Why Boredom Is Good For You

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. I put out episodes four times a week. And if you're out there and you love this podcast and you want to get inspirational text messages directly to your cell phone and you live in the US or Canada, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 1-512-580-9305. Today, I'm going to be talking about disconnecting. I'm going to talk about mindfulness. I'm going to talk about the benefits of being bored and doing absolutely nothing.

0:42And I want you to understand, I get it. And if I were to hear me say this episode, when I was 25 years old, 13 years ago, I would have been like, this is stupid. I have work to do. I have a business to build. I'm so busy. Why would I ever do nothing? But you have to understand that you need to disconnect. In our fast-paced world, boredom, doing nothing has become something that people mostly try to instinctively avoid. And we have endless ways of keeping ourselves busy. Like I just think about our ancestors 500 years ago, a thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years ago. They, at some point in the day, probably sat down and just stared off into the distance for a few minutes.

1:29But for us, we have so many ways. We have endless ways to keep ourselves busy. We don't give ourselves a chance to be bored anymore. We've got social media. We've got TV shows that we can binge. We've got Netflix. We've got HBO Max. We've got every possible thing. Paramount. Now there's this thing that's called Peacock. And there's all these different things that you can subscribe to. There's all of these TV shows. There are always new ones coming out and new movies coming out. And there's text messages from people. And there's email. And on top of that, there's all of the work that you have to do on a daily basis.

2:00Today, I'm going to talk to you and I'm going to prove to you how boredom is good for you. It's good for your mind. It's good and healthy for your body and your overall mental health and well-being. And so when you look at boredom, the first thing I always say is like, what is this thing? Because when I say, what does being bored mean to you? And I did it to every person listening to this episode, there's gonna be hundreds of thousands of different answers. But boredom, when you look at it, is typically seen as just a negative emotional state that we have when we have nothing to do. So we feel, when we have nothing to do, restless.

2:35We feel restless in some sort of way. And at its core, boredom happens when the brain that we have craves stimulation but doesn't have any. So take that just so you can understand it. Craves stimulation. Basically, your brain is having withdrawals from constantly being stimulated all the time, all day long. Let's be fully honest. Let's just put it all on the table together. We are addicted to being constantly stimulated and having something to do. We are addicts. Everybody is in this day and age. And so this is showing us that we have become reliant on external stimuli to regulate our emotions and our thoughts.

3:19Now, what do I mean by when I say regulate our emotions and thoughts? A lot of times, like for instance, you ever had somebody that you know, someone that you love, they have someone that's close to them pass away, and then they say to themselves, well, I just need to keep myself busy so I don't think about it. What they're saying is, I need to do something because I can't personally feel all of these emotions. I don't like feeling these emotions. I don't like feeling this discomfort. So I need to keep myself busy with external stimuli to help regulate my emotions and my thoughts versus actually feel it.

3:50And so boredom, often what it does is it triggers this sense of discomfort inside of us because it forces us to confront our inner world, which we're not really taught. Like if you're listening to this podcast, you get it. You get the inner world is the thing that we need to master, but we're not really taught as children, growing up into adults, college, any of those things. We're not taught how to deal with our inner world, how to deal with our thoughts, our anxieties, our emotions, our anything that's going on inside. And so because of that, and we don't know what to do with all of these thoughts and these feelings, we try to distract ourselves, to not feel it, to not think about it.

4:30And when we remove all of this external distractions that we have, what we're left alone with is just what's going on in our heads. And I know you guys, I know from all of the different courses that I have and people I talk to, it can be chaotic in your head and it can feel really overwhelming and because of that most people are trying to run from their thoughts most people will try to do almost anything to keep themselves busy so that they don't think what they're thinking they don't feel what they're feeling because we were never taught how to do it and this is one of the reasons why it's so hard for people to meditate or be still is because we have accidentally unconsciously trained ourselves to always be busy.

5:16And so our brains are constantly stimulated throughout the day. From the moment that we wake up, we check our phones to the time that we fall asleep, we have work, we have tax messages, all those things, we're constantly bombarded. And that's the problem is our brains were not designed to be stimulated all of the time. If you think back even like just a hundred years, how different our grandparents' lives were and how much stimuli they had compared to us, our brains have not adapted. But we have all this stuff that's in our external world. And so overstimulation to our brain, to our body, can lead us to feeling anxious, to lead us to feeling stressed, mental fatigue.

5:56And when we're constantly bombarded with all the stimuli, our minds don't have a chance to rest and process all of the information that's coming in. And so over time, what do we feel? We feel burnt out. We feel anxious. We feel disconnected. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And so I want to take boredom and I want to change it for you. Okay. I want to change the way that you think about it. What if you stopped saying I'm bored and you just started saying I'm relaxing. Boredom represents a withdrawal from this state of overstimulation. I'm going to remove myself from being overstimulated.

6:32I'm going to give myself a chance to relax. It's an opportunity for our brains to slow down, to process information and to rest. And once again, like I said at the very beginning of this episode, when I was 25, I would have been like, dude, I don't have time for rest. Rest is not productive. But I'm going to show you through studies that we have today, all this stuff, why this is actually really important for you and how you'll be more productive by being bored and by resting. So by actually deliberately creating moments of boredom in our daily lives, we give our minds time to decompress, to reflect, and to store.

7:05So we might think of boredom as like, instead of this, not this empty, useless state where we're not being productive, but like a crucial opportunity for our mental recovery. And so let's talk about embracing this boredom. With all of this productivity we have, all the things we have to do, we have to be busy, we have to hustle, hustle culture. Yeah, guys, get it done. Don't sleep. Just work all day long. It seems counterintuitive to suggest that, hey, maybe we should intentionally embrace boredom. But there's several reasons why you'd want to do so. So the first reason why, and I have studies to actually talk about this, is that boredom actually creates and fosters more creativity.

7:44So one of the most surprising benefits of doing nothing and to be bored is to actually be able to spark creativity. When our brains aren't constantly occupied by external distractions and they're just free to wander and explore new ideas, what happens is we get into a state where we become more productive. And research has shown over and over again that when we allow ourselves to become bored, we allow our brains to enter a state of rest, it leads to unexpected bursts of creativity. There was a study that was done in 2014. It was called Boredom and Creative Problem Solving. then in the study what they did was they had participants were asked to engage in a boring task and one of those tasks like for instance was copying numbers from a telephone book you guys remember the telephone books so they used to they used to look at the telephone books and they would just sit there and they would just copy the numbers and in copying the numbers and doing a very mundane task their brain started to wander and so what happened was they would then have a group of people who would go and they would do this mundane tasks these bored boredom tasks and then they had a group that did nothing.

8:48And then both of those groups would go into and they would compete in a creative problem solving task. And the control group, which literally did nothing, you know, they didn't do anything, was compared to the experimental group, which was the group that went out and actually just did some boredom stuff, did boring tasks. And the results came back and they showed that the people who went into doing something boring before trying to come up with creative ideas outperform the control group with creative tasks. And so it shows us that boredom enhances creative thinking. So if you want to be creative, if you're a musician, if you're a songwriter, if you're a painter, hell, if you're a business owner and you need to be creative, you need to give yourself some time to rest and just allow your mind to wander, to come up with new ideas.

9:34And there was another study that was done in 2012, and it was called Mind Wandering facilitates creative incubation. Say that 10 times fast. Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. And in this study, participants were given a task that required creative solutions, and then they were divided into two different groups. One of the groups engaged in boring, undemanding activities, like we just said. And the study found that the participants who engage in mind wandering and did something boring, and whatever that task was, were more likely to come up with creative solutions to the problems that were given to them than the other group who did not engage in mind wandering.

10:14And so basically it's just showing us that boredom encourages creativity. And so if you can just give yourself time throughout the day just to be bored and tell yourself, hey, I'm just allowing myself to be creative. I don't have to be go, go, go all the time. It can lead to problem solving breakthroughs and creative insights. Would you say that's productive? I would say that's productive as a business owner. That's very productive to come up with creative ways to overcome problems in my business? Yeah, but I can't do that if I'm go, go, go all the time. So another thing that's really good about boredom is it reduces your stress and your anxiety.

10:48So this constant stimulation that we have from screens, from devices, all of that has been linked to increased stress and anxiety levels. If you look from the moment, but basically the iPhone was created and social media started exploding, stress and anxiety levels have gone up and up and up and up and up pretty much every single year. Boredom gives your mind the moment to just take a freaking break already. And it allows your nervous system to shift. And it shifts from fight or flight mode to rest and restore mode, which is essential for you stopping the stress and anxiety that you feel and promoting relaxation in yourself and in your nervous system.

11:28Another thing that boredom does is it improves your focus and your mental clarity. Same thing that just as our bodies need rest after being pushed, after having a really good run or a workout, our minds need moments of rest to maintain clarity and to maintain focus. And so boredom actually gives you the mental reset that allows you to just concentrate more when we return to our tasks. And so we might think, well, you know, boredom is not really productive, but if you give yourself a five minute reset and then go back to working, it has been proven to show that you are more productive and you are better able to focus because of that moment of reset.

12:05And so studies have shown that people who regularly take breaks and most of those breaks doing nothing, closing their eyes, doing breathing, tend to have better focus and improve cognitive performance than those who do not. So that seems pretty damn productive to me. It seems counterintuitive, but it also seems productive to me. And so by being bored, we just create a space for our minds just to kind of reset, restore, refresh themselves, and then leading to greater productivity in the long run. And so how do we do this? How do we do it? Like it sounds good, but how do we actually be bored and be okay with being bored when we're constantly stimulated?

12:41You know, with all of the distractions that we have everywhere, why don't we try to embrace this boredom? And really what it comes down to is it requires us to be intentional. I talk about intentional all the time in these podcast episodes. The first thing I recommend that everybody does is disconnect from everything multiple times per day. Make it a habit to disconnect from all external stimuli, your phones, your computers, talking to people, even going for a walk with your headphones and listening to a podcast. Just go for a walk and do nothing, have nothing in your ears, or just don't even go for a walk.

13:18Just sit on a park bench and just stare multiple times throughout the day. And here's a recommendation, just start small. If you're already struggling with taking breaks, taking multiple hour-long breaks throughout the day is not going to happen. So I would recommend just five minutes a day, multiple times a day. And what I would recommend that you do, if you can, just go on a park bench and then just sit there and breathe in and breathe out. And I'm going to tell you how to in just a minute. But if you're in an office and you can close your door, I recommend you close your eyes and you set your timer for five minutes.

13:49And all you do, I recommend you do it after this podcast episode. You breathe in for four seconds, you breathe out for eight seconds, breathe in for four seconds, Breathe out for eight seconds. And once the alarm goes off, just go back to whatever it is that you were doing. During this break, your brain will store all of the information that it needs to from earlier in the day and allow itself to reset. And that's how your brain actually stores your information. And so your brain stores information when you go to bed, and that's when it stores the most information. But if you give yourself a five-minute reset, your brain will actually start to store information, open up space for you to, you know, actually cognitively be able to process things.

14:30So it's kind of like, it takes the, it's kind of like the way I like think about it is this, it's kind of like closing out all the tabs on your computer. Like I know if I went to most of your guys' computers, there's like 10 or 20 tabs open. And so your computer runs slower because of that. When you do this five minute reset, it's like closing all of them out and then going back into it. It just allows your brain, just like it allows your computer to run faster. Okay. The next thing I want you to do is I really want you to get on board with this mental reframing. And this is something I've been doing for about, I heard about six months ago on something that I was listening to.

15:02And somebody said, stop saying boredom and start saying, instead of saying I'm bored, start saying I'm relaxing and see how it just changes your mindset around what you're doing. When you're bored, we have this feeling of like, oh, I'm supposed to be restless. I'm supposed to doing something. But if we say I'm intentionally relaxing for five minutes, it's like, okay, I can see how I need some rest. I can see how I need some rejuvenation. And so what I would do is just reframe boredom into, instead of this feeling of restlessness to like this feeling of like, I'm relaxing. You know, I'm just relaxing right now.

15:34I'm giving my mind some time to reset. That's the next tip I'll give you. Another really big tip that will help you with your stress, with your anxiety, with your feeling of restlessness. And to make it easier to relax or to be bored is to, I say it quite often recently, is to reduce your caffeine intake. A lot of you guys that are out there love caffeine. I love caffeine as well. But I want you to understand if you feel stressed or anxious or, you know, restless throughout the entire day, one of the things that's definitely adding to it is caffeine. So I'm not saying you have to get rid of your caffeine.

16:11Oh no. I know all of you guys would not be able, myself included, would not be able to work in this world without caffeine. But instead of like two cups a day, instead of three cups a day, go to two cups a day. Instead of two cups a day, go to one cup a day. Instead of one cup a day, go to half a cup a day. Just take it down a little bit and see if that allows you to just, just chill a little bit more. Stop being so stressed, so anxious and allow yourself to just kind of sit in the moment and relax a little bit more. And the last thing that I recommend. And I, it's, it, it's kind of crazy how often I meet people on the streets who come up to me and they say they love the podcast.

16:45And, um, and I love when people do that, but I'll get in a conversation sometimes with people. And one of the things that I find out is even though I talk about meditation all of the time, very rarely are people actually doing it. And I think that, that the reason why is because they're not seeing it as relaxation. They're not seeing it as I'm trying to watch my mind. They see it as like this stressful thing to do. I can't get my mind to stop. You're not supposed to get it to stop. I promise you that. You're not supposed to stop your mind. You're supposed to observe your mind. And so I want you to just try to get in this practice of meditating more.

17:21You know, I had discovered meditation in 2009 and I did it a little bit and then I fell off of it. And I did a little bit and I fell off of it. And then I started meditating and really getting hardcore in about 2007. And it's something that I don't go a day without. And I have just found that it allows me to relax a little bit more. Now I do meditation and breath work. I talk about that all the time. I do breath work. I go onto YouTube. I have audios that I listen to. And it's just a mental reset. And my brain sometimes will go all over the place and sometimes it won't. But it's not about controlling your mind.

17:53It's about giving your mind some time to just relax. And you can just observe your thoughts, see what's going on in your head and then just pay attention to it. Don't judge it. Don't guilt yourself. Don't shame yourself. Don't say that you shouldn't have any thoughts. What I want you to do is just try to find some more time every single morning to just meditate. Five minutes, 10 minutes. I'd recommend starting at five minutes. You know, then go to five from five to 10 to 20 to 30 minutes. And in that time, just give yourself space to relax instead of immediately going to working and looking at your phone and taking care of the kids and all that stuff, wake up early enough to have some time for you to go, instead of being all external, to go internal, to see what's going on on the inside so that you can start to work on what's going on the inside a little bit more.

18:40Because the external will never change the internal. The only way to change the external is to change your internal and bring it out to the external world. And so boredom is not something to be avoided. It's something to be embraced. In our world that is just constant stimuli, constant distractions, allowing yourself to be bored is self-care. So intentionally disconnect from all the stimuli, create moments of stillness. It will allow you to be a better person, be a better business owner, be a better father, mother, son, person, human that exists, and you will be better around other people and you'll bring that out to the rest of the world.

19:17So be bored. That's all I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram, tag me in it rob dial jr r-o-b-d-i-a-l-j-r also if you love this podcast you'll definitely love this thing that we have called mindset mentor plus it's like the podcast on steroids the way it works is every single episode that comes out of this podcast mindset mentor plus subscribers get a whole lot more they get detailed worksheets that go deeper into every single episode they go deeper into every single topic there's journaling questions there's assignments so that you can take every single episode of this podcast and you can actually put it into your life and make real and lasting changes.

19:53So if you want to learn more about it, just go to mindsetmentor.com. Once again, mindsetmentor.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.