Social media. Streaming. Swiping. Today, it’s normal to reach for our phones when we’re bored. But researchers say passive boredom like scrolling is not the kind of boredom that sparks creativity. How can we reclaim boredom in the digital age?

Guests

Sandi Mann, licensed psychologist and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire. Author of “The Science of Boredom: Why Boredom is Good.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I    

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Like most people, Moira doesn’t like being bored.

I am completely guilty of avoiding it at all costs. It’s hard to spend time with yourself, like even when you’re doing the dishes, listening to an audiobook or a podcast or something, it’s hard to just spend time in your own mind these days.

CHAKRABARTI: And that’s because her own mind can sometimes seem to have a mind of its own.

Being in your own thoughts can sometimes lead you places that aren’t enjoyable or fun. It’s when you perhaps start to worry or feel anxiety. Maybe even I’m annoyed at myself that while I’m bored, I’m not having productive ideas. I’m just thinking about the fact that I’m bored.

CHAKRABARTI: So Moira does what so many of us do these days. She avoids boredom by distracting herself with technology.

When I have free time, if I get home from work, for example, like the first thing I’ll do is probably just turn on the TV and put on, whatever, if it’s something I haven’t seen or if it’s just reruns of a show that I love. Yeah I’m definitely guilty of that. But yeah, it’s just so much easier to be entertained effortlessly.

CHAKRABARTI: Turning to tech to hold the boredom at bay is so natural now most people don’t even realize they’re doing it. But Moira also remembers her life before the instant endless dopamine hits. She remembers when she was younger. She was much better at being in her boredom.

It used to be going outside and walking around in the yard or digging for rocks. Like those are things where your mind’s just wandering the entire time and you’re not necessarily accomplishing anything, but you’re filling that time, filling that space and just thinking. I worry. I worry … that there will be a future where nobody is forced to face themselves or be alone with their thoughts. It’s sad. I think we need that.

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and Moira’s right. We do need that. While we think that boredom is a state of wasted, terrifying nothingness, in fact, it can be the exact opposite, a specific state of mind where we can be our most creative.

Sandi Mann is a licensed psychologist and professor at the University of Lancashire in the UK, and she writes about the beauty of boredom in her book The Science of Boredom: Why Boredom is Good. And she’s been researching this topic for more than 20 years, and she joins us from Manchester in England.

Professor Mann, welcome to On Point.

SANDI MANN: Thank you. It’s lovely to be with you.

CHAKRABARTI: First I have to ask, what is it about boredom that so captivated your attention for 20 years?

MANN: It’s not boring at all. That’s what’s so captivating about it, because you’d expect boredom and boredom research to be really boring.

But it’s surprisingly interesting. But I got into this because I first started to research boredom as a young PhD student, and I was particularly interested in those emotions that we either hide at work or fake at work. And the most, the second most commonly hidden or suppressed emotion in the workplace turned out to be boredom and the first most common, and people always say, “What was the first most commonly suppressed emotion?”

Do you know what that might have been?

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, boy. Frustration?

MANN: Yeah, kind of, anger. Anger, okay. Yeah. So most people get that, but most people are surprised that boredom was right up there at number two. And that got me thinking. It was an emotion that isn’t really, or wasn’t really explored much then. It still isn’t that much explored. And it was something that I thought this is a bit different.

Loads of people have studied anger and stress, and we all know about those, but we don’t know so much about boredom. Yeah. So that’s why I got into it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so when you say suppressed emotion meaning that people, when they were, at work when they were threatened with feeling bored or they were cons- concerned that they might be getting bored, they actively tried to avoid that?

MANN: No. What I meant by that was that people were pretending they were not bored. Boredom, yeah, boredom was and is seen as something quite negative. And we don’t like to admit that we’re bored because it suggests there’s something wrong with us. Maybe we’re not good at our job, or maybe we’re boring people.

Or maybe our employer will say, like our mums used to say, “If you’re bored I’ll find you something to do. There’s a whole pile of washing up to do.” And the employer might say you’re bored. Here’s a whole load of tasks to do.” So we’d keep quiet about it. So we’d pretend we’re not bored.

We’d go to that boring meeting with a rigid smile on our face and look really interested and act as if we’re absolutely fascinated and hide all that boredom.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Maybe a little bit later, Professor, we’ll get to whether or not a lot of this comes, that fear of boredom comes from cultural forces.

Because I’m always curious about how things vary globally when it comes to these all-encompassing experiences that we have. Okay, so in the 20 years, though, that you’ve been studying what boredom is psychologically and emotionally we’ve had quite a revolution in the tools that we have at hand to banish boredom. So what evidence have you found over that time about, Oh, gosh, I’m gonna have to admit this. I actually have my phone with me in the studio. But what evidence have you found that digital devices are really banishing any opportunity to be bored in life?

MANN: Here’s the funny thing about our devices, is that they should be banishing all our boredom. We should no longer know what it is to be bored. Kids are growing up with their devices. We’ve got the world literally at our fingertips. We shouldn’t know what boredom is. Our kids should be saying to our parents, “What’s boredom? Isn’t that something that you used to have in the old days?” And we should say, “Oh yeah, when I was a kid, we’d have boredom,” and they’d, they wouldn’t know what it is. But it seems that’s just not the case, and we seem to be more bored than ever before. It’s difficult to quantify that because the boredom research is quite new.

It’s quite … we don’t go back that long. But it seems that we are more bored than ever children are more bored than ever, and it seems that our devices are not actually helping us manage our boredom or get rid of the boredom, but they actually seem to be increasing our boredom.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, tell me more about this. So how are you defining then what boredom is, and I guess the various types of boredom?

MANN: Boredom really is the search for neural stimulation that isn’t met with any satisfaction. So we want a certain level of neural stimulation. And everybody’s different in that need and that, that level that is best for them or at that time.

We have our optimal level. We’re searching for it. We can’t reach that optimal level. And that mismatch between what we’re seeking and what we get is what we label, that negative feeling we label as boredom.

CHAKRABARTI: So the lack of the stimulation is the boredom.

MANN: The lack of adequate stimulation. What’s boring to one person what might be enough stimulation for one person might not be for another person. So everybody has their own optimal level.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. So in that case, I guess it’s starting to make sense how you see that endless scrolling or tapping is in fact a kind of boredom itself because the very act forces us to try and seek more of the neural stimulation that we’re getting from doomscrolling on social media?

MANN: So it’s a little bit complicated.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Yeah. Help me understand it.

MANN: It’s complex. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a few different factors at play. First of all, we do know, research tells us that the one thing that contributes to our boredom is routine and repetition. So doing the same thing over and over again would be boring.

So the factory worker building on an assembly line, they’re doing the same thing over and over again. That can be a big contributor to boredom. Not everybody. Some people will find that stimulating. So we do know that boredom and repetition, so in whatever industry you are in, there’s going to be, sorry, repetition and routine.

There’s gonna be repetition and routine, and that’s the big contributor to boredom. Now, when you go to your device, what we’re actually doing is the same act, the same thing over and over again. We’re viewing the world through the same screen. We’re pressing the same buttons. We’re scrolling in the same way.

It’s routine. It’s repetitive. So we’ve got that factor. The other factor is that we as humans seek novelty. We get a dopamine hit when something, when we see something new or have something new in our lives. So we seek novelty, and the internet and our devices give us that opportunity to get those dopamine hits, because every time we turn a page or scroll, we see something new, and that gives us that dopamine hit.

But the problem is that dopamine is addictive … and we get used to it, and the more we get, the more we need. So we need more and more dopamine to get that same feeling, that same good feeling from it. But once we’ve scrolled and seen something new, it’s no longer new. So we have to keep getting more and more stimulation in order to reach that kind of high or meet that need.

So our boredom threshold’s changed dramatically. We start needing more and more stimulation in order not to be bored, if that makes sense.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. And so that’s why you call this a bad boredom loop.

MANN: It is a bad boredom loop because we think we’re getting rid of our boredom, and what we don’t realize is that we’re contributing to an increase in boredom.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Before we get more into sort of the downside of all these digital distractions, in your book, you talk about research that shows how really hardwired we are to seek neural stimulation. And actually, when Paige, the producer for this hour, told me about this one particular study, I just could not believe it.

A 2014 study that showed just how far people would go to get some kind of neural stimulation or choosing not to be bored. Can you tell us about this, Professor Mann?

MANN: I think this is the electric shock one. So yes it’s absolutely fascinating. People would rather have something painful than be bored.

That’s the bottom line. So give people an opportunity to be really bored and put them in that situation, and then give them an opportunity to give themselves a painful electric shock. They’ll take it, anything to beat the boredom.

CHAKRABARTI: I just can’t believe that.

MANN: People can relate to that.

I think people do all kinds of things to, that aren’t good for them in order to alleviate boredom. Boredom, chronic boredom is a very negative feeling. Can I tell you about a study that I did in Preston in the UK in my university?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, you can start. We have about 30 seconds before our first break, so go ahead and start, and then —

MANN: Yeah. You can stop me if you need. I got, we gathered people into a room that was absolutely empty of any sensory stimulation. It was dark. It was soundproof. We made them leave their phones behind, which is key. And we wanted to see what would happen. I just wanted to observe them and see what would happen.

You put them in this room with no stimulation. They’re completely bored, and we wanted to see what would happen.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Professor Mann, so in this experiment, you put people in a very unstimulating room, you separate them from their phones, and then what happens?

MANN: I just want to stress that we didn’t force them to do that because you don’t get ethical approval to force people anymore these days. So they willingly did this, and I wanted to see what would happen. Would they be able to … how long would they stay there? What would happen to them? The first thing to note is how few people were willing to do this.

And perhaps we’re not surprised, but people were a little bit scared of this and reluctant. But those that did, some people were kicking and screaming to be let out. Of course, we had to let them out. But those people who stayed with it described a process whereby at first it was really uncomfortable possibly even emotionally painful, but very uncomfortable. They were agitated, distressed, stressed. But then if they worked through that or stayed with it, they leant into the boredom, and they started to daydream and mind wander, and they came out quite serene and as if they’d had a relaxation session. One person describes it as being a bit like a warm bath.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me ask you something. Did this, does the same pattern that you observe, did it cut across ages, gender, background? I’m trying to think if there were certain confounding factors that might have influenced how people responded to not having immediate neural stimulation.

MANN: That’s a very good question. It wasn’t such a thorough study that we controlled for those kinds of things. But it would be an interesting future study. So if any of my students are listening and they want to do a future study, we’ve got it ready-made for you. So it would definitely be interesting.

I think generationally as well, I think younger people would probably struggle with that perhaps a little bit more, or at least maybe be more reluctant to actually take part in the study.

CHAKRABARTI: That is the hypothesis that I would want to test, right? Because if you’ve had access to immediate neural stimulation through digital devices since you were very young, presumably that would have a different long-term effect.

But yes, I’m hoping one of your students does a future study on that. Okay so the people who were able to withstand the sort of withdrawal period, if I can call it that way, of not having external ways to stimulate their minds, did all of them come out as more placid or serene, or did some of the people just say the feeling of discomfort never let them go?

MANN: This was a pilot study. It was part of a kind of science festival, so it wasn’t a controlled study with hundreds of people. This was the feeling that we got, that those people, the small number of people who managed to stick it out found it a positive experience.

But I think that those people who found it a negative experience wouldn’t have lasted, and they asked to come out before the end of the study.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. Okay. So let me ask you though, The way that the brain responds to things, we’re still obviously in the infancy of understanding that.

But do you have any hypotheses about why not just the fact that we’re constantly seeking neural stimulation, but is there a sort of any evolutionary reason why the opposite of that might engender actual, like, discomfort and fear?

MANN: Absolutely. All emotions are with humans for a reason, an evolutionary benefit.

They have to be, otherwise we wouldn’t have them. We call them adaptive, so they’ve helped us adapt to our environment. And boredom is no different. The reason that we are designed to get bored is so that we can screen out things or stimulation from the environment that is no longer a threat to us or not a resource for us.

So if you imagine what it’d be like if we didn’t ever get bored and or we couldn’t, we didn’t have that ability, imagine, we’d get up in the morning, or we’d wake up and the alarm would be so fascinating to us every morning. And when we’d open the blinds and we’d be like, “Wow, this is incredible.

Look at that sun in the sky, and look at the clouds and the raindrops.” And we’d be getting dressed and be going, “Oh my gosh, this Velcro, these fastenings are incredible.” We’d never … We’d be like toddlers forever excited by the mundane every day. We wouldn’t be able to get on with our day because we’d be distracted by literally every exciting thing that we haven’t screened out.

CHAKRABARTI: So you’re saying boredom is some kind, it’s a kind of sorting mechanism?

MANN: Yeah, exactly. We have to screen out things that are the same, that are not useful to us and are not a threat to us. So if you imagine our cave-dwelling ancestors sitting on the horizon scanning the horizon, we don’t want them to be, we didn’t want them to be constantly distracted by those trees swaying, and every time a leaf fell off that distant tree, they’d be in thralls of excitement about it.

We want them to be able to screen out the trees because they do the same thing every day or more or less. They’re not a threat. They’re not a resource. And that allows them to focus their attention on that lion that’s approaching. … If they were too busy being focused on the trees that never change, they might miss the lions.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, so you’re making the argument that boredom allows people to focus. Okay. I’m gonna come back to that in a second, but I should tell you, Professor Mann, that when we decided to do this show, we put the call out to our listeners and said, “What do you think about boredom? Do you welcome it?”

Does it scare the pants off of you? And we got a pretty interesting range of responses, so I’m gonna be sprinkling them in throughout the conversation. Let’s start with Greg, who’s in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Greg says he is rarely ever bored, and here’s why.

GREG: I am definitely somebody that has to be extremely busy, so boredom will drive me up a wall. To combat boredom, I’ll do something outside, rock climb, ride my bike, walk you name it, anything outdoors will keep me busy. What boredom does offer me is the opportunity to relax. I’m just very challenged in doing so.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Actually, you know what? I was going to go to the next call, the next listener.

I will in a second. But Professor Mann, how do you respond to what Greg said?

MANN: Hasn’t he got a lovely, soothing voice? First of all. Could listen to that all day. Yeah, so he is using probably the right things to un-bore himself. And that’s really good because he’s using fully immersive 4D, 5D experiences to get the stimulation that he needs. For him, boredom is a relaxed state. It’s downtime. That’s pretty much as it should be as long as he’s getting enough of that downtime. So what we want is to have the optimal level of downtime or boredom in our lives, and for everybody, that’s going to be different.

So as long as he is having time, really, we want time to mind wander and daydream. That’s really key. If you’ve got that in your life, and you’re busy and fulfilled, then you’re winning. You’re doing everything that you can, that you should. But I can’t tell Greg or anybody exactly how much time they need for that downtime to let their minds wander because everybody’s different.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, but that having time to mind wander and daydream is exactly the thing that so many people just loathe or are terrified by. Here’s Howard of Elkhart, Indiana.

HOWARD: I do hate being bored. There are very few things that I actually hate. Why is I need to have my brain actively engaged in doing something, be it having a TV screen, a video screen, the machine that I’m running at work, newspaper, something to read, and boredom has offered me nothing that I can ever remember in my life.

CHAKRABARTI: Howard, we’re gonna have to have you talk to Professor Mann because Professor, this is a perfect segue. You make the argument that boredom actually does offer people something. It offers people a kind of mental state that is, on the whole, you are, you’re very positive. What can go on in the brain when we’re, quote-unquote, bored?

MANN: Yeah, Howard is encapsulating exactly the whole thing with boredom is that it’s meant to feel bad. Of course it feels bad. Of course he hates it. He’s meant to. That’s the whole point of it. We’re meant to not like boredom. It’s a negative state. But paradoxically, it has its benefits and it can be an important catalyst for change.

Boredom if we allow ourselves to be bored, we allow ourselves to be creative and to come up with ideas, and to let our minds wander and see things in a different way. So if you have a problem, maybe Howard can try this next time, if he has a problem and can’t come up with a solution, just having some time where you go for a walk and you let your mind wander can help come up with those solutions.

So there is definitely positives. My own research shows a definite link between boredom and creativity. But again, it’s finding that right level. Too much boredom is definitely not good for us.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, but I wanna talk about an experiment that you did in sort of testing what can come out of a state of boredom, and this is an experiment which came in a couple of parts, and the first part is you gave the participants the most boring assignment that you could think of, and that was copying phone numbers out of the phone book.

Do you remember phone books? I would, I don’t think we have them anymore. I haven’t seen one in a while. This shows how long this project … it wasn’t that long ago, when they had phone books. But I did this study with a student called Rebekah Cadman. And yeah, we found, we decided that the most boring thing we could think of was either reading out aloud phone numbers or copying them out.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then tell me more about this experiment.

MANN: So what we wanted to do was to see whether getting people really bored in that way would increase or decrease their creativity or not have an impact. So we then gave them tests of what we call creative potential. We wanted to measure how creative they were.

We gave them creative problems to solve, that kind of thing. And we gave people as well who hadn’t got bored who hadn’t had to go through the phone book terrors of going through the phone book. So we compared those two groups and we found, lo and behold, that those people who were bored from copying or reading numbers out were the most creative or more creative than the people who hadn’t had the phone book experience.

And actually, we then compared copying phone numbers to reading phone numbers, and we found that reading phone numbers led to the most creativity. Copying phone numbers was a little bit less, led to a little bit less creativity. And we think the reason for that is because when we’re writing, copying, we’re engaging a little bit more of our cognitive brain.

That inhibits daydreaming a little bit which is why if you’re in a boring meeting, you might doodle on a pad or color in the letters on your notes and things like that. That helps us not daydream too much. It helps us focus on what’s going on in the meeting so that we don’t daydream too much.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so wait, two things. First of all, I think we should make it, it’s a very important distinction that in the copying group, it was by hand. So like pen to paper, copying phone numbers out of the book. And then the other group, and they were both, these were both for what, 20-minute stints, right?

The other group, the people would read the phone numbers out of the phone book. But I want to ask you, how did you measure their creativity? That’s the fun part, right? You gave them two paper cups after their 20-minute bout with boredom, and you measured what they did with those cups or how they came up, or ideas they came up with using those cups?

MANN: Yeah, people always love this part. Yeah two plastic cups, the sort that you get as a water dispenser. How many different things can you think of to do with these two cups? What ideas can you come up with? And we rated them on the number of things they came up with and how creative they were.

So for example using them as receptacles, great ideas, but not so creative. So putting, making them into a plant pot, that kind of thing building sandcastles with them. Those sorts of things aren’t as creative as, for example, using them to make earrings, or probably the most creative one was to use them to make a bra, kind of Madonna style, when she used to have those kind of pointed … That was quite creative.

CHAKRABARTI: So something more than just a container to hold dirt for a plant.

MANN: Yeah. Yeah. Another one that was using them to try and listen in on the other side of the wall. Those old-fashioned, I don’t know what you’d call them, where you try and make sounds more pronounced from the other side of a wall.

Things like that. Those are quite creative. So we found that people were more creative in those ideas.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so you’ve also written that when we’re in this state of boredom we are actually … I can’t remember. So help me un- remember here, Professor Mann. We are or aren’t using a certain kind of executive attention network in the brain?

MANN: So when we’re bored, when we are bored when we’re bored … Sorry, I was just checking a question. Are you saying when we are or when we’re not bored?

CHAKRABARTI: I couldn’t remember which state it was that we’re using the executive attention network. Is that when we’re not bored?

MANN: It’s all part of the same system, it’s all part of the network that we’re trying to simply get that level of neural stimulation. Whatever part of our brain that we’re using to achieve that, we’re trying to get that attention, get that stimulation. The feeling of boredom, that labeling of it is part of the kind of the limbic system of the brain which is responsible for our emotions and our emotional experience.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So there’s the executive attention network, and then there’s another network that you write about called the default mode network in the brain?

MANN: Okay. Yeah, we’re getting quite technical now, and —

CHAKRABARTI: We like to get technical here on this program … don’t be afraid of it.

MANN: No, that’s okay. So the different parts of the brain are obviously going to be responsible for different parts of the system. A little bit akin to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system … one of which is responsible for gearing us up and getting us going, and one of which is for calming us down.

So it’s a similar sort of setup in the brain in terms of stimulation and attention and how that connects with dopamine and novelty and all those kinds of processes.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So what I love is that I think what you’re heading towards here is that being bored provides, whether it’s literally neurologically or probably a combination of that and psychologically, this kind of mind space for the brain to think in ways that it usually, it doesn’t when it’s sharply focused on a task. It really frees us from the box of external focus. And I think you make the argument that I don’t know how we could ever test this, but that those states of boredom are what leads to some pretty important advancements in the history of Homo sapien, right?

Like rubbing two sticks together. Oh, let’s make fire. Or, oh, what happened when we left that, that sort of amphora full of grain lying around? Let’s drink it. Oh, that’s beer. Are you making that argument that boredom is actually leads to quite, can lead to significant advances?

MANN: Yeah, so when we are bored, the key here, the missing link to it here is that we’re not getting the stimulation from our external environment. We can’t find it. We’re in a boring meeting, and we’ve counted all the windows in the room and all the pens, and we’ve got nothing else to do externally.

So our brains are always active. They never stop. They’re always busy. So they’re going, our brain is going to go elsewhere. It’s gonna go internally to try and solve this problem, and it’s gonna try and get stimulation in our own brains, and it does that with mind-wandering and daydreaming.

And that’s the missing link here. And mind-wandering and daydreaming is what leads to creativity. So it’s a kind of linked process here.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: So maybe we shouldn’t be so scared of being bored, scared like Christian of Mount Vernon, Iowa, who’s 52 and says he’s rarely bored.

CHRISTIAN: I think I’m terrified of being bored. I don’t remember the last time I was bored. I often joke about the fact that I don’t think I’ve been bored since I purchased an iPhone 3.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s Charlotte from Portland, Oregon, who says, as a kid, she was never bored.

CHARLOTTE: I grew up on an 11-acre property that was wooded.

And when I was a child, if I couldn’t think of anything to do in the house, I went out and I played in the forest. And I played with sticks, and I played with trees. I had imaginary play. And when I went in the house, I drew pictures and I wrote stories.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s Amy from Dayton, Ohio, who has fond memories of being bored as a kid.

AMY: I think boredom is beautiful. Yes, I’m old, but my memories of being so bored were of my summer vacation as a kid, and I remember playing Monopoly with my sister and then my friends and listening to Sgt. Pepper’s album over and over again because I had nothing better to do. I’ve never been bored.

CHAKRABARTI: Sandi Mann, let me just ask you. In these comments from listeners, is what the fondness that they’re remembering their childhood with, are they remembering actual moments of boredom? Because it sounds like to me that you’re talking about a different state of mind than when a child goes out and plays with sticks or splashes around in puddles, or am I wrong?

MANN: I think it is boredom. I think what’s really interesting is that children are brilliant at unboring themselves, and adults are rubbish at it. So children will always find something to do. So if they’re bored, they will always get up to some mischief or other. They will find something to do. They will find, turn those sticks into weapons and those leaves into little houses and fairies, and all kinds of things.

They will use their wonderful imagination, as those listeners have just explained and described, and they will unbore themselves. So yeah, they are dealing beautifully with boredom, and we lose that ability as we get older.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I guess I’m a little confused here, so help me understand because I thought you were making the argument that a good kind of boredom, not the bad doomscrolling loop boredom, but a good kind of boredom where our minds do wander and we’re daydreaming, is actually something that we should make more time for.

But then you’re also saying that getting out of that state of boredom by doing the sort of the natural things that maybe kids do is also good. So do you see where my confusion is here?

MANN: Yeah, so it’s interesting because kids sitting daydreaming is also very useful, but for them, they need to be doing.

They need to actually be active. They’re not going to sit and mind wander. They’re going to want to be doing. They’re very physical. They’re very practical. For us adults, it’s different. If we were bored and our minds wandered, and we said, “Oh, what would happen if I got that stick?” And then we actually go, went and got that stick, and we built a dam, fantastic.

But we don’t usually have that capacity. We don’t usually have that ability. So it’s the next best thing. In other words, I think what I’m trying to say is that boredom helps us be more creative. But the kids are doing it already. When they’re unboring themselves, they are being more creative.

The boredom is, they don’t need that middle step of the daydreaming like we do, is what I’m saying.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. So it’s a path. I get, okay, I get it. Do you know the story of Tolkien and The Hobbit and how he came up with the first lines for that legendary piece of literature?

… So this is something that Paige, again, our producer discovered in her research for this hour, that apparently Tolkien told the BBC, I don’t know, when was this? Let me look this up here. She he told the BBC I guess sometime in the ’60s, 1968, that he came up with the first line of The Hobbit or the concept for The Hobbit when he was marking papers.

Obviously … he was a professor at Oxford, and he had this, he was marking these, this enormous pile of exam papers, and it was actually really laborious, repetitive right, time-consuming, all of the things that adults are really allergic to these days. And then all of a sudden, I’m wondering if his mind was wandering while he was doing that, because all of a sudden, he came upon a blank sheet of paper, because a student had literally written down nothing on their exam paper, and he tells the BBC, “Oh, glorious, I had nothing to read.”

So then a few minutes later, he just, he scribbles on this paper and he said he couldn’t think why he did this, but he scribbled on this blank student paper, “In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” And thereafter, he started writing again, one of the most beloved pieces of literature coming out of the 20th century.

I’m wondering what you think about that.

MANN: Yeah. As a university lecturer, I can very much relate to what you’re saying. I’ve yet to write such a wonderful piece of literature or anything as good as that. But I do some of my most creative thinking, come up with my most creative ideas on a commute.

So my university is about an hour’s commute in the car, and I often come, arrive at my destination and I think, “Gosh, I’m not, I don’t even remember that journey. How on earth did I get here?” But I’m brimming with ideas. I’m gonna do this piece of research, that, I’m gonna write that book. I’m going to redecorate my house.

All these different creative ideas. If I don’t write them down, I’ve forgotten them all, of course. But, I do, my most creative thinking when I’ve got nothing else to do. And in fact, I often apologies to broadcasters like yourself, but I often switch the radio off and just let my mind wander, just so that I can really get into that creative space.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, you shouldn’t apologize because usually in this country at least, one of the most beloved stereotypes of public radio is you turn it on in order to be bored. So I’m glad you don’t find the radio boring.

MANN: Exactly. It’s too stimulating.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So for adults, though, let’s go back to it sounds like you’re calling for adults to actually not only not be afraid of being bored, but invite it into your own life more.

Embrace it.

MANN: Absolutely. One of my campaigns has always been a advocating for a digital detox. And it’s not, obviously I’m not the only one advocating for these things. But I have these wristbands which say I’m having my digital detox,” “I’m not going to be connected at the moment.”

And I’d often ask people when I go around lecturing all over the world on this topic, and I say, how many people in this room have been disconnected from their phone an hour today?” And not many people will put their hands up. And, I go through “Has anyone been disconnected for a day, a week?”

And it gets less and less. But really a day without being connected to the internet can be really beneficial to us. But you don’t even have to go that far. You can just go for a walk, try not to listen to music, try and unplug from everything, and let your mind wander. Or next time you’re on a train, instead of getting your device out, just stare at the clouds, like they used to do in the olden days.

CHAKRABARIT: My first thought when I hear this is actually, Professor Mann, being bored feels like a luxury. I would welcome it more often in my daily life. And I think a lot of people feel this way, that due to the various demands of just modern living, they don’t actually even have, it’s remarkable to say, but they don’t even have time to be bored.

What do you think?

MANN: But we’re all, we all have queues or lines, as we call them, in the supermarket. We’re all stuck in traffic jams on occasion. We do all have those moments when we can let our minds wander, but we often choose to get our phones out. But you’re right, it is a luxury, but it’s a luxury to be able to introduce creativity.

We can say creativity is a luxury, and we just get on with life, but it is a luxury to be able to harness that creativity, and I think that if we don’t, humanity is going to lose something quite precious.

CHAKRABARTI: You know what, though? When you mention the supermarket and waiting in line in the supermarket, that suddenly occurred to me, that’s the perfect example of how we’re living in a world that is absolutely clamoring for our attention at times.

Or actually all the time because I don’t know about where you shop, but where I shop, standing in line in the supermarket, it is a very sensory stimulating experience, right? There’s, like, all the little things that they put in the line right when you’re waiting for the checkout in order to grab your attention, like the sweets and stuff.

There’s always music going on. The lights are really bright. I find it very hard to be bored in those places. And in fact, here’s Todd, who is in Columbus, Ohio, and he too thinks that being bored is a luxury these days.

TODD: I wish we all had the opportunity to be bored on a semi-regular basis. Those ideas that were just out of reach, they always come to me when I’m bored. I’ll be doing something else, I’ll get tired of it, zone out, and bam, there’s that thing I was looking for. Boredom is amazing.

CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Mann, with that in mind, I’m wondering what you think about that in, in fact, we have to be more intentional about being bored. Because again, the attention economy that we’re living in is designed to prevent us from ever being bored.

MANN: Yeah, but the ironic thing is that it’s increasing our boredom. … Even though you say about all this attention grabbing stuff in the supermarket line you’ll still see lines of people on their phone with all of this stuff around them.

… Why, when there’s so much stimulation? Because we need more and more stimulation. And what we have to do is, yeah, bring some intentional downtime when we’re bored into our lives gently, slowly, a small amount of it, and start getting used to lower levels of stimulation.

That will help us in the long term become less bored. There’s a club that you may or may not be aware of called The Dull Men’s Club, which I’ve got quite involved in, even though I am obviously not a dull man. I’m like a dull woman. … But I’m an honorary member. And they find the joy in the mundane.

Those are people who enjoy collecting photographs of letterboxes, post boxes, mailboxes, whatever you call them … and drain covers, and telegraph poles, and trains, and, things that don’t seem to be terribly exciting in today’s fast-paced, what I call whizzy bang world.

But they find the joy in the mundane, and they need lower levels of stimulation in order to be joyful and happy, and that’s what we all really need to do. We need to have periods where we’re just looking for less stimulation. We don’t need the whizzy bang world that we’re in. We’re happy to look at the cloud formations, and the leaves, and the trees, and just life.

Life around us should be enough.

CHAKRABARTI: I think you said something that is very important about how welcoming a healthy kind of boredom can lead us to a place where we need less stimulation to be joyful. That is very powerful, Professor Mann. But so let me just go back to one thing that we talked about earlier.

And that is one of the people, one of the reasons why people say they’re just terrified of being bored is because they also feel that maybe in if I’m bored, it means I’m not being productive, right? I’m wasting my time. I’m not achieving the things that are on my to-do list, or at work, people are gonna see me as being a slacker.

I think, I feel like there are lots of cultural pressures also against finding a healthy state of boredom. And what, how do you, how would we push back against that?

MANN: Yeah, when I did my research, I went into different companies, and I approached one particular company to do some boredom research, and they were horrified.

They said, “Nobody in our organization is ever bored. We’re not letting you do any research.” It’s this sort of horror that anybody should be bored in their wonderful, exciting workplace. But even the most exciting workplaces, there’ll be moments of boredom and repetition and routine.

That’s the way it is. So yeah we are afraid to admit that we’re bored because maybe that makes us sound like, say slackers or boring ourselves. Maybe, as somebody once said to me, or I’ve heard it more than once, that boring, only boring people get bored. This kind of cultural belief.

But really we need boredom. We need to stop seeing it as something negative and start being proud of it. To be saying, “What did you do over the weekend?” “Oh, it was fantastic. I had an hour of complete boredom.” And instead of other people going, “Oh, what a shame,” you go, “Wow, that’s wonderful.”

We’ve got to try to change our culture and our approach to it. Especially if so much positive can come out of being bored.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder, I would love you to wrap up with some tips about how people can make this a better part more daily part of their lives. But at the same time, maybe are we talking about a state of mindfulness?

Are you talking about meditation, or is that just, is that different from the kind of, quote-unquote, “boredom” you’re advocating?

MANN: Yeah, it’s different. But before, before I do that, if you don’t mind, I just do want to go back to the first your first contributor right at the start of the program who was talking about going into a kind of spiral of thoughts that they were afraid of if they let them. I think it’s really important to point out that for some people it is not a good idea to be alone with their thoughts. People with mental health issues or depression it may be a really bad thing to be alone with their thoughts, and they may need to be constantly occupied and busy and distracted, and that’s okay.

This is not a one-size-fits-all. I just wanted to get that out there and point that out.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I think … and I appreciate that you did that because sometimes when we have these conversations, ’cause we’re trying to cover ground that’s relevant to most, to as many people as possible we inadvertently flatten the differences. So I appreciate that a lot. But then so back to the question of meditation, mindfulness.

MANN: It’s not that because with meditation and mindfulness, you’re actually trying to focus your thoughts or push thoughts away.

You’re trying to control or manage your thoughts. With this, with boredom, you’re trying to just let your brain be, let your brain do whatever it wants to do. You’re not trying to control it. You’re not trying to watch your thoughts float away on a cloud, that kind of thing, or banish them or harness them.

You’re just letting your brain do whatever it wants to do, and that’s the real key to boredom, and that’s what we’re looking for when we say real boredom.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. So if there’s one thing that everyone should do today, Professor Mann, in order to welcome a little bit of boredom into their day, what should they do?

MANN: Have an opportunity for daydreaming and mind wandering in your day. It doesn’t have to be very long. Start with a small opportunity. But if you’ve managed to achieve that and you go, “Oh yeah, my mind wandered there. I just daydreamed there,” then that’s a start. You’ve won. And then find your optimal level each day, and it might vary according to what you’ve got ongoing in your life.

But just it, start introducing a little bit of mind-wandering boredom into your life.

CHAKRABARTI: So put away the phones. Don’t be facing a screen. Can you be outside walking around? Is that okay?

MANN: Perfect. Absolutely perfect. As long as you know where you’re going and you’re not having to concentrate too much on the directions and that kind of thing.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.