So, all that frantic pre-Christmas action, the build-up, the final, chaotic melee of the season has finally stopped. It is a mid-winter morning, with January yawning ahead, and you are sitting at home thinking “what now?” Yes, there are the sun holiday websites to browse, the fitness programmes to enrol in and the old movies still to watch in your pyjamas. It can be a blissful time without pressure for many – but for others, there’s that strange feeling of being bored.
One dictionary definition of boredom characterises it as consisting of “wandering attention” and “low levels of arousal”. It is said to be often confused with fatigue but is caused by lack of stimulation, motivation and interest.
Our emotions can be plotted on a two-dimensional chart. One dimension is valence – ie, varying on a scale between positive and negative: joy is very positive and depression is very negative, for example. The other dimension is arousal, or how alert/energised you are. Fury is high on that, serene calmness low.
So where does boredom fit into this two-dimensional space? Low arousal and mainly negative (I say mainly because the valence of boredom depends a lot on the individual).
READ MORE
The philosopher Walter Benjamin, for example, described boredom as “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience”. He saw boredom as a positive state that allows us to incubate new thoughts, ideas and experiences.
And when we study the bored brain (I recommend the scholarly Handbook of Boredom for avid students), we can see brain activity corresponding to these states. First, negative emotions: most of us find boredom aversive, like toast crumbs in bed. Second, “task-unrelated thought”: daydreaming, in other words. Third, “over-estimation of elapsed time”. You think time travels in a straight line? It doesn’t (consider that feeling of “will this plane ever take off?”). Finally, there is “reduced agency” – you feel you don’t have control over your boredom.
The philosopher Blaise Pascal stated, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel said Vladimir Putin would not have decided to invade Ukraine had he not sat isolated in his Covid bunker for that long pandemic year. His mood plummeted. He probably felt out of control, hunched at the end of his absurdly long white table, a full 20 feet from some eminent visitor who would have had to submit faecal samples in advance, (nominally to screen for Covid, but perhaps to humiliate also. Putin is a notoriously cruel man.)
Feeling out of control is an unpleasant experience for most humans and animals, and they respond in one of two ways: with learned helplessness/depression, or with anger. Putin’s response was to stoke his rage about the loss of his Russian-speaking empire and plan the annihilation of upstart Ukraine.
Luckily enough, few of us have lost empires to brood about, and invasion-planning is not an option for most. Forget Pascal’s “all of humanity” for a moment: do some of our problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone?
[ Smartphones: ‘Mindless scrolling is the enemy to being attuned to your baby’Opens in new window ]
I hate the feeling of my fingers scrabbling for my phone the moment I sit down on the Dart. It feels like some small animal moving out of my control. Such is the power of habit – controlling this sinister thief of consciousness that is the smartphone.
Sometimes I resist it, and force myself to tolerate the featureless track until the sea glistens into sight at Dún Laoghaire. I watch the texture of light playing on water – it is never, ever the same; sky and tide framed by clouds, absurd in their magnificence. Yet I look round the carriage – and every head is bent in supplication to their Big Tech masters. Soon mine too will be drawn down in malign worship.
We have done a terrible thing to children by depriving them of the possibility of boredom. Because that’s what smartphones do – they greedily steal their attention so that brains don’t get a chance to free-wheel, to cycle through memories, whimsical thoughts, fragments of images. If our attention is always on – that is, occupied with some external stimulus, it makes mental slaves of us. Why? Because when these externally focused, task-centred circuits on the outside surface of the brain are active, they dampen down, or inhibit, the internal circuits, in particular one called the default-mode network.
Your brain is the most complex entity in the known universe. It is so huge and complex that it is like an entire universe inside your head. The default-mode network is the engine of exploration of this domain – this universe of reminiscence, fantasy, daydream, images, fragments of sound and music, whimsical connection. Yet we close this down when we are always on. It is like severing our psyche in half, cutting us off from an enormous, internal world.
‘Clench these scrabbling fingers and do not succumb to the scrolling the Tech Masters demand’
That’s why we should welcome boredom as a temporary relief from mental slavery. Creativity thrives in states of low arousal, research shows. Writers and artists often keep a notebook by their bedsides to capture ideas that escape goal-focused attention in a sleepy half-world where the brain’s corsets are loosened to let it play.
We have to learn to scroll better. Not through our phones, but through our minds. And our emotions too. This bored restlessness – ask yourself, where do I feel it? What does it consist of? Why do I find it uncomfortable? Am I trying to escape it? And then remember other times you have been bored. Scroll through them and reminisce. What happened? How did the boredom lift?
Maybe this feeling of paralysis makes you a little anxious. This is a normal response to not feeling in control. Let yourself scroll through these feelings and the memories they spark.
This itch to do something – but what? Clench these scrabbling fingers and do not succumb to the scrolling the Tech Masters demand.
Instead, consider how to harness the itch and channel the restlessness. Let yourself scroll through this universe inside. Give it time. Ride the boredom, even savour it. The answer will emerge.
Ian Robertson is a neuropsychologist and the author of How Confidence Works and The Winner Effect
