something was wrong with you. You lack discipline or ambition or the right attitude. Teachers told students to stop being bored. Parents loaded children's schedules to prevent boredom from ever arising. The entire architecture of modern productivity culture was built on the premise that idle time is wasted

time. This was one of the great intellectual errors of the modern era. In the last 20 years, a small group of researchers, most of them working in obscurity, many of them initially laughed at by their colleagues, began to look at boredom with fresh eyes. And what they found completely inverted everything we thought we knew. The first revelation was definitional. What is boredom? Actually, psychologist Sandy Man at the University of Central Lancasher spent years researching this and arrived at a definition that stopped me cold when I read it. She found that boredom is not the absence of stimulation.

It is actually a state of wanting stimulation but being unable to find anything satisfying. It's a kind of restless searching state and itch without a scratch. And here's where it gets interesting. When man and her colleagues actually studied what that restless searching produces, they discovered something nobody expected. They ran an experiment where one group of participants was given a classic creativity test. the kind where you have to think of as many uses for a common object as possible, like a plastic cup. They listed their ideas. Average results. Then they ran another group through a boring task. First, copying numbers out of a phone book by hand for 20 minutes, just copying numbers. The most tedious activity they

could construct. Then they did the same creativity test. The board group wasn't slightly better. They were dramatically better. More ideas, more original ideas, more unusual ideas. The boredom had done something to their thinking. Mand did a second version. This time she made the boring task even more passive. Just reading numbers from a phone book rather than copying them. Even more boring. The creativity scores went up even further. Boredom wasn't the enemy of creative thought. It was the precondition for it. But why? Why would sitting with empty, frustrated, restlessness make you more creative? The answer lives in the most important brain system you might have

never heard of. And I need to spend some real time here because once you understand this, you will never look at an idle moment the same way again. The default mode network. This is the most important brain system that no one tells us about. For most of neuroscience history, researchers studied the brain by giving people tasks to do and watching which regions activated. Solve a puzzle, this area lights up. Process language, that area. Recognize a face, this region. The operating assumption was that the interesting action happened when the brain was working. What nobody thought to ask was what is the brain doing when it's not working? In the 1990s, neuroscientists Marcus Riel at

Washington University in St. Louis was doing exactly this kind of taskbased brain imaging and he kept noticing something strange. There was a network of regions that consistently deactivated when people were given tasks to focus on. They went quiet during directed attention. And when the task ended, when the person was just resting, just letting their mind wander, this network came roaring back online. Riel called it the default mode network, the DMN, the brain's default setting. For years, the DMN was dismissed as background noise. Idling like a car engine at a red light. Wasted energy. The brain burning glucose for nothing. Then in one of the great slowburn reveals in science history,

researchers started actually studying the DMN and they found that it was not idling at all. It was doing the most sophisticated, most important, most deeply human cognitive work of your entire mental life. Here is what the default mode network is responsible for. I want you to listen to this list carefully. The DMN is the system that generates your sense of self. Your ongoing narrative of who you are, what you value, where you've been, where you're going. When you lie awake and think about your life, that's the DMN. When you feel the particular ache of regret or the particular warmth of gratitude, the DMN is assembling those experiences. The DMN is where you process other people's minds. When you

try to understand why someone acted the way they did, to imagine their inner experience, to feel empathy, that requires the DMN. It's the system that makes you socially intelligent, that makes you capable of compassion rather than just reaction. The DMN is where you simulate the future. When you imagine a difficult conversation before it happens or envision what a decision might mean for your life 5 years from now, that is DMN activity. It's your brain's flight simulator, your rehearsal space. And critically, the DMN is where creative insight happens. Not the grinding effortful part of creativity, not the application of rules, the breakthrough moment, the sudden connection between

two things that seem uncorrelated, the solution that arrives apparently from nowhere in the shower. That is the default mode network firing. And in fact, some researchers now believe that the highest levels of human creativity are not primarily a function of the focused task oriented brain at all. They are a function of how well your DMN operates and how often you give it the space to do so. And here's the thing that I want you to write down right now about DMN. It cannot activate when you are consuming. Listen to that again. Your DMN can't activate when you're consuming the default mode network, your self-reflection system, your empathy system, your creativity system, your

future simulation system, your meaning making system, it cannot run while you're taking in external stimulation. When you're scrolling, the DMN is suppressed. When you're watching, the DMN is suppressed. When you're listening to a podcast, yes, including this one, when you're engaged with external input, the DMN is offline. It only comes online in the gaps, in the pauses, in the waiting, in the boredom. Now, I want you to think about how many gaps you have left in your day. When was the last time you stood in a queue without your phone? The last time you waited for a meal at a restaurant without your phone? The last time you sat in a waiting room for a doctor or a dentist and just sat. The

last time you took a walk without headphones. The last time you lay in bed in the morning without immediately reaching for a screen. If you're like most people in the modern world, those moments are nearly gone. Eliminated with remarkable thoroughess. and with them quietly and visibly something essential has been disappearing from your inner life. Researchers at the University of Virginia ran a study that I find poignant. They asked participants to sit alone in a room with their thoughts for 15 minutes. No phone, no book, no music, just sitting. The only thing in the room was a button that if pressed would deliver a mild electric shock. 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock

themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. One man shocked himself 190 times. Pascal was right in 1654. We just now have the neuroscience to understand exactly why. And we have something he couldn't have imagined. An industry that has spent billions of dollars making the avoidance of your own mind not just easy, but irresistible. Now, I want to talk to you about how the attention economy surgically removed boredom from your life. I want to be really precise here because I don't think this is an accident. I don't think that you feeling bored and feeling like

it's a weakness or the need for constant stimulation is your fault. I don't believe this is something that you did to yourself. I think it is a designed outcome and the people who designed it knew somewhat what they were doing. In 2017, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, began speaking publicly about something he'd witnessed from the inside. He described how the technology industry doesn't simply make products. It makes persuasion machines. Systems explicitly engineered to capture and hold human nature for as long as possible using the same psychological techniques developed for slot machines and gambling. Harris called it the race to the bottom of the brain stem. Not a

race to make you smarter or more connected or more fulfilled. a race to find the lowest, most ancient, most reflexive part of your neurological architecture. The part that responds to novelty, to social approval, to potential threat, to pattern and reward, and plug directly into it. The core mechanism is intermittent variable reward. The same mechanism that makes slot machines the most addictive gambling devices ever invented. You pull the lever, you scroll down, and sometimes you get something rewarding, a funny video, a surprising piece of news, a notification that someone liked what you posted, and sometimes you get nothing interesting. The randomness is not a flaw. The randomness is the feature. It's what makes you keep pulling the lever, keep scrolling, keep

checking. Your dopamine system was not designed for this. It evolved to motivate you to pursue food, warmth, safety, and connection. scarce resources in a world where effort was required to find them. It was not designed to interface with a system that provides infinite instant algorithmically optimized stimulation calibrated specifically to the profile of your individual psychology. And so you find yourself, as most people do, checking your phone somewhere between 96 and 150 times per day. Not because you decided to, not because you want to, but because a system smarter than your conscious mind has learned exactly which lever to pull, exactly when to pull it, and exactly how to keep you coming back.

Stop scrolling. I need you to understand this about notifications. Every notification is an interruption. Every interruption breaks your focus. And researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to the same level of deep focus you were at before. 23 minutes for a single notification glance. Most of us receive dozens of notifications per day, which means most of us never, not once, not for a single sustained period, reach the depth of focus and the depth of mind wandering necessary for their default mode network to do its best work. But here's the thing about your attention being stolen. You can reclaim what was

taken. And this is where we go back way back to the people who understood the value of empty moments more clearly than almost any thinkers in history. I want to talk to you about the ancient art of doing nothing. What the wisest humans who ever lived knew about the sacred gap. The stoic philosopher Senica writing 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome was surrounded by precisely the same problem Pascal would observe 16 centuries later. Rome was a city of spectacle. Gladiator games, theatrical performances, political intrigue, constant noise and crowd and stimulation. Senica watched his fellow citizens lurch from entertainment to entertainment, from party to party. And he wrote something that reads like it was composed yesterday. Senica wrote,

"It is not that I am brave enough to be bored. It is that I know what boredom is for." He called it otium often translated as leisure. But that translation loses something crucial for Senica. Otium was not relaxation. It was not passive rest. It was purposeful emptiness. Deliberately cultivated spaciousness. time not organized around doing or consuming but around being around allowing the mind to roam to integrate to discover what it actually contains. Senica believed that the quality of a person's otium determined the quality of their thinking. Not their reading, not their study, their otium. The time when the books were closed and they just sat.

He wrote letters in that state. He had his deepest philosophical insights in that state. He believed that you could not genuinely know yourself without regular intentional time spent in silence with your own mind. So what I want to share with you is the practice of how to be bored. I want to give you something real, not a manifesto, not a list of things to feel guilty about, a practice. First, understand what you're actually doing when you reach for the phone. You're not making a decision. You're executing a reflex. A reflex that has been installed and strengthened over years of training. The first step is simply to notice it. To put a tiny gap between the stimulus, boredom, and the

response, scroll. You don't have to resist it. Just notice. Oh, I'm bored. And my hand moved. That noticing over time is everything. You cannot change a reflex you're not aware of. Second, practice what I call the 3inut hold. When you feel boredom arriving, that restless, uncomfortable itch, make a deal with yourself. 3 minutes. You're going to hold still for 3 minutes. No phone, no book, no music. You're just going to let the discomfort be there. Look at a wall. Look at the sky. Look at your hands. For the first minute, it will feel terrible. Your mind will pingpong. It will tell you this is a waste of time. It will generate a small flood of anxious, mundane thoughts,

things you need to do, things you said, things you're worried about. This is all normal. Sit with it. In the second minute, something usually shifts. The chatter doesn't stop, but it changes character. It becomes slightly less urgent. Your gaze, if you let it, will start to drift and soften. Your breathing will slow without you telling it to. In the third minute, something opens. Not always, not dramatically, but a quietness begins to gather. And sometimes, sometimes, something arrives from below. A thought you didn't expect. A memory you hadn't planned to have. A connection between two things in your life that you suddenly see clearly. A feeling that had been waiting patiently

behind all the noise. That's your default mode network coming online. That is OTM. Third, every day do one thing that allows you to be bored. Walk without headphones. Eat breakfast without your phone. Sit outside for 10 minutes after work doing nothing. Lie in bed for 5 minutes after you wake before checking your phone. Wash your dishes without any distraction. These are not sacrifices. These are investments. Each boring ritual is a deposit in the account of your inner life. Each one is giving your default mode network, your creativity, your empathy, your self-standing a little bit of time to run. The remarkable thing is how quickly it compounds. People who begin simple boredom practices just like these often

report within 2 or 3 weeks that they feel more creative, more emotionally present, more able to access their own feelings, more interesting to themselves. Not because they've learned anything new, because they've given the knowledge they already have space to breathe. Number four, and this is the most important one. Get bored on purpose before your hardest problems. Before a difficult creative challenge, before a decision that matters, before a hard conversation you need to have, take 10 minutes and do something mindlessly mundane. Wash the dishes, fold laundry, take a short walk. You're not procrastinating. You're activating your most sophisticated cognitive machinery.

You are greasing the right wheels. What seems like wasted time is often the thing that makes everything that follows work. I want to come back to Pascal. He wrote his sentence in 1654. Long before slot machines, long before television, long before the algorithm that knows you better than your friends do, that has mapped the exact contours of your restlessness and as a piece of content already selected, already cued, already waiting for the precise moment your attention starts to drift. Pascal looked at kings and philosophers and soldiers, people with every resource, every advantage, every stimulation their world could offer, and he saw them running. We are all running. Running from a person.

Running from a place. Running from silence. Running from ourselves. I'm not judging you. I'm grieving what you're missing out on. I want you to know that the most important things, the things that make life worth living, that make humans capable of wisdom and love and genuine creativity, those things could only be found in one place nobody wanted to go. The quiet stillness, the peaceful room, the empty moment, the uncomfortable awkward silence. That's where it all is. That void is not empty. It only looks empty from the outside. From the inside, if you can hold still long enough to get there, it is the most populated, most alive, most genuinely yours place you will ever stand.

Yourself is in there. Your best ideas are in there. Your deepest relationships being shaped in there by the quality of the attention you're developing. or destroying right now today in every idle moment. The technology is not going anywhere. The algorithm is not going to develop a conscience. Nobody is going to give you your boredom back. You have to take it one uncomfortable minute at a time. Now you know. Go be bored. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.

I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I think envy is the thief of joy. I think social comparison is invaluable.