In a study, participants were told to sit in a room and do nothing for 15 minutes.
In that room, there was also a button which would electrically shock them. They could
choose to click that button of their own will. 67% of men and 25% of women pressed that button.
It goes to show how much we hate boredom. We hate it so much that we can choose pain over boredom.
So, we try to avoid it as much as we can.
Avoiding boredom has never been easier because we’ve got so many things to do. We try to keep
doing something in our free time, whether it is scrolling through social media, watching a movie,
or binge-watching shows on Netflix. That makes sense because boredom is boring.
We tend to think of boredom as a negative emotion. We try to avoid it as much as we can. However,
science tells us that boredom can actually be great for you.
A study found that boredom can result in increased creativity. In this study, people
were told to sort a bowl of beans by color, one by one. These people later performed better on an
idea-generating task than a group of artists who first completed an interesting craft activity.
The task was to come up with excuses for being late that wouldn’t make someone look bad.
The bored people performed better both in terms of quality and quantity of excuses.
Thinking lets your creative juices flow, and your ideas flourish. Many writers, sculptors, and
musicians have expressed that boredom helps them do their work. The world might not have seen Harry
Potter had JK Rowling not been bored on a long train ride. In an interview from 2016, she said:
“I didn’t have a pen and was too shy to ask anyone for one on the train, which frustrated me at the
time. But when I look back, it was the best thing for me. It gave me the full four hours on the
train to think up all the ideas for the book.” Can you imagine a world without Harry Potter?
Getting lost in her thoughts sparked this genius idea.
In 1666, Sir Issac Newton had to work from home for more than a year due to the Great Plague of
London. Newton was a student at Cambridge, and Cambridge told students to study from their homes.
And guess what he came up within that time? He found theories on optics,
calculus, motion, and gravitation. That year is called Newton’s year of wonders.
Here’s how his assistant explained how he got one of his ideas:
“...Whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the same power of gravity
(which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain
distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought.
‘Why not as high as the Moon?’ said he to himself.”
He was bored under a tree, and he had a “Eureka!” moment. If he had other things to
do during that period, we might have never got these groundbreaking breakthroughs in science.
Along with sparking ideas, boredom can make you more productive. Boredom doesn’t mean
you’re not doing anything. If your mind is not occupied with social media, you could be
planning about things you’ll do in the future. Your future pursuits have to be thought out,
and boredom lets you do just that. This is called Autobiographical Planning. It involves
the identification and organization of steps required to get to a specific future outcome.
So put your phone inside your pocket and get bored. Thinking is great for you,
and when you’re bored, you think. Remember that when you pull out your phone or start
binge-watching shows on Netflix, you might be missing a chance of getting life-changing ideas.