You Need to Be Bored
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You need to be bored. You will have less meaning, and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldnât be clearer. Let me give you the good side of boredom in general. Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise congnitively, which switches over our thinking system to use a part of our brain thatâs called the default mode network. That sounds fancy. Itâs really not. The default mode network is a bunch of structures in your brain that switch on when you donât have anything else to think about. So you forgot your phone and youâre sitting at a light, for example. Thatâs when your default mode network goes on. We donât like it. My colleague in the psycology department here at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, he did experiments where people had to sit in a room for 15 minutes with instructions to do absolutely nothing, and there was nothing in the room to do, except there was a button in front of them that they could push. And if they, they gave themselves a painful electric sock.
Sit there bored, or get a shock. A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing. We donât like boredom. Boredom is terrible. Why is boredome so bad? Well, because the default mode network makes us think about things that might be kind of uncomfortable. When you think about nothing, while your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life. What does my life mean? You go to uncomfortable existential questions when youâre bored. That turns out to be incredibly important, incredibly good. One of the questions we have such an explosion of depression and anxiety in our society today is because people actually donât know the meaning of their lives, much less so in previous generations. Tons of data show this, and furthermore, we are not even looking. Why not? Iâll tell you why not. We figured out a way to eliminate boredom. Weâve been able almost completely, to shut off the default mode network in our brains. How?
The anwser is that thing in your pocket with the screen, which you take out even when youâre standing in the street corner waiting for the light to change, is like, I might have to wait here for 15 seconds. What are you doing? Youâre actually trying to not be bored because the default mode network is mildly uncomfortable because it sends you to the types of questions that you canât get your mind around. You canât get your arms around. Well, thatâs a big problem. Thatâs a doom loop of meaning. If every time youâre slightly bored, you pull out your phone, and itâs going to get harder and harder for you to find meaning. Thatâs a recipe for depression and anxiety, and a sense of hollowness, which, by the way, are all through the roof. I get it. You donât want to be bored. You need to be bored. Be bored more. Tomorrow, when you go to the gym in the morning after you wake up, donât take your phone. Can you handle it? Not listening to a podcast while youâre working out. Just being in your head. I promise you, you will have your most interesting ideas while youâre working out without devices, itâs probably been a long time since youâve done that.
Commute with nothing, not even the radio. Can you do that? Start getting better at periods that are 15 minutes and longer of boredom, and watch your life change. Number one, you will be less bored with ordinary things in your life. If you get better at the skill of boredome, youâll be less bored of your job. Youâll be less bored with your relationships. Youâll be less bored with the things that are going on around you. And more importantly, youâll start digging into the biggest questions in your life. Purpose. Meaning. Coherence. Significance. Who knows. You might just get happier. People ask me all the time, is the doctor taking his own prescriptions? And the answer is yes. Yes, I am. I am prone to the same pathologies as anybody else because I have the same brain chemistry as everybody else. So what do I do to fight that? The answer is I do a numbers of things. I have a no-device policy after 7:00 in the afternoon. I donât sleep with my phone. We donât have devices when we have meals in my family.
Because weâre there for each other. Weâre not there for people who arenât there. Three, I have regular media and screen cleanses where I donât use my device for longer periods of time. First, itâs like children screaming in my head because thatâs how dopamine is saying âget the phoneâ. Thatâs addiction. But I calm down and I feel better, and I feel sort of blessed by the end. I pick the phone up by the end because I have to check my emails. And I have to be a normal functioning, connected person in the world. But it does remind me that my life doesnât have to revolve around these devices. These protocols are really, really helpful. I recommend them to anybody and everybody. Donât sleep with their phone. No phones during meals. Regular social media fasts. Youâll get better. People worry that if they do these things, theyâre going to miss something. There are ways that you can remedy that. One of the things that you can do is you can have your phone on. Youâre just not looking at it, only one or two numbers that can reach you in case of emergencies.
Phones can do that by the way. If you donât have to do that, ask your kid. But donât use emergencies in as an excuse. Hereâs something thatâs not emergency. Whatâs going on Twitter? Thatâs not an emergency. Answer nothing. It doesnât matter. The news can wait. Seriously. Your grandparents didnât know what was going on every single second in Washington, DC. Youâre killing yourself with this stuff. Are you kidding me? Itâs bad for you. So let me say it straight to my kids. Put down your phones. You need more meaning in your life. And so do I.