In the doctor’s waiting room. The wait is getting longer. What to do? We take out a smartphone, check messages, surf the Internet, play games — anything, just not to be bored. The first commandment of the modern world is: you must not be bored. Physicist Ulrich Schnabel argues that being bored is good for you and explains why.
The more we do something against boredom, the more bored we become. This is the conclusion of the British psychologist Sandy Mann. She claims that in our time, every second complains that he is often bored. In the workplace, two-thirds complain of a feeling of inner emptiness.
Why? Because we can no longer stand the usual downtime, in every free minute that appears, we immediately grab our smartphone, and we need an increasing dose to tickle our nervous system. And if continuous excitement becomes habitual, it soon ceases to give its effect and begins to bore us.
If continuous excitement becomes habitual, it soon ceases to have its effect and begins to bore us.
You can try to quickly fill the impending frightening feeling of emptiness with a new “drug”: new sensations, games, applications, and thereby only ensure that the level of excitement that has grown for a short time will turn into a new boring routine.
What to do with it? Bored, recommends Sandy Mann. Do not continue to stimulate yourself with more and more doses of information, but turn off your nervous system for a while and learn to enjoy doing nothing, appreciate boredom as a mental detox program. Rejoice in the moments when we don’t have to do anything and nothing happens that we can let some information float past us. Think of some nonsense. Just stare at the ceiling. Close eyes.
But we can consciously control and develop our creativity with the help of boredom. The more bored we are, the more fantasies appear in our heads. This conclusion was reached by psychologists Sandy Mann and Rebeca Cadman.
Participants in their study spent a quarter of an hour copying numbers from the phone book. After that, they had to figure out what the two plastic cups could be used for.
Avoiding great boredom, these volunteers proved to be inventive. They had more ideas than the control group, who hadn’t done any stupid task before.
We can consciously control and develop our creativity through boredom. The more bored we are, the more fantasies appear in our heads
During the second experiment, one group again wrote out phone numbers, while the second was not allowed to do this, the participants could only leaf through the phone book. The result: those who leafed through the phone book came up with even more uses for plastic cups than those who copied numbers. The more boring one task is, the more creatively we approach the next one.
Boredom can create even more, brain researchers say. They believe that this state can also be useful for our memory. At a time when we are bored, both the material that we have recently studied and current personal experience can be processed and transferred into long-term memory. In such cases, we talk about memory consolidation: it starts working when we do nothing for a while and do not concentrate on any particular task.