Boredom and Creativity: What Happens When We Finally Stop Distracting Ourselves
Photo by Juan Gomez on Unsplash
This is Part 2 of my last post.
While “doing nothing” over the weekend and then seeing inspiration find me (rather than me chasing it) sounds easy, I also realised — it isn’t that easy.
Why?
It’s tempting to slip into tiny chunks of multitasking, losing minutes and seconds to what Brigid Schulte calls Time Confetti.
Doing nothing is genuinely hard. How long can one really sit still — or even read a book — before reaching for some form of stimulation?
I’m reminded of childhood, when I would often tell my mother, “I am bored.” If she suggested something that didn’t interest me, I’d rather stay bored than do it just for the sake of being “productive.”
As an adult, I haven’t felt that pure, unfiltered boredom in years. Yes, I’ve felt bored while doing something for too long — like reading a book or finishing a painting — but then I’d simply switch to another activity, watch TV, or check my phone. That’s not the same as just being bored.
We rarely get bored — or truly do nothing — anymore. James Clear recently wrote on LinkedIn:
“The reason people get good ideas in the shower is because it’s the only time during the day when most people are away from screens long enough to think clearly. The lesson is not to take more showers, but rather to make more time to think.”
Paul Graham takes this further in his essay The Top Idea in Your Mind:
“I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”
So, why is boredom so difficult?
We’ve trained ourselves to fight it — scrolling, distracting, staying busy. This is also why many people struggle with meditation. A friend of mine, generally calm and not phone-addicted, shared how she can only meditate with a guided track — and even then, one hour is her maximum before frustration sets in.
This is exactly what happens in the first few days of Vipassana meditation. No phone, no books, no chatting with fellow meditators. Just sitting and meditating (or trying to) for 10+ hours a day. You can’t escape the boredom. The sheer lack of stimulation borders on painful.
A funny side note: when I drove to the meditation center, I was listening to a Diljit Dosanjh song. For the first 2–3 days, my mind replayed that song on loop as a way to fight boredom.
Eventually, though, the song wore off. My mind began to settle. Slowly, I grew okay with less stimulation. I became more aware of subtler sensations — the air passing through my nostrils, a tiny crawling feeling near my pinky toe. Before my first Vipassana, I used to think, “I can’t feel much in my body.” But years of practice have deepened my awareness.
Many people coming out of Vipassana also describe a sense of emotional cleansing. That’s because boredom forces us to sit with difficult emotions too — the ones we often avoid.
An HBR article explains:
“Boredom, when you don’t have anything else to think about, switches our brain into the default mode network. This network is mildly uncomfortable because it makes us think about big, existential questions like — What does my life mean? — that we usually push aside.” (slightly edited for reading)
Maybe that’s why so many people quit their jobs during Covid. With fewer distractions, we had to face the harder questions about life, purpose, and meaning.
Maria Popova puts it beautifully in Brain Pickings:
“To be bored is to be unafraid of our interior lives — a form of moral courage central to being fully human.”
Maybe boredom is not the enemy after all, but an invitation —
…to do nothing extraordinary.
…to sit and think.
…to let our thoughts wander.
To notice the restlessness, and gently remind ourselves: “Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nobody to be.”
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