The Quiet Power of Boredom
Read about the surprising research on boredom and practise the more the more structures with reduced participle clauses.
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Boredom has a poor reputation. Most of us treat it as a small emergency, reaching for a phone within seconds. The more entertainment we carry in our pockets, the less patience we have for the empty minute at a bus stop or in a waiting room.
Yet the research on idleness, slowly gathering since the early 2010s, points in an awkward direction. The longer people sit with mild boredom, the more original their later answers in creativity tests. Schoolchildren forced to wait without devices generate more ideas in a follow-up task than peers who scrolled. Designers report that the most useful insights of a project tend to arrive in the shower, not at the desk.
The reason, suggested by neuroscientists, is the default mode network: a set of brain regions that switch on when nothing demanding is happening. Quietly running in the background, it appears to consolidate memory, plan the future, and rehearse social scenarios. The more we starve it of empty time, the less it can do this work.
This is awkward for the modern adult. Trained by years of instant feedback, the brain has come to expect a constant drip of stimulation. Removing the phone for an afternoon often feels less like rest and more like a mild withdrawal: restless, irritable, slightly anxious. The further we are from a real boredom habit, the more painful the first hours feel.
Practised in small doses, however, boredom becomes manageable. A walk without headphones, a queue without scrolling, a meal alone without a screen: these are micro-trainings. The more consistently we accept these moments, the more comfortable our own company becomes.
Reframed this way, boredom is something to be listened to rather than solved. The empty minute is where the interesting half of our minds finally gets a word in.
Questions
What does the writer say boredom has?