The Power of Boredom
08.14.2020 • 4 min read
Fun Fact
A study at Harvard and Virginia universities found students preferred physical pain over 15 minutes of boredom. To demonstrate this study a famous YouTuber Michal from Vsause conducted a similar experiment where he put people in an empty room with no stimulus and a device that will electrocute them if being touched. They were told to stay there for 30 minutes. It took one minute and fifty-seven seconds for one of the subjects to touch that device to alleviate boredom and five minutes later he touched it the second time. This shows how much our brain craves challenge, it needs to do stuff.
A little bit about me
I did nothing productive for 1 month, and I feel terrible. I wasn’t just being unproductive to make a video about it or do a social experiment. This has always been how I spent my vacations. Whenever there is a long vacation I convince myself that if I don’t use this time to relax and take a break, I will have no time once school starts. And as far as I remember, I have always felt like this at some point during the vacation.
At the beginning of the summer, I started a YouTube channel because I told myself that this is going to be a long summer and I don’t have that much to do so might as well explore something new. But as time goes by, towards the second half of the summer I started to realize how my time till school starts is getting closer and closer so I gave myself an excuse to take a break. And by that I meant do nothing. So I switched myself to the “vacation mode.”
But like the example at the beginning of the video, human brain is not designed to handle boredom. And I don’t want to electrocute myself so I needed to find a way to keep it occupied. But how would I rest and work at the same time? Let me explain.
Let's talk about brain
If we reduce our brain to something simple, I would say the brain has three main components, input, output, and processing.
As a student, normally there is a balance between the three. I go to lectures, attend meetings, watch movies. I also do homework, presentations, participate in student organizations. I also study, learn new skills, and socialize. But for this entire one month, I’ve dialed input to max, output to minimum, and processing to none. All I have been doing is consuming information, not learning, not improving, not producing, just consuming. I watched YouTube day and night, and when I got board of that, I played video games nonstop. And when my neck hurts from playing games I lay down and watch a movie. If it was not for food delivery and dumping trash I probably wouldn’t even step outside.
And this is why I felt terrible.
I have always thought myself of being a healthy person. Of course I wish I had gone to the gym more often and eat more vegetables. But I was always happy with my physical and mental state. Yet, during this month, I felt way worse than usual. I feel the guilt of not being productive, I felt body aches and got tired and sleepy easily even when I have not done anything intensive physically or mentally.
And this is when I realized something...
We need time to be bored, however hard that may be. Even when we’d rather be electrocuted, we still need to exercise to pause the input, pause the output, and that is when processing can be at its true potential.
I feel so fortunate to live in such a technologically advanced age of human civilizations. We can have most of the knowledge in the world at our figure tips. Yet, that also means we receive plenty of information everyday whether we want it or not, whether it is helpful for us or not. There was a time when we had breakfast without checking the news, drove to work without listening to the latest podcasts, went to bed without scrolling through social media. Those were the time we used to use for processing but now are filled with inputs. For me, one of the most creative time of the day is right after I turn off my lights, put away my phone and get ready to go to bed. My brain starts to spin, I start to have ideas, which is not that helpful when I need to get some sleep. But if I let those thoughts slide, they may never come back.
Although we live in a time when we have ever more information available to us, we have less time to actually think and process those information. I’m not saying input is not important, in fact from personally experience, I would say input may be more important than the other two, at least when you want to learn a new language. But often times, we emphasize on input too much that we neglected the other two.
How to be bored?
So how do we learn to be bored? The short answer is I don’t know. But I feel it might be like learning a musical instrument. The most important part is practice. You may learn all the techniques and all the music theories and even life story of the composer. But if you don’t practice the piece, you will never be able to play. I would try starting small. Maybe have breakfast without checking the news, commute to work without listening to podcasts, go to bed without the phone near me. I would probably still bring my phone with me when I go the the restroom, I really don’t want to go back to the days when I had to read the shampoo ingredient to pass time. Anyway, we should start to practice turning content consuming into digesting. I’m not saying watching YouTube or playing video game is bad. YouTube can be a great learning platform and games can have beautiful narratives that challenge our imaginations. But just know that in order to learn something, input is not enough. True knowledge and meaningful experience can only be acquired when combining input, processing, and output all together.
All right, as a pseudo brain expert, here are my revelations:
1. The brain needs to be stimulated.
2. The brain has three components, input, output, and processing.
3. Living in the age of information, our input component is being overly stimulated.
4. We need to learn to be bored to practice the processing component.
I know this can be a tough time for a lot of us. If you are also feeling something similar to how I felt after spend such a long time being unproductive, I hope this video can offer you a new perspective of the power of being bored. If you are staying productive and keeping your brain happy, kudos to you. Let’s practice together, and master the power of being bored.