Boredom: Our Brain’s Greatest Gift

“Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” — Sherry Turkle

What if boredom wasn't something to dread but was, rather, something to embrace? Boredom is your brain's built-in program to grow, to extend yourself, to let you know that your current trajectory is off track. It's encouraging you to push through the discomfort and write new neurological code.

CREDITS:
Podcast creator: Jordan Taylor

TRANSCRIPT:

My name is Jordan Taylor, and welcome to the If Then podcast. Our brains our a conglomerate of if/then statements, like in computer code, and oftentimes new lines of code are hard to write in our mind when we’re trying new things, for example if I want to play piano, then I need to read music. Sitting down and coding that particular if then statement could take years of dedication, but when we do sit down and create new then statements for a complicated if, it feels freaking amazing. This podcast is your weekly motivation, and mine, to get uncomfortable and write some neurological code.

“Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” — Sherry Turkle

There was a storm that evening—outside and within. The wind blew the limbs, and the leaves came down like an autumn colored rain, and I sat inside, unprotected, from my own rain of thoughts and a cell phone. I was battered by stimuli in my electrical brain storm. A notification here. A suggested video there. An instagram like. An Elon tweet. Hmm… I wonder how many downloads my last episode got? I was in the thick of it like most evenings—until, outside, there was a strike.

*lightning strike*

*sound of breaker*

And all went dark. All, that is, except my illuminated face now contrasted in the bright light of the screen. My eyes dilated. The screen froze. There was a glitch in my brain as my video stopped.

“No no no, not again…hhhhhh…”

Out in the country, you run on wifi. I pulled to refresh.

*roulette wheel sound*

“Come on come on.” Nothing. And then another pull.

*roulette wheel sound*

Even though I knew what the outcome would be.

*ding*

“Error loading Tap to retry.”

And then it set in. My new reality as I pulled 3 more times out of desperation. How long would it be? Could it be all night? The storm is pretty bad this time.

*thunder*

And then it hit me. Withdrawals. I could feel my stress rise as my pattern was broken, as urges hit and I couldn’t react, I just sat and stared at the Home screen swiping left and right through icons, another urge. Another sequence of apps opened and closed, their patterned order engrained in me, top left, then close, swipe, bottom right, then close. Opening and closing. Desperately searching for a fix, and the stress rose and kept rising, and another urge, and another, and then Sara came in,

“Jordan, let’s get that lantern from downstairs.”

“Yeah, okay. Can't you just get that yourself, Sara? You know where it is, right?”

“Uh…yeah…I think I do. You just kind of have your tools down there and I thought you could help me maneuver around it so we don’t get hurt in the dark.”

I looked up. And I saw. I finally saw it all. Myself. The darkness. Her flashlight across the room lighting her little corner I put her in. The black void between us. And the feeling.

*music*

I can’t think of anything else in my life that if it were taken away right now, I would experience withdrawal symptoms. See for some reason, I just don't struggle with common addictions like drinking, drugs, pornography, food. And, because of that, it's easy to internally criticize others when I hear of their addictions, like just stop watching porn--how hard is that? Even though, when I think about it, I'm not much different than them, and I can relate more than I'd like to admit. Much more. We all have some symptom in our lives we're trying to mask by different methods. Instead of dealing with the root cause, we temporarily medicate the symptom away. During a particularly stressful day, drinking a lot might make you feel carefree and happy in the short term, but the side effects are a terrible hangover, potential liver poisoning, disease, and an early death. You've successfully masked the initial symptom of stress, but with a laundry list of side effects--themselves symptoms that also need to be masked and medicated--the root cause of the initial ailment never truly understood or addressed, and if the addiction is tried to stop, it can lead to even worse side effects from withdrawal than the one initially medicated. When I saw so clearly my withdrawal symptoms that stormy night, after I made a stressful marital battle out of my wife's thoughtfulness, it hit me. What symptom was I masking with a smart phone--mymedication of choice? What symptom did I need to get to the root cause of?

To answer this question, a simple line of thought needed to be followed. What do I not feel when I'm on my phone, that if taken away, would eventually appear and I would have to deal with? The answer was obvious. See, I’ve noticed something weird. I’ve never felt bored when I’m on my phone. Not one time, and, interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter how long I’m on it either. Rather, if I’m on it for a long period of time, I start to feel stress, anxiety, and irritability, like side effects, but never boredom. I'm never motivated to stop. And then it hit me. I realized that, in a very real way, I'm medicating boredom from my life. I'm not dealing with its reality. I'm ignoring it by popping my hourly medication with a phone scroll without even being aware. But what if the symptom of boredom was actually cluing me into something important, something I needed to know?

That stormy, powerless night, I asked myself, "What is boredom?" Well, if you think about it, the interesting thing is that it’s a pre-loaded program in our brain’s operating system—much like hunger and our conscience, which are, respectively, for our physical and moral well-being. If either one of those pre-loaded programs were deleted, well, that wouldn't be good. So what about the other pre-loaded program: boredom? In the same way that hunger is unpleasant but, with responsible choices, leads to a healthy life, so to boredom is unpleasant. Could it also be leading me to something beneficial in some other aspect of my life?

4 times a year we would make the 14 hour drive to south Florida--our out-of-sync kid bladders making it 16. My dad--the pilot, drove down the never ending runway while my mom, the flight attendant, made sure her 3 child passengers were fed and cared for. My brother, sister, and I sat, watching the world fly by hour after ticking hour with a paper plate and a semi passing. A red one this time. Guard rails traced with eyes as 70mph revealed their slight imperfections--up and down and up and down like a wave. And there was a car in rapid pursuit behind us. Us siblings could feel the presence of the driver as our van seemed to slow to a crawl--he was breathing down our necks. We came up with all sorts of ways to speed the van and gain back some ground. Bursts of stories with Beanie Babies and Mario plushes throttled us faster. Mrs. Rayburn's Dumb Class was our favorite fuel that my brother created. I don't remember times of laughter quite as vividly as when Bowser, Mrs. Rayburn, openly scolded the children in shame while Lugi, the smallest of the plushes, somehow consistently came from behind in class competitions to win, always famously uttering his last line, "I win all the awards!" And where was the driver now? Out of site, it seemed. But we couldn't keep our guard down for too long.

When I thought about it, boredom's pursuit was the direct orchestrator of some of my most fond memories--bursts of creativity, imagination, and interactions that, otherwise, wouldn't have happened. Being the youngest, I might not have learned important lessons so quickly on what made my older, more interpersonally sophisticated siblings laugh and what didn't. The threat of boredom made me deeply engaged and pay attention to small nuances in social cues, and boredom's ever-present pursuit made them patient with me, made us all work as a team in our attempt to outwit him on the road. We didn't have phones, and there was no such thing as data. It was just our energetic synergy like an afterburner down the road as boredom fell behind. Each tearful laugh jet fuel as the van seemed to finally lift off the runway and time sped. Hours past like minutes. And we thrived together and arrived safely at Grandma's door and ran in and shut it, safe at last from boredom's stalking--until the drive home in 2 weeks time.

Thinking back, that long family car ride defined my life. It trained me in deep imagination, interpersonal communication, humor, patience, and focused attention, training I wouldn't have received in such overwhelming doses otherwise. And it was all thanks to our common enemy: boredom. If boredom's pressure, back then, accelerated me to a more ambitious, developmental place, could it be pressuring me in the same way now to act, to ambitiously run like my life depends on it, but it catches and swallows me instead without my knowing? I couldn't feel the urgent chase because of my medication, my smart phone, and so I didn't have the proper response, the fight or flight, to escape. Did I just complacently let it swarm unbeknownst to me and then lived with the results? A life overwhelmed with stress, anxiety, and irritability as my side effects? And I never felt boredom creeping up. I never knew it was there. After all, why run if you don't know you're being chased?

Boredom is the brain's built-in program to develop itself. It's the catalyst to make you get uncomfortable and write new neurological code. If you're bored, if you allow yourself to feel the consequences of your life choices, the unfulfillment, it's your brain urging you to learn, to grow, to do something worthwhile, to extend yourself. It's your brain encouraging you to push through the discomfort, and live a meaningful life. Boredom is the antidote to living in an uneventful, stagnant way. If something dangerous is pursing you, you don't think about the uncomfortableness of what you have to do to avoid the dangerous encounter. You just act. You just do. You do anything you have to, to run for your life. To make it out on the other side. But imagine being in hot pursuit, and having no idea, no clue that you're in a chase for your life. Do you think you'll have the motivation to do anything you have to do to get out of there? No matter how uncomfortable?

To know if you're medicating boredom, throughout the day when you have the urge to pull out your phone and autoscroll through your sequence of apps without a thought, stop, notice the thought, and wonder at it. Just observe it. Then, without engaging, just be present in the moment like described in the last episode, and see yourself. Where are you? What is your physical environment right now? Then, as anxiety inevitably builds and falls away as you don't feed the addiction, as boredom slowly takes its place, feel it. Appreciate its functionality, and its purpose in your life. It was designed for a reason, to push you to fulfilling activities. Then look around and inside yourself, what tools do you see that you could imaginatively use to combat boredom naturally. If you were a child, how would you see things? What opportunities are there? If you were completely open ended, if you weren't yourself with your self-programmed responses and behaviors to every little thing, where would your imagination take you to naturally be fulfilled?

I do this quite often when I'm in the airport. There's nothing quite as boring as waiting for a flight, and so I intentionally keep my phone in my pocket as an exercise in combating it naturally without medication. When I have the urge to pull out my phone, I just sit. I see myself sitting there. I look at my environment, my imaginative tools, the people sitting around me. Who are they? What is her story? I wonder where he's from? I see his socks as he's hunched on his phone, an unusual brand I'm actually familiar with because I have the same pair. He must be a cyclist too. A natural conversation is sparked. He puts his phone away. We talk. His name's Mike. Colorado. I've been to Boulder. Okay, he does ride bikes. Oh he's a racer? Like big events. Cat 1 competitor, even. Now, that's dedication to the craft. The conversation ends, and I get up to get some exercise before the long flight. Now, reminiscing about my days of racing. I remember how I went from being lapped to winning in one year's time. How did I do that? Oh, that could be a great podcast episode for season 2 of If Then, How to Master Anything Fast. The outline of the script practically wrote itself in my head with every step and escalator and down the ramp, and then I buckled in and the plane took off. And where was boredom now? It was left behind, no chance of catching up now as my fingers typed the script on the plane. Every stroke an acceleration. Every burst of inspiration a rocket launching, and I went faster and fasTER…

So I'll leave you with this: “Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” — Sherry Turkle

Thank you so much for listening to season 2 episode 4 of the If Then Podcast, and hey, if you enjoy the podcast and want to be entered to win AirPods Max with an If Then Podcast engraving at the end of season 2, give me a 5-star review, screenshot this podcast, and share it on your instagram tagging @ifthenpodcast in your post or story. We're at 83 shares currently, and if we get to 200 by the end of season, one of you will win AirPods Max. If not, I keep them--which I'm more than happy to do. But steal them from me, okay. Sharing this podcast and leaving reviews is the main way that other people like yourself discover it. It's the main way it grows. So thank you so much for reviewing and sharing. We’re almost at 565 reviews on Spotify and 260 on Apple Podcasts. And don’t forget, while we're building to that 200 mark for the AirPods Max giveaway, I’ve also been giving away 2 free 1 month Audible gift cards every week to two of you who share on Instagram. Last week, Victoria (@Victory_Klenke) and Andy (@ascoles3) won a free credit for an audiobook of their choice. If you shared the last episode, you can also share this one too to be entered to win again. Thank you so much for listening, my name is Jordan Taylor, and what if/then will you write today?