The benefits of boredom

Does boredom make us more creative?

First and foremost, being bored motivates you to search for something less boring to do. Feeling bored at work, for example, could inspire you to explore a change of career. Or if you decide there’s nothing worth watching on TV, you might choose to switch off and make your own entertainment by taking up a new hobby.

This, according to researchers at the University of Central Lancashire, can explain why the lockdowns of the past two years saw a surge in creativity among people stuck at home. From banana-bread-making to picking up a paintbrush for the first time since childhood, many of us realized there are only so many times you can watch?Tiger King?on Netflix before you need to find other ways to amuse yourself.

But what about those times when you have no choice but to stick with the boring situation—carrying out a mundane task at work or waiting for a bus, for instance? The good news is that the boredom you’re feeling now could spark your creativity and help you come up with some of your best ideas, says a 2019 study published in?the Academy of Management Discoveries?journal. People who’d taken part in a boring bean-sorting task later performed better at coming up with creative ideas than another group who’d been given something more interesting to do first.

Are we more easily bored nowadays?

Still, why daydream at the bus stop when you can simply scroll through your phone?like everyone else? For starters, spending every spare moment staring at a screen can have a well-documented negative effect on your mental wellbeing, sleep quality, and eyesight. But that’s not all: over time, it reduces your boredom tolerance levels and means you become less able to think creatively, problem-solve and simply notice what’s going on around you.?

Ultimately, if we take it for granted that there’ll always be something close at hand to entertain us, we start to lose the ability to entertain others, think creatively and allow our minds to switch off and relax. We stop coming up with new ideas and we’re less motivated to find ways to do something less boring instead. Whisper it: we run the risk of becoming boring ourselves.