📗 Understand
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Jan 30, 2025
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7 min read
Today’s topic isn’t sexy: we’re going to talk about boredom. But I promise, not in a boring way. We're going to explore how our relationship with waiting and emptiness has evolved with the arrival of new technologies. And how boredom is intimately linked to creativity and concentration.
🐾 An Endangered Species
In 2014, a team of researchers from the universities of Virginia and Harvard, led by Timothy D. Wilson, conducted an experiment with 55 individuals. Here’s the setup:
Alone in a room for 6 to 15 minutes
Deprived of music, reading, writing, and of course, smartphones.
The experiment was conducted in two parts.
1️⃣ First Phase
The scientists first assessed the participants’ reactions to various stimuli, such as shocking images or mild electric shocks, which they had to rank from pleasant to very unpleasant.
They then asked if they were willing to pay $5 to avoid the electric shock. Those who were willing to pay to avoid it continued with the experiment.
2️⃣ Second Phase
The remaining participants were invited to stay alone for 15 minutes, this time doing nothing and without any stimuli.
However, they could choose to inflict an electric shock on themselves at any moment by pressing a button.
🏆 Results
18 people (43% of the participants) chose to self-administer at least one electric shock during this time. One participant even shocked himself 190 times (well, he might be a little odd). The researchers concluded that many people prefer to suffer just to escape boredom.
They would rather have something happen, even if it’s negative.
So they don’t have to face their thoughts alone.
Do you recognize yourself in one or more of the following situations?
It’s 6:27 PM, you’ve finished getting ready, and you need to leave home at 6:30 for an appointment: you pick up your phone to scroll during those 3 minutes of waiting.
You’re in a queue: you instinctively take your phone out of your pocket to browse through apps, watch a YouTube video, or check your emails.
You have a 10-minute commute: you automatically put on music or a podcast.
It’s clear: our relationship with boredom and solitude has drastically changed with the advent of new technologies, particularly smartphones.
We’ve always wanted to escape inaction. At the beginning of our history, out of necessity and survival instinct. Today, technology makes it much easier to fill the “void.” Access to an infinite amount of information and stimulating content is constantly at our fingertips.
Problem? The more we give in, the more the brain craves it.
We’ve trained our reward circuitry to fill every moment of inaction with technological self-stimulation. As a result, we demand more and more.
Today, the attention market consists of:
Increasingly short content.
Platforms that are better designed to capture attention.
Every second of idle time becomes an ideal opportunity for a new distraction. They can slip into every little moment of emptiness, everywhere and all the time.
But you guessed it, it’s a vicious cycle: every time you give in to a distraction when you’re bored, you become increasingly restless during every moment of inaction.
There’s no longer a need for a particular intention to pick up your phone. It’s become instinctive and deeply ingrained in our brain mechanisms. So it’s no longer just a matter of willpower.
Taking a break devoid of any external stimulation has become nearly impossible. Yet, fighting boredom with your phone often proves counterproductive.
It ironically ends up intensifying the feeling of boredom and wasted time. And it often leads to guilt for not spending that time on a more enriching activity.
🪄 The Virtues of Boredom
“All the unhappiness of men comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to remain quietly in a room” —Blaise Pascal
You probably know the famous saying that we often have our best ideas in the shower. Well… that’s not untrue.
In the shower, while walking… your most relevant inspirations frequently come from moments when you do nothing. Or more precisely, nothing that requires reflection.
When you’re showering, you can’t escape or play Angry Birds to entertain yourself (a nice reference from 2012).
In his book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari tells us this:
“Creativity is not about creating a new thing emerging from the brain. It’s a new association between two things that already existed. Mind wandering allows for broader thinking pathways, enabling more idea associations.”
This quote comes from his friend Nathan Spreng, a neuroscientist. Paradoxically, it’s not necessarily during intense work moments that we exercise our creativity.
In moments like a shower, on autopilot, the brain operates chaotically. Without distractions, doing a task that doesn’t require reflection: the brain starts to connect disparate ideas and solve problems.
Letting your mind wander can allow you to:
Unlock hidden ideas
Make unexpected connections
Bring forth new perspectives
In cases of hyper-stimulation (via smartphones, for example), this downtime doesn’t work: we’re not accommodating our consciousness.
History is full of innovators, artists, and scientists who spent a lot of time letting their minds wander. Albert Einstein, for example, had a habit of stepping away from his work as a physicist for long hours to let divergent ideas come to him.
He would regularly take walks, go to isolated cabins in the mountains, play the violin, or sail at sea with his wooden boat. And he would return to work with new ideas that propelled him to become who he was. Einstein also said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Would he have developed his theories of relativity if he had bought the latest iPhone and was level 796 in Candy Crush?
In a world that promotes acceleration, moments of pause help avoid mental fatigue and reduce anxiety and stress. Slowing down to observe better and navigate more effectively afterward.
The book Deep Work by Cal Newport, is once again enlightening on this subject. According to him, learning to be bored helps you concentrate when necessary.
The reason is simple: if you train your mind to distract you every time you’re bored, you can’t tolerate it anymore.You don’t learn to resist stimuli.
Boredom is therefore an integral part of a “deep work” culture: knowing how to work deeply to create value. By self-stimulating at the slightest downtime, we miss out on this. As Cal Newport explains:
“Just as athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you will struggle to reach the highest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing from even the slightest hint of boredom.”
Embracing boredom is therefore training yourself to concentrate intensely. When you think about it, it makes sense. If you do little exercise and at the same time eat chocolate donuts every day, you won’t be able to run a marathon.
If every time you’re not working, you’re constantly distracting yourself (often multitasking), you won’t suddenly be able to sit down and concentrate for four hours straight.
There are creative and productive virtues in moments of inaction. The key is not to view them (both individually and collectively) as weaknesses but as potential instruments of well-being and productivity.
Don’t hesitate to jump into the void.
💪 The Challenge of the Week
Knowing that I am a very poor student on this topic of boredom, I’ve borrowed this challenge from the book Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi.
She starts from the observation that the times when we seek to conquer boredom with our phones are those when we are moving (walking, commuting…).
The challenge is to keep your phone out of reach whenever you move, for example, in your bag. Make the effort to complete your journeys without music, without any stimulation other than the real world and what’s happening around you.
The idea is not to look at it until you arrive at your destination. I’ve tried this challenge for the past three days. Nothing in my ears, nothing in my hand during travels.
What I observed:
The first trip felt a bit strange, but by the second, I started to take pleasure in carefully observing my surroundings.
I felt clearer-headed by the end of my journeys.
I had many ideas for topics to explore and reflections I’d never had before.
🛩️ The Challenge Upgrade
If you want to go further, during your travels, observe your environment and note three things you’ve never seen before. In Paris, even just in terms of architecture, I observed incredible things I had never noticed that are right next to me.
So what about you?
