Boredom is good for you

And how to clear your head

It’s Sunday afternoon, Maala and I are in the living room. I grab the TV remote and turn on the football.

“Daddy, can I watch a show?” She says.

“Later,” I say. “I want to watch the game.”

She groans and flops to the floor.

We ban TV during the week, so on weekends she binge-watches her shows until we say she’s had enough. Today, she’s had enough, and it’s a tough pill for her to swallow.

The game kicks off—it’s Buffalo versus Tampa Bay. I find my place in the corner of the couch and take a sip of my beer. Maala is sprawled out on the floor in front of me. She rolls from side to side, then onto her back. Her arms and legs are spread wide in a starfish, and she forces a heavy sigh from her mouth.

“Daddy,” she says in a whiny voice as she stares at the ceiling. “I’m bored.”

“Well, go find something to do,” I say.

She huffs and groans again. I take another sip of my beer and consider the branding on the can for a moment. After a bit of a while, Maala rolls up off the floor and walks to the corner of the room, where she sits on a stool at her table and hunches over some paper. I carry on watching the game.

Aaron Sorkin is an American screenwriter and filmmaker who wrote A Few Good Men, The Social Network, and The West Wing.

A few months ago, I listened to an interview in which he was asked how he began writing.

“There was this one night, I was sharing a tiny studio apartment, and everyone I knew was out of town,” he said. “It was one of those nights in New York where it just feels like everyone has been invited to a party you haven’t been invited to. I didn’t have three dollars to my pocket. But in this apartment was a semi-automatic typewriter. The TV was broken, the stereo was broken. The only thing to do was to put a piece of paper in that typewriter and start typing—”

“So it was just pure boredom?” Says the host.

“Pure boredom,” says Sorkin.

When we’re bored, a different part of our brain kicks into gear, called the default mode network. It activates the regions of the brain responsible for self-reflection, daydreaming, memory, and imagining the future. Scientists call this ‘wakeful rest’, and it’s typically when ideas start popping up. More than likely, it was the mental state Sorkin was experiencing when he was stuck in his apartment alone as a 20-something college grad with nothing to do but write.

I see Maala lift her head from the table.

“Daddy?” She says. “How do you spell meow?”

I tell her. She notes the spelling and returns to her work.

The second quarter begins.

The problem these days is that the internet and smartphones have made boredom too easy to kill. Any moment where we used to sit alone with our thoughts, whether it’s waiting for the traffic lights to change, walking to work, waiting in line at the grocery store, working out, or cooking dinner, is now filled with opening our phone to watch, read, or listen to something.

I was like this. I spent any spare moment catching up on content I’d saved. Podcasts were my main crutch, but so was YouTube, the multiple books on my side table I convinced myself I was reading but never finished, and the bookmarked articles on my phone. I told myself I was being productive. If there was spare time in my day, I needed to fill it. And I happily avoided any feelings of boredom. But finally, one day, I noticed how little information I was actually recalling. I’d listen to a podcast and completely forget everything that was said. I’d get halfway through a book and couldn’t remember anything interesting about it. Worst of all, I struggled to think of any new ideas or develop existing ones. My head felt like it was full of gunk.

I’d wrongly assumed that being productive meant that the cracks in my day always needed filling. And up until a month ago, it had never occurred to me that leaving space for boredom was, in many cases, the most productive thing I could do.

Maala spins around on her stool to face me. She’s smiling, excited.

“Daddy!” She says.

She’s holding a card shaped like a cat’s face that she cut out of paper. It’s colored pink and blue and yellow and there are shiny gems stuck on it.

“Check this out!” she says, and makes the cat sing with a popsicle stick she glued to the mouth. On the bottom it reads, “HI lets play sum MEOWSIC!”

Yes, boredom is good for you.