Bored? It can be a good thing
Embracing boredom can deepen our experience and lead to self-discovery. Instead of escaping it, explore the feelings and beliefs associated with it.
I was at a workshop speaking about happiness, where a student asked me: What’s a change I had cultivated that has allowed for more satisfaction in my life.
In that moment, I realized my capacity to accept and make friends with boredom is a quality that I have worked towards. One of the secrets that we least speak about when it comes to adulting is mindfully engaging in tasks that are boring and yet necessary. It has allowed me to stay present and deepen my experience of what surrounds me.
It was during the pandemic, that I realized how people use the term ‘bored’ for a wide range of feelings and even in moments when they were unsure of what they were thinking or feeling. Conversations took various forms: feeling bored in life, with friendships, intimate relationships and then work too. These themes have continued to linger in therapy sessions.
A twenty-two-year-old told me, “I feel bored with my life, and I have been spending long hours just scrolling.” Another 45-year-old told me, “It’s my boredom that has led me to drinking every day, I don’t know what to do.” I realized that boredom was a term used for moments when people felt they didn’t have anything exciting to do, it was also a term used when there was absence of social connection and isolation. Then there were others who used the term boring in the absence of meaningful work and moments of languishing. Boredom at its core has to do with a state where we feel the absence of excitement, novelty or even thrill. Mundane tasks like doing accounts, administrative work or household chores are associated with boredom, procrastination, anxiety, and an inability to finish them. This has come to be known as ‘errand paralysis,’ a term coined by Anne Helen Petersen.
A desire to escape boredom can lead us towards many a slippery slope including binge eating, binge drinking, consuming content endlessly, drugs, impulsive decisions in relation to how money is spent, and even an unhealthy relationship with work. A 50-year-old client mentioned to me, “I began to use work as a filler to deal with what I thought was boredom for the longest time. It was only when my seven-year-old mentioned how I’m never listening, is when I realised that I had stopped investing in any personal relationships. While I thought I was bored, I was deeply lonely.”
When clients talk about boredom, I urge them to go deeper and explore all the feelings they are associating it with. I also try and ask clients to tell me the beliefs they have come to associate with boredom. We are living at a time where there is no limit to the content that’s available, so very often adults won’t give themselves the permission to feel bored. As a consequence, they suppress feelings and act in ways which may not be productive. If we are using boredom as a shield to avoid doing the inner work, put in effort and invest in our relationships then it can end up becoming a cop out. Our relationships, friendships often require a new lens and a different way of looking at the same reality. Yet, as adults we forget to do that and begin to look externally for answers when very often our boredom is a compass, a useful tool trying to tell us something.
As adults, if we can be patient in moments when boredom strikes us and slowly examine what we are feeling or missing, we will be surprised with answers that we may find. While productivity and optimization are the new buzz words, we all know that as we sit still and allow ourselves to be bored, we may find a new idea or answers to questions that have been long been lingering.
What life has taught me is that we can get bored with everything eventually, so the real task is learning not to give in to the fantasy of the next big thing. Boredom can be a liminal space where so much can unfold; think of it as a pause that allows us to find clarity and excitement anew.
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