You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You need to be bored.

You will have less meaning

and you will be more depressed

if you never are bored.

I mean, it couldn't be clearer.

Let me give you the good side of boredom in general.

Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively,

which switches over our thinking system to use a part of our brain that's

called the default mode network.

That sounds fancy.

It's really not.

The default mode network is a bunch of structures in your brain

that switch on when you don't have anything else to think about.

So you forgot your phone and you're sitting at a light, for example.

That's when your default mode network goes on.

We don't like it.

My colleague in the psychology department here at Harvard, Dan Gilbert,

he did experiments where people had to sit in a room for 15 minutes

with instructions to do absolutely nothing,

and there was nothing in the room to do,

except there was a button in front of them that they could push.

And if they did, they gave themselves a painful electric shock.

Sit there bored, or get a shock.

A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing.

We don't like boredom.

Boredom is boredom is terrible.

Why is boredom so bad?

Well, because the default mode network makes us think about things

that might be kind of uncomfortable.

When you think about nothing while your mind wanders and thinks about, for example,

big questions of meaning in your life.

What does my life mean?

You go to uncomfortable existential questions when you're bored.

That turns out to be incredibly important, incredibly good.

One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression

and anxiety in our society today is

because people actually don't know the meaning of their lives,

much less so in previous generations.

Tons of data show this, and furthermore, we're not even looking.

Why not?

I'll tell you why not.

We figured out a way to eliminate boredom.

We've been able, almost completely,

to shut off the default mode network in our brains.

How?

The answer is that thing in your pocket with the screen,

which you take out even

when you're standing on the street corner waiting for the light to change,

is like, I might have to wait here for 15 seconds.

What are you doing?

You're actually trying to not be bored

because the default mode network is mildly uncomfortable,

because it sends you to the types of questions

that you can't get your mind around.

You can't get your arms around.

Well, that's a big problem.

That's a doom loop of meaning.

If every time you're slightly bored pull out your phone,

it's going to get harder and harder for you to find meaning,

and that's the recipe for depression and anxiety and a sense of hollowness, which,

by the way, are all through the roof.

I get it.

You don't want to be bored.

You need to be bored.

Be bored more.

Tomorrow, when you go to the gym in the morning after you wake up,

don't take your phone.

Can you handle it?

Not listening to a podcast while you're working out.

Just being in your head.

I promise you, you'll have your most interesting ideas

while you're working out without devices.

It's probably been a long time since you've done that.

Commute with nothing, not even the radio.

Can you do that?

Start getting better at periods that are 15 minutes and longer of boredom,

and watch your life change.

Number one, you'll be less bored with ordinary things in your life.

If you get better at the skill of boredom,

you'll be less bored with your job.

You'll be less bored with your relationships.

You'll be less bored with the things that are going on around you.

But more importantly, you'll start digging into the biggest questions in your life, purpose,

meaning, coherence, significance.

And who knows?

You might just get happier.

People ask me all the time, is the doctor taking his own prescriptions?

And the answer is, yes.

Yes, I am.

I'm prone to the same pathologies

as anybody else because I have the same brain chemistry

as everybody else.

So what do I do to fight that?

And the answer is, well, I do a number of things.

I have a no device policy after 7:00 in the afternoon.

I don't sleep with my phone.

We don't have devices when we have meals in my family.

Because we're there for each other.

We're not there for people who aren't there.

Three, I have regular social media

and screen cleanses where I don't use my device for longer periods of time.

First, it's like children screaming in my head because that's how dopamine is saying,

get the phone, get the phone.

That's addiction.

But it calms down and I feel better.

And I feel sort of blessed by the end.

And I pick the phone up by the end

because I have to check my emails.

And I have to be a normal, functioning, connected person in the world.

But it does remind me

that my life doesn't have to revolve around these devices.

These protocols are really, really helpful and I recommend them to anybody and everybody.

Don't sleep with your phone.

No phones during meals.

Regular social media fasts.

You'll get better.

People worry that if they do these things, they're going to miss something.

There are ways that you can remedy that.

One of the things

that you can do is you can have your phone on.

You're just not looking at it,

and there's only one

or two numbers that can reach you in case of emergencies.

Phones can do that by the way.

If you don't have to do that, ask your kid.

But don't use emergencies in as an excuse.

Here's something that's not an emergency.

What's going on Twitter.

That's not an emergency answer nothing.

It doesn't matter.

The news can wait.

Seriously your grandparents didn't what was going on every single second in Washington, DC.

You're killing yourself with this stuff.

Are you kidding me?

It's bad for you.

So let me say it straight to my kids.

Put down your phones.

You need more meaning in your life.

And so do I.