Imagine yourself sitting in an empty white room. In front of you is a red button that when pressed, will give you an electrical shock. Given that you will get paid if you resist the urge to press the button, what would you do if you were in the room for 15 minutes? “What a silly question,” you probably say to yourself.
Well, let’s see what the result shows when this topic was studied in a proper experiment. Surprisingly, 25% of female participants and 67% of male participants did press the button. When asked, they said that they pressed the button simply because of boredom. Are they crazy? Absolutely not. This behavior was just human nature. We do not enjoy the sense of boredom. We often fill in the gap caused by boredom by scrolling on our phones. When was the last time you let your brain rest in a quiet and unstimulating state? Let’s see some benefits of being bored:
Relax the brain
These days, we are flooded with information. To process these stimuli, our brains are spending excessive amounts of energy, which results in adding stress. Being bored and removing yourself from stimuli will let your brain rest.
Develop creativity
When you are in a bored state, creative thinking naturally happens. (Wilson et al (2014) showed that people in the most boring conditions could come up with the most creative ideas on how to use a plastic cup. When we are bored, and we cannot do anything else, we will automatically do creative thinking to entertain ourselves. During the silent and “boring” moments, we can get creative. Imagine whatever you want!
Increase altruism
A study (Iris-Anda et al, 2019) showed that bored participants are more likely to donate to charity or to give blood. The unsatisfied feeling you experience when you get bored will lead you to do emotionally, cognitively, and socially rewarding experiences to fulfill the sense of emptiness. You will be forced to look for ways to help others.
Plan the future
When you get bored and let yourself solely focus on your thinking, generally you will think about your future and plan for it. Understandably, we are thinking about the future in daily life quite frequently while we are doing homework or working. However, we are not fully focusing on those thoughts. We all know how significant planning for the future is. We have to give ourselves proper time for autobiographical planning. The “boring times” are the perfect moment for planning the future. (Baird, B., Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. , 2011)
Overall, boredom offers time for a “brain break”, encourages us to be innovative, motivates us to help others, and provides us with time for planning our future. If these are the benefits of doing nothing but thinking for a few minutes, we should try this out. Here is a simple method: sit somewhere comfortable and quiet (WITH NO PHONE). Then, start to explore your thoughts. Enjoy the process. To see the list of works cited please access the following link.