Boredom Is Trying to Tell You Something

You know the feeling.

Hour seven of a long-haul flight. The Wi-Fi is down, you've already watched the one decent movie, and sleep isn't coming. Or you're in line at the bank, staring at a ticket number the screen seems to have forgotten about. Your phone dies on a train that's running forty minutes late. You're stuck in a meeting that has nothing to do with you. Or it's a Sunday afternoon with nothing on the calendar, and you've scrolled for half an hour, opened the fridge, closed the fridge, and scrolled through every streaming app without finding a single thing you want to watch.

It doesn't hurt, exactly. You're not tired, and you're not sad. Something is just off. Time stops moving at its usual speed and starts to drag.

That's boredom. And we hate it more than we'd like to admit.

In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia ran a simple experiment.1 They asked people to sit alone in an empty room for fifteen minutes. No phone, no book, nothing to do but think. There was one thing in the room: a button that gave you an electric shock.

Before the session, everyone tried the shock once. Most said they would pay money not to feel it again.

Then the fifteen minutes started. By the end, 67% of the men and 25% of the women had pressed the button at least once. One man pressed it 190 times.

Given the choice between a few minutes alone with their thoughts and a jolt of electricity, a lot of people took the jolt.

It sounds absurd until you notice your own hand going for your phone the second the elevator doors close. Most of us are pressing a button all day long. Ours just doesn't sting.

Why we can't stand an empty minute

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle points out that if there were no people on Earth, only plants and animals, questions like "What time is it?" would mean nothing. The answer would always be the same: it's now. What else would it be?

A cat doesn't feel that 3 p.m. on a Sunday has been wasted. Only a person does, and mostly a modern one.

Somewhere along the way, time stopped being something we lived in and became something we manage. We schedule it, optimize it, try to get more out of it. Once time is a resource, an empty hour starts to look like a leak. Unproductive. Wasted. Boring. We even talk about killing time, which is a strange thing to do to the one thing we keep saying we never have enough of.

And filling time has never been easier. One video slides into the next, and we're busy the whole way through. But it's a kind of fake busy. You rarely put your phone down after an hour and think, well, that was time well spent. We've plugged every gap, and somehow we're more bored than ever.

Boredom isn't empty. It's wanting.

I used to think boredom meant having nothing to do. Then I read Out of My Skull by James Danckert and John Eastwood, two psychologists who study boredom for a living, and it turned out I had it almost backwards.2

They define boredom as the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to engage with something and not being able to. You want to do something, just not any of the things in front of you, and your mind has nothing to grab onto. Tolstoy had a nicer phrase for it: a desire for desires.

Plenty of things can bring it on. Repetitive tasks. Things that are too easy or way too hard. Being made to do something you can't walk away from. And a lot of boredom is the shallow, waiting kind: the bank line, the delayed train, the slow flight. You're waiting for something to happen, and when it does, the boredom ends.

The kind I find more interesting is the other one.

It doesn't have a clear trigger. It feels more like hollowness. You might be busy the whole time, going to meetings, seeing people, bingeing a show, playing a game, and still come out the other end feeling like nothing stuck. It isn't that you had nothing to do. It's that nothing you did actually had you.

A crisis of agency

The book uses an image I keep coming back to.

Picture two things out on the ocean. One is a cork, bobbing wherever the waves push it. It doesn't decide where it goes. The other is a fisherman rowing against the current, trying to make it back to shore. The cork has no intention. The fisherman does.

That deeper kind of boredom, the authors argue, is your mind telling you you've become the cork. Your time is full, but you didn't choose what filled it. They call it a crisis of agency: for a while, you've stopped feeling like the one steering your own life.

That sounds bleak. But the next part of the book is what changed how I see it, because it compares boredom with something that looks a lot like it from the outside: apathy.

An apathetic person and a bored person might be slumped on the same couch. The difference is what's going on inside. The apathetic person genuinely doesn't want anything. They're not bothered enough to fix it. The bored person is restless precisely because they do want something. They want to throw themselves into something, and they can't find it.

Apathy is caring about nothing. Boredom, in a way, is caring too much.

So if you're bored, part of you still wants to do something that matters to you. That part is alive and pushing. I find that oddly reassuring.

Don't rush to switch it off

When your body runs low on fuel, you get hungry. When your mind runs low, you get bored. Danckert and Eastwood see boredom as an alarm that evolution built into us. It doesn't hand you an answer. It just goes off, to tell you that whatever you're doing has stopped holding you and your abilities are sitting idle. Boredom is a signal that something needs to change.

The trouble is that it's an annoying alarm, so our first instinct is to shut it off. And the off switch lives in our pocket.

The things that are hardest to stop scrolling were built to catch us in exactly that moment. They grab our attention and skip right past whatever we actually needed. The alarm goes quiet, but the message is still there, unread. And the more we rely on something outside us to make boredom go away, the worse we get at finding things to do on our own, which only makes the next bout of boredom harder to sit with.

So next time it shows up, instead of reaching for the nearest thing to fill the gap, it might be worth treating it as an opening. What do I actually want right now? Have I been doing things I didn't choose for too long? Is there something I've already finished with, and haven't admitted it yet?

The answer usually doesn't come from staring at the question. It's more like a name on the tip of your tongue. Stop chasing it and it turns up on its own. Which is exactly why you have to leave it a little room.

Make some room for non-time

Not every empty stretch is wasted.

In The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler describes starting his writing day at 4 a.m.3 Between four and seven-thirty, before the world wakes up and the day's to-do list starts chasing him, he's in what he calls "non-time." If one sentence takes two hours, fine. There's no clock in there. Creativity, he says, needs time like that.

There's some science behind the romance. When we zone out or daydream, a set of brain regions called the default mode network switches on, and ideas that live far apart in our heads finally get a chance to meet. In a 2012 study from the University of Utah, people who spent four days hiking in the wilderness with no devices scored about 50% higher on a creativity test afterward.4

I've tried my own small version of this. I get up an hour earlier than I need to, and that hour doesn't belong to anything on my schedule. I think of it as my hour of keeping a little distance from the world. I leave the house at the same time either way, but the whole day feels different with that hour in it. I don't have less to do. I've just taken a bit of the steering back before anything else gets a say. I'm the one rowing, not the cork.

So maybe there are two ways to live with boredom. One is to listen to it: take it as a signal and ask yourself what you want. The other is to tolerate it: let some time stay empty, without rushing to fill it. A lot of good ideas grow in exactly that kind of space.

One last question

Danckert and Eastwood close their book by saying that boredom puts a simple, very deep question in front of us.

What are you going to do?

Next time you're on a flight with no Wi-Fi, or it's another Sunday afternoon when nothing appeals, maybe don't reach for your phone just yet. Let the question sit for a minute.