Boredom ended for much of the world in the mid-2010s. Once we all possessed a tiny portal in our pocket that could transport us into immediate contact with friends, enemies, the worst news the world has to offer that day, arguments, vacation ideas, and charming videos of various cute animals, boredom as we knew it ceased to exist. All we had to do was open our phones.
These days, many people can’t even ride an escalator without whipping out their phones to alleviate just thirty seconds of stillness. We experience moments of awe through a three screen after hitting record instead of just witnessing it.
A modern inability to concentrate and broad downturns in happiness coinciding with the rise of smartphones are well-documented phenomenons.
But for creatives, it goes beyond closing your hundred open tabs and taming your urge to pick up your phone so you can actually write.
How can you be creative if you never let your mind wander?
The science of a wandering mind
According to psychologist Jonathan Smallwood, who studies mind wandering, typically when our mind strays we re-examine the past in order to imagine an improved future, a crucial evolutionarily advantageous trait that helps us learn and adapt.
It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Anyone who has had endless intrusive thoughts about that dumb thing they said at a party may question how helpful it truly is to stew in our own thoughts, but in general, it’s an important state where we order our thoughts and solve problems. According to a 2017 metastudy, mind-wandering enhances creativity and has the potential to enhance mood if it doesn’t stray into rumination.
We probably don’t really need scientific studies to tell us what we already know. Anyone who has written a book has had “eureka” moments while taking a peaceful walk or steaming in the shower. When your mind strays, good ideas bubble to the surface.
But many of us are compulsively stamping these moments out of our days. We pick up our phones almost 150 times a day and spend over four hours staring at them. Our overloaded minds hardly stand a chance.
Embrace “boredom”
Why don’t we just let ourselves stare at the window and let our mind wander? Why can’t we let our eyes glaze over and just ride the freaking escalator for thirty seconds?
One recent study shows that people enjoy sitting alone with their thoughts way more than they think they would. Our modern grind culture tries to wring every possible ounce of productivity out of our days, but it misses how crucial it is to just slow down some times and let our minds take us wherever it wants to go.
In addition to reining in my push notifications, keeping my phone on silent, and driving down my screen time, lately I’ve been trying to consciously incorporate more “staring into space” into my daily life. I spend some time after waking up and going to sleep thinking about my day rather than immediately scrolling on my phone. I try to be more conscious about why I’m picking up my phone.
I’m at a crucial stage where I finished a huge project–my most recent novel–and now I’m trying to figure out what’s next, if anything. And I know the good ideas are not waiting to be discovered inside my phone.
Have you embraced mind wandering time in our time of distraction? How did you achieve it?
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Art: Aurora Borealis by Frederic Edwin Church
I check my phone in the a.m. then leave it upstairs or in my purse while I go about my day. Checking it around supper and before bed. I shut it off at night. It’s a real time waster. I removed my Tik Tok app. I can check email from my p.c. including your newsletter.
Good advice, Nathan.
I’m just going to let my mind wander…. wait, I got a couple notifications. I’ll be back in a few.
I once heard a wonderful writer named Joseph Chilton Pearce say that one of the few things that differentiated the most successful people in the world from the rest of us wasn’t economics or social status or any of the things you might think. Rather, it was that, when they were kids and would sit in a corner and sort of stare off into space, their parents did NOT say to them, “Don’t just sit there, go outside and play. Get some fresh air.” What those kids were doing, though their parents might not have recognized this, was a form of meditation, and that’s so lost to us these days, with our 150 looks each day at our phones….
Love. I’ve been good at staring into space my whole life. Phones do get in the way, but I often take walks without headphones and long showers and, yep, just sit on my big comfy chair and space off.
Space out our space off? Crikey.
How have I achieved wonderful amounts of mind-wandering, creativity, and writing completed? By choosing from the get-go to say no to any cell phone.
The laptop affords enough temptation, and I sometimes have to re-set boundaries there, but never have I regretted refusing the shackles of the phone.
Scrolling time is not always bad. I read articles, posts, emails and comments and if anything jumps at me I use it to write poems or picture book stories. This morning while drinking coffee I was scrolling on facebook and saw some comment about coffee which made me write a poem about coffee. Later on I was reading your email about boredom and wrote a poem about boredom. So… scrolling or YouTube watching can be good for idea generation, but you just have to be mindful and deliberate.
I’ve just finished reading Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson and one of the many wonderful things she reminds me to do include – stop multi-tasking. I’ve developed some shocking habits in this regard. Only one screen at a time, for example, and no screens if I’m writing. I’ve bought a Remarkable tablet so I have no need to be online now when I’m writing (early days, we’ll see how it goes).
The other thing that works well for me is I accidentally started keeping a drawing pad by my writing desk – I use coloured pencils to doodle if I’m stuck, to stop the urge to Google. This allows my brain to wander whilst my hands are busy.
I find myself very guilty of filling those escaltor seconds. With me I use the excuse of always having more to read – articles, posts, etc. I try to give myself mind-wandering moments when travelling somewhere new, taking in the scenery without a screen and just thinking, or listening to something if it’s a route I know well.
I find it helpful to get into an alpha mind state by doing some mindless repetitive task. Hoovering usually does it for me. Cleaning, ironing, mowing, hedge cutting, painting a wall… Need to give it at least five or ten minutes to work. Only trouble is the task often gets left half done, when I rush off to make a note of the killer idea/sentence/chapter title that bubbled up.