Boredom Might Be Doing Something Important

Just last night, Rowan, my youngest, came into my office, sat down, looked at me, and announced, “Mom, I’m bored.”

“Good,” I said.

He looked at me like that was not remotely the answer he had been expecting. I could almost see him waiting for the second half of my response — the suggestion, the activity, the solution to the terrible predicament in which he had found himself. Instead, I let the answer stand.

Here is the thing: I have watched this happen over and over again, and I have been tempted to fill that space for my children more times than most parents simply because I have seven of them. A bored child appears in front of you and there is an almost automatic impulse to provide something. Go do this. Make that. Watch something. Call somebody. Here, let me solve the discomfort of having nothing immediately interesting happening to you.

Except boredom might be doing something important.

We have become remarkably uncomfortable with empty space, and our children are growing up in a world where they barely have to experience it at all. They doomscroll themselves to sleep, reach for the phone when they wake up, stare at screens through road trips and airplane rides, and take their phones into the bathroom at school. Earbuds go in, screens come up, and scroll, scroll, scroll.

Kids will sit beside each other on a bus and communicate through their phones instead of having a conversation. Friendship is increasingly mediated through emojis, GIFs, disappearing pictures, TikTok links, and whatever meme perfectly communicates an emotion without requiring anyone to actually find the words for it.

Before we become too self-righteous about the kids, though, plenty of adults are doing exactly the same thing.

We reach for our phones while standing in line, waiting for someone at a restaurant, sitting at a red light, getting into bed, waking up, watching television, eating lunch, or using the bathroom. Couples lie beside each other scrolling separate worlds. Families sit around restaurant tables with four screens glowing between them. We have managed to eliminate an astonishing number of the small pauses that used to exist naturally throughout a human day.

Those pauses were not necessarily wasted time.

Research on mind-wandering and creativity is more nuanced than the internet-friendly claim that “boredom makes you creative,” but there is good evidence that certain forms of deliberate mind-wandering and low-demand mental space can support divergent thinking and creative problem-solving. Sometimes the brain needs room to move away from a problem before it can approach that problem differently.

That makes intuitive sense to anyone who has ever found the answer to something in the shower.

When we are not constantly consuming somebody else’s thoughts, our own thoughts finally have somewhere to go. We make associations. We replay conversations. We imagine possibilities. We notice questions we had not realized we were asking. Children invent games because nobody handed them one. Adults begin thinking differently because there is finally enough quiet for a thought to finish.

Boredom can also confront us with ourselves, which may be one reason we are so eager to escape it.

Without the phone, podcast, television, alcohol, shopping, work, game, or constant stream of messages, we may notice that we are lonely. Angry. Restless. Dissatisfied. Grieving. Anxious. We might discover that the relationship we keep saying is fine does not feel particularly fine when we sit quietly inside it. We may remember something painful or recognize that the thing we have been calling exhaustion is actually resentment.

Not every uncomfortable thought requires analysis, and sitting alone with trauma is not a substitute for appropriate professional care. Still, psychological research has consistently connected experiential avoidance, thought suppression, and emotion-regulation difficulties with post-traumatic stress symptoms. Healing often requires developing a greater capacity to experience internal discomfort without immediately escaping, suppressing, or reorganizing our lives around it.

That is part of what I think we miss when we treat boredom as a problem requiring immediate relief.

Boredom gives us opportunities to practice remaining present when nothing is stimulating us. There is no dopamine-rich parade arriving every few seconds with another video, headline, outrage, joke, body, product, tragedy, recipe, argument, or stranger’s vacation. Your nervous system has to tolerate the ordinary experience of simply being where you are.

That capacity matters far beyond boredom.

It matters when a conversation with your spouse becomes uncomfortable and you want to grab your phone instead of staying engaged. It matters when your child is frustrated and you want to rescue them because their discomfort makes you uncomfortable. It matters when loneliness shows up, when anxiety rises, when an old memory surfaces, or when you are faced with a problem that cannot be solved in thirty seconds.

We build resilience partly by discovering that discomfort does not always require immediate action.

Our increasingly fragmented digital environment may complicate that learning. Research does show associations between problematic digital-media use and attention problems, impulsivity, hyperactivity, and ADHD symptoms, particularly among children and adolescents. The relationship is complicated and appears capable of running in both directions: people with ADHD-related traits may be especially drawn to highly stimulating digital environments, while problematic digital-media patterns may also contribute to later attention difficulties through several possible pathways. That is very different from saying scrolling “causes ADHD,” which the evidence does not justify.

What we can say is that we have built an extraordinarily ADHD-friendly environment for brains that were never designed to receive novelty every few seconds.

Scroll. Reward. Scroll. Novelty. Scroll. Outrage. Scroll. Beauty. Scroll. Sex. Scroll. Fear. Scroll. Somebody dancing in their kitchen.

Then we wonder why reading ten uninterrupted pages of a book feels harder than it used to.

Attention is something we practice. So is patience. So is tolerating frustration. So is conversation. So is imagination. So is being alone with ourselves.

And intimacy requires many of those same muscles.

Real connection is slower than scrolling. Your partner will not change subjects every twelve seconds to maintain your interest. Your child will tell you stories that take too long. Your friend will occasionally repeat herself. Sex between two people who have shared a life for years requires presence, curiosity, vulnerability, and an ability to remain inside your own body rather than constantly searching for the next stimulus.

Human beings cannot compete with algorithms designed to keep us from looking away.

We should probably stop asking them to.

There is another gift hidden inside boredom that I want my children to know: when nobody immediately entertains you, you have to meet yourself.

You have to decide what interests you. You have to solve the problem of what comes next. You build something, wander outside, draw, dismantle something you probably should not dismantle, stare at the ceiling, argue with your brother, make up a game, pick up a book, daydream, think, create, fail at entertaining yourself, and try again.

Somewhere in all of that, a person develops.

Adults need that space too. We need walks without headphones, meals without phones, drives without constant input, evenings when we allow silence to exist, and moments when an uncomfortable feeling gets to finish its sentence before we interrupt it with a screen.

I am not declaring war on technology. I use it. My kids use it. The world they are growing up in will require them to understand it far better than my generation ever had to.

But I am increasingly convinced that one of the things we may need to intentionally protect is the space where absolutely nothing is happening.

Because nothing is rarely nothing.

Sometimes boredom is where the brain starts making connections. Sometimes it is where creativity returns, where a problem gets solved, where we finally notice what we feel, or where our nervous system learns that restlessness is survivable. Sometimes it is where we remember how to talk to the person sitting beside us.

And sometimes it is simply an eleven-year-old boy sitting in his mother’s office announcing that he is bored.

Good.

I hope he gets bored enough to find out what his own mind can do.

→What was the last thing you did because you were bored — not because a screen suggested it to you?

Maybe the invitation this week is simple: leave one empty space empty. Take the walk without headphones. Sit in the car for five minutes before reaching for your phone. Let your child be bored long enough to discover what comes next. Give your own mind enough quiet to hear what it has been trying to say.

And if this made you a little uncomfortable, I would love to know why. Tell me in the comments what boredom tends to bring up for you.

As always loving and praying for you and our world.

Rene Schooler

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This post was previously published on medium.com.