The Lost Art of Boredom: Why Doing Nothing Is a Creative Superpower

Your phone dies halfway through the train ride.

No warning, no gentle transition. One moment you’re scrolling through email, or Twitter, or whatever your thumb now reaches for before your brain is even fully consulted. The next moment: black glass.

There are still twenty‑seven minutes until your stop.

You look around. Almost every other head is tilted down, lit in ghostly blue. A man plays a game, jaw slack. A woman taps furtively in a WhatsApp fight. A teenager scrolls TikTok with the fluidity of a concert pianist.

You, meanwhile, are stuck with the terrifying prospect of… just being here.

At first, your mind scrambles for substitutes: maybe there’s a book in your bag? A half‑finished podcast you could replay from memory? You check your pocket even though you know the phone is dead, like pressing the elevator button three times in case the universe was waiting for enthusiasm.

Then, because there’s nothing else to do, your gaze drifts.

You stare at the little safety poster by the door. You read it twice, then a third time. You watch the reflection of faces in the dark window. Your thoughts slide from the meeting you had this morning, to the bug in your code you haven’t been able to fix, to the fight you had last week, to the slightly crooked “Mind the gap” sticker.

Somewhere around minute ten, your brain does something unexpected.

Without your conscious effort, an idea begins to form. A different way to structure tomorrow’s presentation. A cleaner approach to the feature you’ve been hacking on. A phrase that perfectly describes a feeling you’ve been trying to write about. It arrives not like a thunderbolt but like a queue forming quietly in the background: by the time you notice it, it’s already there.

You reach for your dead phone, remember, and instead grope around for a pen. You scribble the idea on the back of a receipt and feel that small, satisfying click of something falling into place.

Twenty‑seven minutes of what you would have called “wasted time” just paid for themselves.

This is the paradox we live inside: in the most stimulating era in human history, our best ideas still tend to show up when nothing is happening. And yet we’ve almost completely engineered those moments out of our lives.

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For most of human history, boredom was a default. You got bored while water boiled, while crops grew, while the sun crossed the sky. Children got bored on long car rides and ended up reading the back of cereal boxes, inventing games with siblings, or staring out the window until the shapes of trees turned into dragons.

Today, with a rectangle in our pockets that can deliver more novelty in ten seconds than an entire medieval village saw in a year, boredom has become a design flaw to be eliminated.

We fill every crack in the day with something: a podcast while we shower, Slack in the elevator, email in line for coffee, news while we wait for food to arrive. If a page takes more than three seconds to load, we feel wronged.

On average, Americans now spend north of four hours a day on their smartphones and over seven hours a day online; over the course of an adult life, that adds up to about seventeen years of internet browsing.(theguardian.com)

The strange thing is that, despite all this entertainment, reported boredom is going up, not down. Longitudinal surveys in the US and China suggest more students now describe themselves as bored than before the smartphone era began.(theguardian.com) In workplaces, people often reach for their phones to relieve boredom, only to end up feeling even more bored afterwards.(theguardian.com)

We seem to have built a society that is hyper‑stimulated and under‑fulfilled at the same time.

Boredom has become the cigarette break of the twenty‑first century: everyone sneaks outside to take a hit of novelty whenever there’s a pause. The difference is that the smoke we’re pulling into our heads doesn’t just stain our attention in the moment; it subtly reconfigures how our brains use downtime at all.

To understand what we’re losing, we have to start with what boredom actually is.

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Boredom feels simple: that itchy, restless sensation of wanting to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this.

Psychologist Erin Westgate offers a more precise definition. In her “Meaning and Attentional Components” (MAC) model of boredom, she argues that boredom is what we feel when we are unable or unwilling to successfully engage our attention in a meaningful activity. It isn’t laziness or apathy: it’s a motivational state, like a mental wince.(erinwestgate.com)

Two things have to go wrong at once.

First, attention: the task is either too easy (understimulation) or too hard (overstimulation) for your current mental resources. In both cases, your mind keeps sliding off. Second, meaning: what you’re doing doesn’t feel connected to any goal you actually care about.

Watching paint dry fails on both counts.

Westgate suggests boredom is less like a glitch and more like pain. The twinge you feel when you twist your ankle doesn’t feel “good,” but it’s extremely useful information: something about how you’re using your body is unsustainable. Similarly, boredom is your mind shouting, “This—this allocation of my finite hours—makes no sense.”(erinwestgate.com)

Seen this way, boredom isn’t the opposite of engagement. It’s the signal that points toward engagement, like the low‑fuel light on your car dashboard.

What we do when that light blinks, however, makes all the difference.

You can treat boredom as a bug to be patched with quick stimulus—scroll, snack, swipe. Or you can treat it as a doorway: the moment where your mind, suddenly unanchored from the task at hand, is free to go somewhere more interesting.

To see why that matters, we have to peek under the hood and look at the machinery that takes over when we “do nothing.”

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If you slide someone into an fMRI scanner and ask them to lie still and not think about anything in particular, their brain does not “shut off.” It slips into a different gear.

Neuroscientists call this the default mode network (DMN): a constellation of regions including the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex that light up when we’re not focused on external tasks—when we’re daydreaming, remembering the past, imagining the future, thinking about ourselves or other people.(en.wikipedia.org)

For a long time, the DMN was cast as the villain of productivity. Its activation correlated with mind‑wandering, which in turn correlated with worse performance on things like reading comprehension tests and sustained attention tasks. If you’ve ever realized you’ve “read” three pages without absorbing a word because your thoughts were elsewhere, you’ve met the DMN.

But that same network turns out to be deeply involved in more interesting things: autobiographical memory, imagining possible futures, sense of self, social understanding—and creativity.

In 2011, Benjamin Baird and colleagues asked participants to perform a boring choice reaction time task and periodically report what they were thinking about when their minds wandered. They found that a large share of these off‑task thoughts were “prospective”—about the future—and specifically about “autobiographical planning”: contemplating personal goals and how to achieve them.(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

In other words, when the world stops making immediate demands on our attention, a surprisingly large fraction of what the brain does is pull out our to‑do list for the next decade.

More recently, a 2024 study by Eleonora Bartoli and colleagues used stereo‑EEG recordings directly from people’s brains while they engaged in classic creativity tasks—like coming up with alternate uses for a common object—and also while they were simply instructed to let their minds wander. They found that DMN activity ramped up during both mind‑wandering and divergent thinking, and that directly stimulating DMN regions reduced the originality of people’s ideas.(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

That is, the system that hums along when you’re zoning out on the train is causally involved in your ability to connect distant concepts in novel ways.

Our brains, it turns out, have two major networks that matter for creative thought: one that generates spontaneous, free‑flowing associations (the DMN) and one that evaluates and structures those ideas (the so‑called executive control network). Creativity seems to require a kind of unlikely collaboration between them.

You can think of the DMN as the eccentric friend who has no filter and the executive network as the sensible friend who actually has to drive the car. Too much of the first and you get a night that ends in a ditch; too much of the second and you never leave the driveway. Interesting ideas happen when the wanderer is allowed out for a stroll but the grown‑up is still on call.

What does this have to do with boredom?

Boredom is the moment when the external world stops giving you a script. It’s the blank space where the DMN naturally takes the mic.

Unless, of course, you cut it off.

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In a series of studies that would have made Stanley Milgram proud, psychologist Sandi Mann and her colleague Rebekah Cadman set out to deliberately bore people to death—scientifically.

In one experiment, they asked a group of participants to spend fifteen minutes copying numbers out of a phone book. Another group just waited. Afterwards, both groups were asked to generate as many creative uses as possible for a pair of polystyrene cups.

The phone‑book copyists, who had spent a quarter of an hour in cognitive purgatory, came up with more and more original uses for the cups than the control group.(coach.nine.com.au)

To see how far this could go, Mann and Cadman ran a second version with three groups: no boredom, moderate boredom (copy the numbers), and maximal boredom (just read the phone book). Then they swapped in different kinds of creativity tasks.

The results were even sharper. The most bored group—the passive phone‑book readers—often outperformed both the writers and the non‑bored controls on measures of creative thinking.(thestrategygroup.com.au)

The interpretation was that boring, especially passive boring activities, free up mental space for daydreaming, and that daydreaming feeds creative cognition. People seem to enter a kind of low‑grade trance in which irrelevant memory fragments bump into current concerns, generating novel combinations.

A meta‑analysis of “incubation” studies—the classic phenomenon where setting a problem aside and doing something else helps you later solve it—backs this up. When researchers looked across dozens of experiments, they found that taking a break improved problem‑solving performance, especially for tasks involving divergent thinking, and that breaks filled with low‑demand activities (as opposed to cognitively heavy ones) tended to help more.(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Incubation seems to be less about “rest” and more about letting the DMN off its leash to quietly comb through your memory banks while your conscious mind is occupied with washing dishes or walking down the street.

Boredom, in this light, isn’t the enemy of creativity; it’s part of the infrastructure.

This idea has seeped into pop culture. In a well‑known TED talk and book, Bored and Brilliant, journalist Manoush Zomorodi documented how listeners who deliberately reclaimed little pockets of boredom by putting their phones away on commutes and walks reported more original ideas and a renewed sense of mental spaciousness.(theverge.com)

Science‑YouTube has picked it up too: in a video bluntly titled “Why Boredom is Good For You,” Derek Muller from Veritasium walks through studies showing that bored participants donate more to charity and engage in more future‑oriented goal planning, tying these to boredom‑induced mind‑wandering.(ythub.online)

If boredom is so fecund, why do we recoil from it like a hot stove?

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In 2014, a team led by Timothy Wilson invited people into the lab, took away their belongings, and left them alone in a room for between six and fifteen minutes. No phone, no books, no music. Just their thoughts.

The only “optional feature” in the room was a button connected to a device that would administer a small but unpleasant electric shock. Participants had already tried the shock and said they would pay money to avoid experiencing it again.(dash.harvard.edu)

Left alone, many of them shocked themselves anyway.

Men were especially enthusiastic; one administered the shock 190 times, to the extent that the researchers excluded him as an outlier. Overall, about 67% of men and 25% of women in that particular experiment chose at least once to trade the discomfort of unstructured thinking for literal physical pain.(pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

The authors summarized their findings with a line that ricocheted around the internet: “Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”

Around the same time, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert recruited thousands of participants via an iPhone app that pinged them at random times to ask what they were doing, whether their mind was on the activity or elsewhere, and how happy they felt. The result: people’s minds were wandering almost half the time—and the more their thoughts drifted away from what they were doing, the less happy they were, regardless of whether their mind was on pleasant or unpleasant topics.(dash.harvard.edu)

“A human mind is a wandering mind,” they wrote, “and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

At first glance, these findings seem to strike a fatal blow to the romantic vision of the daydreaming genius. If mind‑wandering is both aversive in the moment and associated with lower happiness, isn’t boredom something to be minimized?

It’s worth slowing down here.

First, subsequent commentary on Wilson’s electric‑shock study pointed out that, on average, participants rated the experience of “just thinking” as somewhat enjoyable and somewhat entertaining as well as somewhat boring. Only a minority chose to shock themselves multiple times.(frontiersin.org) The dramatic story—“humans would rather hurt themselves than be alone with their thoughts”—overshadows the more mundane finding: many people are simply out of practice at unstructured thinking without props.

Second, Killingsworth and Gilbert’s mind‑wandering measure lumped together a lot of different mental states. Rumination about anxieties, fleeting fantasies about vacations, replaying arguments, planning your week—they all counted as “off‑task thought.” It’s hardly surprising that, in aggregate, these correlate with lower momentary happiness.

If I pinged you randomly during a day and most of the times your mind wandered it was to worry about unpaid bills, I’d expect you to report feeling worse.

But that doesn’t mean every form of mind‑wandering is toxic. Other research has specifically examined mind‑wandering during incubation periods for creative tasks and found… a mixed picture. In one study, people whose minds wandered more during breaks did slightly better on one measure of creativity—flexibility—but also reported more negative mood.(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

In other words: the same mental habits that make you good at generating far‑flung associations might, under certain conditions, also make you more prone to melancholy.

It helps to distinguish between two very different species of boredom.

One is the “fertile boredom” that Mann and Cadman induced with phone books: low‑stakes, time‑limited, with an interesting question already simmering somewhere in your mind. Your external world is quiet, but your internal world is humming.

The other is “toxic boredom”: the chronic, empty restlessness that comes from feeling trapped in tasks that are both meaningless and inescapable, with no clear alternative. Studies of chronic boredom link it to depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and risky behavior.(ouci.dntb.gov.ua)

Fertile boredom is like a fallow field: nothing visibly growing, but the soil is replenishing itself for the next crop. Toxic boredom is like leaving a pot on the stove with nothing in it: eventually the metal warps and burns.

The modern world has made it very easy to dodge both kinds.

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Imagine being slightly bored in 1993.

You’re in a café waiting for a friend who’s late. The environment pushes you toward a set of coping strategies: you can people‑watch, read the menu again, doodle in a notebook, stare out the window and let your mind drift.

Most of those involve some engagement with your surroundings or your own thoughts. The DMN gets rehearsal time. Your mind, starved for stimulus, starts making its own.

Now fast‑forward to 2025.

You’re in the same café. The friend is still late. Your brain feels the first flicker of boredom—this moment is not very stimulating, not obviously meaningful—and reaches for the new default coping strategy: the shock button in your pocket.

You pull out your phone. Now, two things happen.

One, you get instant relief. The low‑level discomfort of boredom is replaced with a hit of novelty, social feedback, mild outrage, or whatever else your feeds are designed to serve. Two, and less visibly, you swap one kind of mind‑wandering (stimulus‑independent, autobiographically flavored) for another (stimulus‑driven, platform‑optimized).

Instead of your mind roaming through memories and future plans, it is recruited into skimming the lives, arguments, and ad campaigns of others.

From the standpoint of your default mode network, this is like being in the middle of an interesting conversation and having someone constantly poke you on the shoulder to ask if you’ve heard the news about this other, unrelated thing. The DMN can’t sustain its own meandering; it keeps getting yanked back into the tight attentional loop of scrolling.

Even when you’re not using your phone, the device exerts a kind of gravitational pull on your cognitive resources.

Adrian Ward and colleagues asked hundreds of people to take demanding cognitive tests—things that measure working memory and fluid intelligence—under three conditions: phone on the desk, phone in their bag or pocket, phone in another room. The phones were all turned off or on silent. The only thing that changed was proximity.

Performance improved systematically as the phones got further away. People whose phones were in another room did better than those with phones in pockets, who in turn did better than those with phones on the desk. These effects were strongest for participants who reported being especially dependent on their phones.(econpapers.repec.org)

Ward called it “brain drain”: part of your limited attentional capacity is silently diverted to not thinking about the phone. The mere presence of the device forces your executive control system to burn cycles inhibiting your urge to check it.

If boredom is the moment your brain is finally free to drift into its own networks, the constant availability of the phone means you almost never get there.

We have, in effect, outsourced the management of our boredom to products whose business model depends on stealing and holding our attention. The economy is very good at monetizing your idle minutes; it is less concerned with what your mind might have grown in those minutes on its own.

Given all this, “just be bored more” is not a realistic prescription. Our muscles for that have atrophied. And none of us is about to move to a monastery, disable every app, and stare at a wall for six hours a day.

But there is a middle path: treating boredom as a habit you can train rather than a state that either randomly happens to you or doesn’t.

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Consider three types of time in a typical day.

The first is task time: when you are actively doing something that stretches your attentional and cognitive resources—writing code, performing surgery, negotiating a contract, caring for a toddler. In these moments, your executive control network is (ideally) in charge.

The second is consumption time: when you are passively taking in content that someone else created. Reading is here. So is scrolling Twitter, binging Netflix, or listening to a podcast.

The third is what we might call open time: when you’re not obviously doing or consuming anything. Waiting in line. Sitting on a train. Walking to the store. Lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

If you mapped your day, the open time used to be where boredom lived. It was also where mind‑wandering, daydreaming, thinking about your life, and spontaneous insights lived.

Over the last decade, most of us have quietly reallocated almost all of our open time into consumption time. There are fewer and fewer minutes in the day when your mind is left entirely to its own devices.

To reclaim boredom’s benefits, you don’t have to blow up your life. You just have to steal back a slice of this third category and defend it from the others.

An entrepreneur I know, let’s call her Lina, initially laughed when her coach suggested that she schedule fifteen minutes of “staring at a wall” after lunch.

“I don’t have time to stare at a wall,” she said. “I barely have time to pee.”

Her coach pushed back. “You don’t have time not to,” he said. “Right now your brain is a browser with 80 tabs open. You need somewhere for the background processes to run.”

They compromised: every weekday, after lunch, she would walk the same two blocks around her office, without her phone, and with only one instruction: no deliberate “thinking about work.” If a particular problem came up naturally, fine. But this was not a performance walk. It was a boredom walk.

At first it was excruciating. She would find herself rehearsing emails in her head, then catch herself and try to focus on the cracks in the sidewalk, then get annoyed at having nothing “useful” to do.

About a week in, something shifted. Her thoughts started free‑associating. She’d notice a dog and remember a childhood pet, which jogged loose a half‑forgotten ambition she had at sixteen, which suddenly connected to a product idea she’d been circling without fully articulating.

Three weeks later, she started bringing a small index card to jot things down. Not because she was forcing insight, but because so many interesting fragments were popping up that she didn’t trust herself to remember them all.

She calls it “my DMN commute.” She still hates the feeling of it sometimes. But she’s become convinced that those fifteen devices‑off, structure‑less minutes have produced more genuinely original thinking about her company than any single conference or brainstorming session.

You don’t have to be a founder to steal this trick. But you do have to make two commitments.

First, that not every waking minute has to feel obviously productive. Boredom will often feel, in the moment, like doing nothing. From the outside, your boredom walk or couch stare will look indistinguishable from slacking off. That’s fine. From the brain’s perspective, this is the equivalent of sleep for your creative networks: invisible work.

Second, that you will protect some micro‑zones of your life from the phone. This sounds trivial until you try it. Walking the dog without a podcast. Standing in the checkout line without Instagram. Sitting on the toilet without your timeline.

Each of these is a miniature exposure therapy session for boredom. You’re teaching your brain that the itch of “I should be looking at something” will rise and fall without killing you.

You might start with a ridiculously small rule: the first five minutes of any wait are phone‑free. Or “no phone within arm’s reach while I’m eating alone.” Or “the shower is my monastery.” Or “I don’t bring my phone to the bed” (a commitment that has probably saved more ideas and relationships than we’ll ever know).

These are not moral injunctions; they’re design choices. If you believe that your brain does interesting, useful work when it’s left to its own devices, then you have to give it some device‑free time.

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There is a deeper layer to this, beyond creativity hacks.

One of boredom’s gifts is that, once the initial discomfort passes, it forces you to ask better questions about your own life.

In his exploration of mind‑wandering and future thinking, Baird found that people’s spontaneous thoughts during low‑demand tasks skewed toward personal goals and how to achieve them.(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) Boredom, in this sense, isn’t just about “coming up with ideas for plastic cups”; it’s about giving your mind room to chew on what story you’re actually trying to live.

When you never experience unscripted time, you outsource that question to algorithms and other people’s agendas. The future you plan is the one that fits in reply‑all threads and notification windows.

This is one reason I’m wary of treating boredom purely as a tool for increased output. It certainly helps with that. But it also has a way of revealing when the ladder you’re climbing is leaning against the wrong wall.

Sit quietly for ten minutes a day without external input, and patterns start to emerge. The same thought that kept trying to surface in the gaps between emails may turn out to be more important than the emails themselves.

Of course, for some people—especially those dealing with trauma or certain mental health conditions—being left alone with one’s thoughts can be genuinely overwhelming. The studies on boredom and psychological distress suggest that chronic, inescapable boredom is associated with worse outcomes, not better ones.(ouci.dntb.gov.ua)

If your internal landscape feels like an unsafe neighborhood, you shouldn’t wander it alone at night. But that’s an argument for approaching boredom gently, maybe with a therapist or a structured practice like guided meditation—not for outlawing boredom altogether.

For most of us, the bigger risk isn’t that we’ll be crushed by boredom. It’s that we’ll be so effective at stomping it out that we never hear what it was trying to say.

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When my parents describe their childhoods, boredom is everywhere.

They talk about staring at clouds for so long that the sky seemed to bend. About making entire imaginary universes out of sticks and rocks. About spending afternoons lying on the floor listening to the same record ten times in a row because there was nothing else.

By contrast, many kids today live in environments where any hint of boredom is quickly medicated—with screens, with scheduled activities, with adult‑designed tasks. I don’t say this with nostalgic superiority; if I had been born with a touchscreen in reach, I probably would have used it until my thumbs fell off.

But when we remove every trace of boredom from childhood, we’re not just increasing “happiness.” We’re changing how those brains learn to cope with under‑stimulation and meaning‑seeking.

One quiet tragedy is that boredom tolerance, like any muscle, is best developed when the load is small. If you never practice being gently bored—on a walk, on a bus, over a slow breakfast—then when larger, unavoidable stretches of boredom arrive (a long illness, a dead‑end job, a lockdown), you have fewer internal tools for handling them.

The same is true in adult life. The executive who cannot stand five unstructured minutes in a lobby without checking her email is not going to magically tolerate the months‑long ambiguity of a new venture. The student who cannot sit in a lecture without scrolling will struggle to read the dense, slow book that might actually change his thinking.

Reclaiming boredom is not about puritanically rejecting all modern entertainment or going off‑grid. It is about recognizing that, for brains like ours, a complete absence of boredom is just as unnatural as constant hunger or constant pain.

There is a reason so many of our culture’s clichés about insight involve stillness: the shower epiphany, the long walk, the “sleeping on it.” These are all, in their own way, carefully disguised boredom rituals.

What’s different now is that the forces pushing against boredom are more sophisticated and ever‑present than they have ever been. Your ancestors did not have teams of PhDs designing cornflakes that hijacked their taste buds every time they tried to fast. You do.

So we need to become more deliberate about carving out spaces where boredom can safely occur.

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The next time you find yourself on a train with a dead phone, consider resisting the urge to curse your bad luck.

Instead, notice what happens in the first thirty seconds.

The twitchy reach for stimulus. The phantom buzz you think you feel in your pocket. The vague panic: What if someone needs me? What if I’m missing something?

Then watch those waves crest and recede. There is usually a moment, a few minutes in, when your brain gives up on grabbing for distraction and starts looking around for something else to do.

That “something else” is not always pretty. Sometimes it takes you to dark places: the fight you had with your partner, the deadline you’re ignoring, the thing you regret saying five years ago. Sometimes it’s banal, like an endless mental grocery list.

But if you stick with it, if you give your mind enough slack, it will often start making more interesting connections. That unsolved bug in your code meets that conversation you overheard last week and produces a new debugging angle. That business problem collides with a childhood memory and yields a story you can use in your pitch. That gnawing sense that something in your work is “off” starts to crystallize into a more specific “I think I need to say no to this project.”

None of this is guaranteed. The mind is not a vending machine where you insert minutes of boredom and out pop insights. But the probability distribution shifts. You make it more likely that the kinds of thoughts that matter will have a place to appear.

And even when nothing “useful” comes out, you’ve done something else: you’ve reminded your brain that it can survive in a room with itself.

In a culture where you can carry a pocket‑sized theme park everywhere you go, the ability to walk down the street with no soundtrack and no screen may come to seem eccentric, even suspicious. It is, in fact, a quiet superpower.

Attention is finite. Novelty is infinite. Boredom sits at the boundary between those two, asking impertinent questions: “Is this really how you want to spend your one precious life? Is this task, this app, this obligation connected to anything you actually care about?”

You can muffle that voice with an endless scroll. Or you can occasionally let it speak and trust that, given a little empty space, your mind will find better uses for itself than any algorithm can.

So perhaps the challenge is simple enough to phrase, and hard enough to actually do, that it’s worth issuing plainly:

At least once a day, let yourself be bored on purpose.

Stand in line with empty hands. Sit on a park bench without your phone. Take a shower without a podcast. Stare out of a window for the length of a song you’re not playing.

Let your default mode network flicker on. Let your thoughts wander, plan, recombine. Let the discomfort wash through and out.

Somewhere in that silence, if the science is right and human history is any guide, the rough drafts of your next good idea are already waiting for you.