The Art of Being Bored..!

Something I remember with a smile is walking into my children’s rooms years ago, and seeing one or the other staring out of the window listlessly, “What’s up?” I would ask, and knew what they were going to say, as they yawned in my direction and said, “Daddy, I’m bored!”
Most often I would nod and tiptoe out of their room, leaving them to solve the state they were in, and it was just a matter of time, before, whoever I’d walked into in their state of boredom, would breeze into my room with, “Dad, I’ve got an idea!”
A bored mind looks for stimulation. Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. says, that ‘At its core, boredom is a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied” and Mann continues by saying, “If we can’t find that, our mind will create it.”
When my daughter rushed into my room, saying, she had an idea, that idea, whatever it was, came out of boredom. I don’t quite remember very many of the ideas that came out of their boredom, but as I saw one of them become a TV anchor with Bloomberg and maybe it’s her birthday today, that brings back such memories, and the other a very successful clinical psychologist, I can well imagine the periods of ‘bored’ time which inspired and ignited their imaginations and spurred them on.
Boredom can enable creativity and problem-solving by allowing the mind to wander and daydream! “There’s no other way of getting that stimulation, so you have to go into your head,” Mann says. “You may be surprised by what you come up with when you do.”
Apart from ideas and creativity, boredom is good for your mental health. Daydreaming can be “quite a respite” and provide a brief escape from day-to-day life,” says Mann. Studies have shown, for example, that modern tools including emails, social media, and oh yes, your WhatsApp can be a strain on your mental health.
But what do we do when we are bored? We rush to pick up our phone, to glance and spend time in the very things that cause a strain on our mental health! Because every time we get our phone out, we’re not allowing our minds to go on their own journeys and solve our boredom problems!
So next time you find yourself bored, either during a boring lecture, standing in line at a grocery store, or killing time in a waiting room, resist the urge to look at your phone. Instead get bored, look out of the window, or at the ceiling and let your mind loaf around, allow your imagination to start working, and use these lovely God given moments of boredom well.
And believe you me you’ll be astonished to find very soon, how your brain, mood and work performance improve!
The art of being bored is to allow boredom to take over..!

******************************************

IF YOU WANT TO RECEIVE BOB’S BANTER EVERYDAY, PLEASE SEND YOUR NAME AND WHATSAPP PHONE NO TO [email protected]

 

******************************************

6 thoughts on “The Art of Being Bored..!”

  1. Bob, depends what kind of ideas come out of our boredom. Especially with kids, we can only hope for the best! ??

  2. In management parlance what they call “360 degree thinking” appears to be the same as the boredom you are referring to.
    What a respectable way of defining boredom!!!

    1. It will help us to bring some more good thinkers to come up in life. Many more newton, Edison and Kalam like brains will be discovered by this way of boredom.

  3. Great idea Bob! Thank you, and not forgetting to wish your daughter a fabulous birthday! May she be a channel of blessing and joy to you as well as her near and dear ones. God bless you and her too.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *