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Being Bored Can Actually Be Good for You

If you’re not convinced keep reading.

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris from Unsplash

Writers, musicians, or artists, in general, aren’t allowed to be bored.

They are creators for god’s sake! How can they not have some interesting idea of cooking in the back of their minds at all times?

But don’t worry if you‘re a maker and feel bored once in a while. It’s actually one of the most important factors in the creative process.

According to a scientific study, being bored gives us time to daydream which can lead to an increase in creativity. Without this state of mind, we wouldn’t let our minds wander and find new ways to do things (get ideas for a novel, find new uses of a product, and so on).

So let it get boring!


Famous artists were driven by boredom too

Who would have thought that Agatha Christie, the world-renown writer of detective novels, was often bored when she was a young lady?

Thanks to having this monotonous feeling, she would start wondering inside her mind and try to find ways to entertain herself to get her life a little bit more interesting.

Eventually, this led her to write. Those short stories and a novel she wrote by the time she was 17, were a turning point in her career. That’s when she decided to dedicate herself to this art.

Kate Nash, a British singer-songwriter, was also motivated to start writing songs during her teens because “there wasn’t much else going on in my life”. Once again, boredom was a motivator to make her create something that would get her out of this state.

Other famous people have also stated the benefits of boredom: Neil Gaiman, David Foster Wallace, Anish Kapoor, and many more.

It seems that when people don’t have anything better to do, the mind starts creating things to maintain itself occupied. It’s the push we need to explore outside our usual boundaries and fill a space that our mind is longing for.


Sensory Deprivation: An extreme case of boredom

Let’s start with a more subtle experiment.

Think of yourself being isolated inside a small room with a bunch of tasteless shakes of meal replacement products, a washbasin, a bed, and a tiny toilet.

Nothing more nothing less.

Everything in the room is white and the lights will always be on so you don’t know when it’s either day or night. And you’ll be inside this room for three straight days.

How will you feel?

It would clearly suck, I know.

But the interesting thing is that when there’s no outside stimulation the brain starts stimulating itself. You might start hearing noises that are not there or mix dreams with reality. The mind will try to keep itself aroused and when it doesn’t find anything outside it will start tricking you from the inside.

That’s what happened to a famous YouTuber called Vsauce who isolated himself for 3 days to experience first hand the psychological effects of mild sensory deprivation.

Check it out:

 

Photo of an Isolation Tank taken from Wikipedia

Take-Aways

Try it out!

 

By Pavle Marinkovic on

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If you were interested in this article, I recommend you follow this link: Psychology

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