Speaker 1: Hey, it's Jay, and today I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about how to be bored. Maybe there's a lot
Speaker 1: of you out there who don't know how to be
Speaker 1: bored anymore. You always distracted, You're always running to the
Speaker 1: next thing, You're always trying to fill your gaps, be busy.
Speaker 1: Maybe you struggle with dealing with the thoughts in your
Speaker 1: head when you actually slow down and pause. If you
Speaker 1: want to know how boredom can be powerful for your brain,
Speaker 1: this episode is for you. And if you want to
Speaker 1: know how you can change your life and actually use
Speaker 1: it to your advantage, don't skip this episode. In sixteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaize Pascal wrote
Speaker 1: a sentence that I think might be the most underrated,
Speaker 1: most urgent, most terrifying truth ever put on paper. He wrote,
Speaker 1: all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit
Speaker 1: quietly in a room alone. Think about that. This was
Speaker 1: sixteen fifty four, no smartphones, no television, no radio, no
Speaker 1: newspapers delivered to your door, no telegraph. The most sophisticated
Speaker 1: entertainment technology available was a harpsichord and a good candle,
Speaker 1: and Pascal looked at the people around him, the richest,
Speaker 1: most educated, most powerful people in France, and concluded that
Speaker 1: the root cause of war, corruption, cruelty, recklessness, and misery
Speaker 1: was that nobody could just sit still. They hunted, they gambled,
Speaker 1: they threw lavish parties, They picked fights with neighboring kingdoms.
Speaker 1: They pursued scandal and intrigue at caught, not, Pascal argued,
Speaker 1: because they actually wanted those things, but because the alternative,
Speaker 1: being alone with their own thoughts, was too unbearable to face. Now,
Speaker 1: I want you to pick up your phone. You probably
Speaker 1: are it already, but don't actually do it. Just imagine
Speaker 1: the moment, you know, the moment I meant ending in
Speaker 1: line at the coffee shop, you're waiting for the elevator,
Speaker 1: you're sitting on the toilet, you're in the first ten
Speaker 1: seconds of an ad and you can't skip yet, and
Speaker 1: your hand moves almost before you've made a decision to
Speaker 1: the phone, to scroll to the feed, to anything that
Speaker 1: fills the gap. What are you running from? Pascal new
Speaker 1: he was watching people run from it in sixteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: This doesn't make you weak, You're not wrong, You're not
Speaker 1: a bad person. The thing you're running from doesn't have
Speaker 1: a name. In polite conversation, we call it boredom, like
Speaker 1: it's a minor inconvenience, like being slightly cold or having
Speaker 1: a headache, something to be treated, something to be eliminated,
Speaker 1: something that signals there's a problem to be fixed. But
Speaker 1: what if boredom isn't the problem. What if boredom is
Speaker 1: the solution and someone has been very carefully, very profitably
Speaker 1: taking it away from you. Welcome to something I call
Speaker 1: the sacred void. Now, before we dive in, now, I
Speaker 1: want to talk about what boredom actually is. Scientists got
Speaker 1: this wrong for one hundred years. So here's the truth.
Speaker 1: I need to start by rehabilitating boredom's reputation because it
Speaker 1: has been absolutely destroyed. For most of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: Psychologists treated boredom as a deficiency state, a signal that
Speaker 1: something was missing stimulation, purpose, motivation. The implicit assumption was
Speaker 1: that a healthy, engaged, well adjusted person shouldn't experience boredom.
Speaker 1: If you were bored, something was wrong with you. You
Speaker 1: lack discipline or ambition or the right attitude. Teachers told
Speaker 1: students to stop being bored. Parents loaded children's schedules to
Speaker 1: prevent boredom from ever arising. The entire architecture of modern
Speaker 1: productivity culture was built on the premise that idle time
Speaker 1: is wasted time. This was one of the great intellect
Speaker 1: errors of the modern era. In the last twenty years,
Speaker 1: a small group of researchers, most of them working in obscurity,
Speaker 1: many of them initially laughed at by their colleagues, began
Speaker 1: to look at boredom with fresh eyes, and what they
Speaker 1: found completely inverted everything we thought we knew. The first
Speaker 1: revelation was definitional. What is boredom actually? Psychologist Sandy Man
Speaker 1: at the University of Central Lancashire spent years researching this
Speaker 1: and arrived at a definition that stopped me cold when
Speaker 1: I read it. She found that boredom is not the
Speaker 1: absence of stimulation. It is actually a state of wanting
Speaker 1: stimulation but being unable to find anything satisfying. It's a
Speaker 1: kind of restless searching state, and it's without a scratch.
Speaker 1: And here's where it gets interesting. When Man and her
Speaker 1: colleagues actually studied what that restless searching produced is they
Speaker 1: discovered something nobody expected. They ran an experiment where one
Speaker 1: group of participants was given a classic creativity test, the
Speaker 1: kind where you have to think of as many uses
Speaker 1: for a common object as possible, like a plastic cup.
Speaker 1: They listed their ideas average results. Then they ran another
Speaker 1: group through a boring task, first, copying numbers out of
Speaker 1: a phone book by hand for twenty minutes. Just copying
Speaker 1: numbers the most tedious activity they could construct. Then they
Speaker 1: did the same creativity test. The board group wasn't slightly better.
Speaker 1: They were dramatically better. More ideas, more original ideas, more
Speaker 1: unusual ideas. The boredom had done something to their thinking.
Speaker 1: Man did a second version. This time she made the
Speaker 1: boring task even more passive, just reading numbers from her
Speaker 1: phone book rather than helping them even more boring. The
Speaker 1: creativity scores went up even further. Boredom wasn't the enemy
Speaker 1: of creative thought, it was the precondition for it. But
Speaker 1: why why would sitting with empty, frustrated restlessness make you
Speaker 1: more creative? The answer lives in the most important brain
Speaker 1: system you might have never heard of. And I need
Speaker 1: to spend some real time here, because once you understand this,
Speaker 1: you will never look an idle moment the same way again.
Speaker 1: The default mode network this is the most important brain
Speaker 1: system that no one tells us about. For most of
Speaker 1: neuroscience history, researchers studied the brain by giving people tasks
Speaker 1: to do and watching which regions activated. Solve a puzzle.
Speaker 1: This area lights up, process language that area, recognize a
Speaker 1: face this region. The operating assumption was that the interesting
Speaker 1: action happened when the brain was working well. Nobody thought
Speaker 1: to ask, was what is the brain doing when it's
Speaker 1: not working. In the nineteen nineties, neuroscientists Marcus Reichel at
Speaker 1: Washington University in Saint Louis was doing exactly this kind
Speaker 1: of task based brain imaging, and he kept noticing something strange.
Speaker 1: There was a network of regions that consistently deactivated when
Speaker 1: people were giving tasks to focus on. They went quiet
Speaker 1: during directed attention, and when the task ended, when the
Speaker 1: person was just resting, just letting their mind wonder, this
Speaker 1: network came roaring back online. Reichel called it the default
Speaker 1: mode network the DMN, the brain's default setting. For years,
Speaker 1: the dm MEN was dismissed as background noise idlaying like
Speaker 1: a car engine at a red light, wasted energy, the
Speaker 1: brain burning glucose for nothing. Then, in one of the
Speaker 1: great slow burn reveals in science history. Researchers started actually
Speaker 1: studying the DMN, and they found that it was not
Speaker 1: idling at all. It was doing the most sophisticated, most important,
Speaker 1: most deeply human cognitive work of your entire mental life.
Speaker 1: Here is what the default mode network is responsible for.
Speaker 1: I want you to listen to this list carefully. The
Speaker 1: DMN is the system that generates your sense of self,
Speaker 1: your ongoing narrative of who you are, what you value,
Speaker 1: where you've been, where you're going. When you lie awake
Speaker 1: and think about your life, that's the DMN. When you
Speaker 1: feel the particular ache of regret or the particular warmth
Speaker 1: of gratitude, the dm MEN is assembling those experiences. The
Speaker 1: DMN is where you process other people's minds when you
Speaker 1: try to understand why someone acted the way they did,
Speaker 1: to imagine their inner experience, to feel empathy, that requires
Speaker 1: the DMN. It's the system that makes you socially intelligent,
Speaker 1: that makes you capable of compassion rather than just reaction.
Speaker 1: The dm MEN is where you simulate the future, when
Speaker 1: you imagine a difficult conversation before it happens, or envision
Speaker 1: what a decision might mean for your life five years
Speaker 1: from now. That is DMN activity. It's your brain's flight simulator,
Speaker 1: your rehearsal space. And critically, the dm MEN is where
Speaker 1: creative insight happens, not the grinding effortfu part of creativity,
Speaker 1: not the application of rules, the breakthrough moment, the sudden
Speaker 1: connection between two things that seem uncorrelated, the solution that
Speaker 1: rives apparently from nowhere in the shower. That is the
Speaker 1: default mode network firing. And in fact, some researchers now
Speaker 1: believe that the highest levels of human creativity are not
Speaker 1: primarily a function of the focused, task oriented brain at all.
Speaker 1: They are a function of how well your DMN operates
Speaker 1: and how often you give it the space to do so.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing that I want you to write
Speaker 1: down right now about DMN. It cannot activate when you
Speaker 1: are consuming. Listen to that again. Your dm MEN can't
Speaker 1: activate when you're consuming the default mode network your self
Speaker 1: reflection system, your empathy system, your creativity system, your future
Speaker 1: simulation system, your meaning making system. It cannot run while
Speaker 1: you're taking in external stimulation. When you're scrolling, the DMN
Speaker 1: is suppressed. When you're watching, the DMN is suppressed. When
Speaker 1: you're listening to a podcast, yes, including this one. When
Speaker 1: you're engaged with external input, the DMN is offline. It
Speaker 1: only comes online in the gaps, in the pauses, in
Speaker 1: the waiting, in the boredom. Now, I want you to
Speaker 1: think about how many gaps you have left in your day.
Speaker 1: When was the last time you stood in a queue
Speaker 1: without your phone, The last time you waited for a
Speaker 1: meal at a restaurant without your phone, The last time
Speaker 1: you sat in a waiting room for a doctor a
Speaker 1: dentist and just sat. The last time you took a
Speaker 1: walk without headphones, The last time you lay in bed
Speaker 1: in the morning without immediately reaching for a screen. If
Speaker 1: you're like most people in the modern world, those moments
Speaker 1: are nearly gone, eliminated with remarkable thoroughness, and with them,
Speaker 1: quietly and visibly, something essential has been disappearing from your
Speaker 1: inner life. Researchers at the University of Virginia ran a
Speaker 1: study that I find poignant. They asked partisans events to
Speaker 1: sit alone in a room with their thoughts for fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: no phone, no book, no music, just sitting. The only
Speaker 1: thing in the room was a button that, if pressed,
Speaker 1: would deliver a mild electric shock. Sixty seven percent of
Speaker 1: men and twenty five percent of women chose to shock
Speaker 1: themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. One
Speaker 1: man shocked himself one hundred and ninety times one hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety times. Pascal was right in sixteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: We just now have the neuroscience to understand exactly why,
Speaker 1: and we have something he couldn't have imagined, an industry
Speaker 1: that has spent billions of dollars making the avoidance of
Speaker 1: your own mind not just easy but irresistible. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about how the attention economy
Speaker 1: surgically removed boredom from your life. I want to be
Speaker 1: really precise yere, because I know I don't think this
Speaker 1: is an accident. I don't think that you feeling bored
Speaker 1: and feeling like it's a weakness or the need for
Speaker 1: constant stimulation is your fault. I don't believe this is
Speaker 1: something that you did to yourself. I think it is
Speaker 1: a designed outcome, and the people who designed it knew
Speaker 1: somewhat what they were doing. In twenty seventeen, Tristan Harris,
Speaker 1: a former design ethicist at Google, began speaking publicly about
Speaker 1: something he'd witnessed from the inside. He described how the
Speaker 1: technology industry doesn't simply make products, It makes persuasion machines,
Speaker 1: systems explicitly engineered to capture and hold human nature for
Speaker 1: as long as possible, using the same psychological techniques developed
Speaker 1: for slot machines and gambling. Harris called it the race
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the brainstem. Not a race to
Speaker 1: make you smarter or more connected or more fulfilled, a
Speaker 1: race to find the lowest, most ancient, most reflexive part
Speaker 1: of your neurological architecture, the part that responds to novelty,
Speaker 1: to social approval, to potential threat, to pattern and reward,
Speaker 1: and plug directly into it. The core mechanism is intermittent
Speaker 1: variable reward, the same mechanism that makes slot machines the
Speaker 1: most addictive gambling devices ever invented. You pull the lever,
Speaker 1: you scroll down, and sometimes you get something rewarding, a
Speaker 1: funny video, a surprising piece of news, a notification that
Speaker 1: someone liked what you posted, and sometimes you get nothing interesting.
Speaker 1: The randomness is not a flaw. The randomness is the feature.
Speaker 1: It's what makes you keep pulling the lever, keep scrolling,
Speaker 1: keep checking EU dopamine system was not designed for this.
Speaker 1: It evolved to motivate you to pursue food, want safety,
Speaker 1: and connection scarce resources in a world where effort was
Speaker 1: required to find them. It was not designed to interface
Speaker 1: with a system that provides infinite, instant, algorithmically optimized stimulation
Speaker 1: calibrated specifically to the profile of your individual psychology. And
Speaker 1: so you find yourself as most people do, checking your
Speaker 1: phone somewhere between ninety six and one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: times per day, not because you decided to, not because
Speaker 1: you want to, but because a system smarter than your
Speaker 1: conscious mind has learned exactly which lever to pull, exactly
Speaker 1: when to pull it, and exactly how to keep you
Speaker 1: coming back stop scrolling. I need you to understand this
Speaker 1: about notifications. Every notification is an interruption. Every interruption breaks
Speaker 1: your focus, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine
Speaker 1: have found that after an interruption, it takes an average
Speaker 1: of twenty three minutes to return to the same level
Speaker 1: of deep focus you were out before twenty three minutes
Speaker 1: for a single notification glance. Most of us received dozens
Speaker 1: of notifications per day, which means most of us never
Speaker 1: not once, not for a single sustained period, reached the
Speaker 1: depth of focus and the depth of mind wandering necessary
Speaker 1: for their default mode network to do its best work.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing about your attention being stolen. You
Speaker 1: can reclaim what was taken. And this is where we
Speaker 1: go back, way back to the people who understood the
Speaker 1: value of empty moments more clearly than almost any thinkers
Speaker 1: in history. I want to talk to you about the
Speaker 1: ancient art of doing nothing. What the wisest humans who
Speaker 1: ever lived knew about the sacred gap. The Stoic philosopher Seneca,
Speaker 1: writing two thousand years ago in ancient Rome, was surrounded
Speaker 1: by precisely the same problem Pascal would observe sixteen centuries later.
Speaker 1: Rome was a city of spectacle, gladiator games, theatrical performances,
Speaker 1: political intrigue, constant noise and crowd and stimulation. Seneca watched
Speaker 1: his fellow citizen's lurch from entertainment to entertainment, from party
Speaker 1: to party, and he wrote something that reads like it
Speaker 1: was composed yesterday. Seneca wrote, it is not that I
Speaker 1: am brave enough to be bored. It is that I
Speaker 1: know what boredom is. For he called it otium often
Speaker 1: translated as leisure, but that translation loses something crucial. For Seneca.
Speaker 1: Otium was not relaxation. It was not passive rest. It
Speaker 1: was purposeful emptiness, deliberately cultivated spaciousness. Time not organized around
Speaker 1: doing or consuming, but around being around, allowing the mind
Speaker 1: to roam, to integrate, to discover what it actually contains.
Speaker 1: Seneca believed that the quality of a person's otium determine
Speaker 1: the quality of their thinking, not their reading, not their study,
Speaker 1: their otium the time when the books were closed and
Speaker 1: they just sat. He wrote letters in that state. He
Speaker 1: had his deepest philosophical insights in that state. He believed
Speaker 1: that you could not genuinely know yourself without regular, intentional
Speaker 1: time spent in silence with your own mind. So what
Speaker 1: I want to share with you is the practice of
Speaker 1: how to be bored. I want to give you something real,
Speaker 1: not a manifesto, not a list of things to feel
Speaker 1: guilty about, a practice. First, understand what you're actually doing
Speaker 1: when you reach for the phone. You're not making a decision.
Speaker 1: You're executing a reflex, a reflex that has been installed
Speaker 1: and strengthened over years of training. The first step is
Speaker 1: simply to notice it. To put a tiny gap between
Speaker 1: the stimulus boredom and the response scroll. You don't have
Speaker 1: to resist it. Just notice, Oh I'm bored and my
Speaker 1: hand moved that. Noticing over time is everything. You cannot
Speaker 1: change your reflex you're not aware of. Second practice, what
Speaker 1: I call the three minute hold. When you feel boredom
Speaker 1: arriving that restless, uncomfortable itch, make a deal with yourself
Speaker 1: three minutes. You're going to hold still for three minutes.
Speaker 1: No phone, no book, no music. You're just going to
Speaker 1: let the discomfort be there. Look at a wall, look
Speaker 1: at the sky, look at your hands. For the first minute,
Speaker 1: it will feel terrible. Your mind will pingpong, It will
Speaker 1: tell you this is a waste of time. It will
Speaker 1: generate a small flight of anxious, mundane thoughts. Things you
Speaker 1: need to do, things you said, things you're worried about.
Speaker 1: This is all normal. Sit with it. In the second minute,
Speaker 1: something usually shifts. The chatter doesn't stop, but it changes character.
Speaker 1: It becomes slightly less urgent. Your gaze, if you let it,
Speaker 1: will start to drift and soften. You're breathing more slow
Speaker 1: without you telling it to. In the third minute, something opens,
Speaker 1: not always, not dramatically, but a quietness begins together, and
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes something arrives from below a thought you didn't expect,
Speaker 1: a memory you hadn't planned to have a connection between
Speaker 1: two things in your life that you suddenly see clearly.
Speaker 1: A feeling that had been waiting patiently behind all the noise.
Speaker 1: That's your default mode network coming online. That is otium. Third,
Speaker 1: every day, do one thing that allows you to be bored.
Speaker 1: Walk without headphones, eat breakfast without your phone, sit outside
Speaker 1: for ten minutes after work doing nothing, Lie in bed
Speaker 1: for five minutes after you wake before checking your phone'sh
Speaker 1: your dishes without any distraction. These are not sacrifices. These
Speaker 1: are investments. Each boring ritual is a deposit in the
Speaker 1: account of your inner life. Each one is giving your
Speaker 1: default mode network, your creativity, your empathy, your self understanding,
Speaker 1: a little bit of time to run. The remarkable thing
Speaker 1: is how quickly it compounds. People who begin simple bored
Speaker 1: and practices just like these often report within two or
Speaker 1: three weeks that they feel more creative, more emotionally present,
Speaker 1: more able to access their own feelings, more interesting to themselves.
Speaker 1: Not because they've learned anything new, because they've given the
Speaker 1: knowledge they already have space to breed. Number four, and
Speaker 1: this is the most important one. Get bored on purpose,
Speaker 1: before your hardest problems, before a difficult creative challenge, before
Speaker 1: a decision that matters, before a hard conversation, you need
Speaker 1: to have Take ten minutes and do something mindlessly mundane.
Speaker 1: Wash the dishes, fold laundry, take a short walk. You're
Speaker 1: not procrastinating your activating your most sophisticated cognitive machinery. You're
Speaker 1: greasing the right wheels. What seems like wasted time is
Speaker 1: often the thing that makes everything that follows work. I
Speaker 1: want to come back to Pascal. He wrote his sentence
Speaker 1: in sixteen fifty four, long before slot machines, long before television,
Speaker 1: long before the algorithm that knows you better than your
Speaker 1: friends do, that has mapped the exact contours of your restlessness.
Speaker 1: And as a piece of content, already selected, already cued,
Speaker 1: already waiting for the precise moment your attention starts to drift.
Speaker 1: Pascal looked at kings and philosophers and soldiers, people with
Speaker 1: every resource, every advantage, every stimulation their world could offer,
Speaker 1: and he saw them running. We are all running running
Speaker 1: from a person, running from a place, running from silence
Speaker 1: running from ourselves. I'm not judging you, I'm grieving what
Speaker 1: you're missing out on. You to know that the most
Speaker 1: important things, the things that make life worth living, that
Speaker 1: make humans capable of wisdom and love and genuine creativity,
Speaker 1: those things could only be found in one place nobody
Speaker 1: wanted to go. The quiet stillness, the peaceful room, the
Speaker 1: empty moment, the uncomfortable, awkward silence. That's where it all is.
Speaker 1: That void is not empty. It only looks empty from
Speaker 1: the outside. From the inside, if you can hold still
Speaker 1: long enough to get there, it is the most populated,
Speaker 1: most alive, most genuinely yours. Place you will ever stand
Speaker 1: your self is in there. Your best ideas are in there,
Speaker 1: your deepest relationships being shaped in there by the quality
Speaker 1: of the attention you're developing or destroying right now today,
Speaker 1: in every idle moment, the technology is not going anywhere,
Speaker 1: The algorithm is not going to develop a conscience. Nobody
Speaker 1: is going to give you your boredom back. You have to
Speaker 1: take it one uncomfortable minute at a time. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: go be bored. Thank you so much for listening to
Speaker 1: this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat
Speaker 1: with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to
Speaker 1: growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential. I
Speaker 1: don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I
Speaker 1: think envy is the thief of joy. I think social
Speaker 1: comparison is invaluable