Give Boredom a Chance if You're Creatively Blocked

Why we should relearn how to be bored, and techniques for facilitating boredom.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I can remember often being bored as a child. I was of that generation that was largely left alone to raise itself – I had the freedom to run the neighborhood as I pleased, wasn’t overscheduled with extracurriculars, and I was a latchkey kid. I had lots of time to be bored. And I didn’t like the feeling! Being bored is usually an unpleasant sensation, and it’s particularly difficult for children to handle. We learn how to be bored as we mature, but not in a positive sense. We discipline ourselves into being able to sit still and not fiddle when we’re, say, listening to a boring lecture. We inure ourselves to boredom.  

Then when I was sixteen I spent a year with in Italy, where I lived with a family whose mother was from a Swiss Calvinist background. Boredom was not acceptable in that family. This was the first time I came across the belief that being bored is morally suspect. My host sister told me that when she complained about being bored as a child, she got yelled at. She was expected to fill her time with worthy tasks, be they play or work. Being bored was a sign of sloth and mental indolence.

Boredom, suffice it to say, does not have a good reputation. It’s either something to avoid at all costs, or it indicates something is wrong with us. But it may be key to creativity. There is a theory that creative people are more likely to get bored. But what if it’s the opposite?  What if people who are more likely to get bored have the capacity to be more creative? What if boredom is somehow necessary for creativity? If this is the case, it means that those of us trying to access our creative potential need to relearn how to be bored, and unlearn all the negative connotations we’ve internalized around boredom.  

Boredom is a “paradoxical emotion,” i.e. one that creates one emotional state in order to bring about its opposite. When we are bored, our immediate instinctual reaction is to move through it as soon as we can. We’ll pick up our phones, take a look at our to-do list, turn on the TV, anything to stop feeling bored. And that’s good! That shows that our minds are actively seeking engagement. This process contains the seeds of creativity – we just need to learn how to cultivate and enhance that. And the first step is to let ourselves be bored more often and for longer periods of time instead of immediately jumping into the first knee-jerk activity at hand.

One way to do this could be something similar to my intentional practice of wasting time. Whenever I find myself getting time anxiety, when I’m overwhelmed by all the things I feel I have to do, I sit down and breathe, and purposefully “waste” time until my mind has lighted on something I actually want to do. It is easy enough to repurpose this into a creativity practice, with a focus on letting the mind wander instead of settling on an activity. I call this type of thing “staring at a wall.” Give it a try. Just have a seat somewhere comfortable and stare at something. Maybe the scene out your window, or a cozy fire, or a fake fire on TV, or whatever. Sit through the antsy-ness. Don’t give in to your desire to get up and do something. Let your mind wander, and when it settles on something, gently push it to wander some more. The bored mind will naturally try to creatively solve its state of boredom. Let it cycle through a number of ideas and solutions. The important thing is to not see any of them as necessarily requiring action. The purpose of this exercise is to train your brain to work creatively.

Once you’ve loosened up your brain a bit by getting it used to boredom, you can step things up by using tasks that have a meditative quality to them, such as washing dishes by hand, as part of your creative practice. One of the most effective is walking. Writers in particular seem to find a regular walking habit conducive to creativity. Studies have shown that it’s the act of walking itself that enhances creative thought, so it can take place on a treadmill if that’s what’s available to you, but it must be somewhat leisurely. If you are walking explicitly for exercise, i.e. at a fast clip, it doesn’t work. When I was experiencing burnout and couldn’t write, I started walking daily through my neighborhood. I didn’t think of it as a creativity practice per se, but I eventually walked myself straight out of my creative block.

Two final activities that have been shown to enhance creativity are writing or reading something boring. And by boring, I mean very boring. One study actually gave participants pages from a phone book (lol so old-fashioned) to copy down by hand or read, and then tested them on creative tasks. Morning pages, where you write three handwritten pages in stream-of-consciousness style as soon as you wake up, may rely on the same mechanism. Another trick many writers use is to copy passages from other people’s work. While this is meant to help with learning writing style and technique, it is an inherently boring task (trust me, I’ve tried it).

Maybe you already have things in your own life you find deeply boring that you could repurpose as a creativity practice. Something that pops into mind for me is when I have to wait for something, like for other people to arrive, or in a medical office. See what you can come up with! Sometimes those “wasted” minutes and hours can be our most valuable.