Permission to Be Bored: Creating Blank Space in a World of Constant Downloads

In our digital age, boredom is hard to come by. Every time we have a little bit of space, we’re very quickly able to fill it up by checking what’s latest on the news, refreshing our emails, or scrolling to see the latest from our favorite influencers.

But a couple of weeks ago when Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram went down, a lot of people (after getting over the initial panic or confusion) felt a sense of relief that there wasn’t the pressure to continuously check our feeds and account activity. And lots of people took to Twitter to complain about being bored!

I believe (not being insensitive to some folks globally who were severely negatively impacted by Facebook’s giant error) this cultural moment was important for lots of humans to go through.

I don’t think that we need to have a permanent outage of all social media to live peacefully in our digital age (although there is a lot that needs to change with it... a topic for another time). But I do think that we need to be mindful of filling all empty time and space with information, feeds, and screens. This emptiness will allow our bodies, nervous systems, and minds to return to our baseline level of health.

Boredom (Space) is Essential

Boredom is essential for the wholeness of the human experience. And it is an emotion that is widely misunderstood.

We’ve developed an aversion to boredom because our culture promotes messages like “the Devil has work for idle hands,” bootstrap mentality, and “the grind.” Not to mention how tech and entertainment help us avoid assessing our own mental health. As we’ve discussed a lot here at Technically Spiritual, we know that in order to come back to feeling human, we have to move against the narrative that our worth = our productivity.

Being bored can be a wonderful thing. Being bored helps our brains recover by not having to DO anything, and just be…

This is going to seem out of character, but I am actually not advocating for even meditation here. What I’m talking about is giving ourselves time and space to actually let the mind wander.

This is different from meditation, where the point is to cultivate focused attention. Boredom promotes day dreaming, and wandering off into other realms of the mind. This is healthy for healing. Sometimes we need a mental escape because the world is a lot to deal with. And it’s better to find solace within one’s own mind than to keep reaching for our technology and seeking the answers externally. We ourselves know what we need to heal—and when the world is overstimulating, adding more from the outside isn’t always the best solution.

Boredom & Creativity

Sandi Mann, author of The Upside of Downtime shares,

“We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom, because every time we get our phone out, we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems.”

In fact, being bored actually has been proven to stimulate creativity, although that may seem counterintuitive.

Going for a walk and just letting yourself look at the trees and think will often prompt new ideas that you’ve never considered before. When we let ourselves be bored, we give the mind a break from constantly working and taking in new information. We actually give ourselves some time to let the mind make connections between things we already know, which is how creativity works – blending a couple of familiar things to make a new one. It is also the core of innovative problem-solving.

The mind also accesses this creativity when we are doing activities that we can do on autopilot or that engage our left brain - such as playing ping pong or cleaning. This is why people seem to get great ideas while they shower!

Give Yourself Permission to Just Be 

So yes, while of course it is important to carve out time in the day to sit down and meditate and observe the thoughts, it is also important to give yourself the time to just let your mind wander. Cultivating boredom does not have to be another line on your self-care checklist, because it is actually about not doing.

So, how do we engage in more time to do nothing and be bored? Sure, especially if we are hoping for inspiration to strike and we want to purposely cultivate creativity, we can stimulate boredom by engaging in a really boring task, like walking the same route you always walk, watching water boil, or staring out of the window.

But, how we can intermittently add boredom into our days is first giving yourself permission to be bored and allowing yourself to be comfortable with how uncomfortable it might feel at first.

It’s going to require a bit of mindfulness, and some level of self-control, so be easy with yourself. The next time you are waiting for an elevator, or standing in line, or sitting in a doctor’s office, simply try not picking up your phone. Instead, stare at the wall or your feet and let your mind wander off. Seriously, I’m giving you permission to just zone out.

I know, I talk about being present and how important that is, and of course I want you to be aware of your surroundings enough to protect yourself from danger. But, this practice of cultivating boredom requires you to go into the depths of your own mind, into your reflective inner experience, your imagination, and there you will find a new world can be opened up that can help you heal from the mental overload of today’s digital age.

Good luck with this practice and let me know what you think!

Want to listen to this article? Here’s the audio version!