Deliberate Boredom

Growing up in Indiana presented an amazing opportunity to be bored. It was a simple choice: entertain yourself or wallow in mediocrity.

After exhausting the obvious activities like jumping neighborhood kids on my BMX bike and tipping cows, I found my way into becoming a SYSOP of a midnight dial-up BBS, starting a little computer consulting side hustle, winning the state science fair, and the left seat of a Piper Archer.

I’ve known for some time that boredom breeds creativity but I never really knew what to do with the realization.

That changed last week when my amazing meditation guru friend Jennifer Smorgon connected some dots for me.

“Meditation,” she said, “is just deliberate boredom. You strip away stimulus so your brain can finally do its own work.”

She went on to explain that this can only happen when you are awake and alert, hence sitting up during meditation. Anthropologically, the body stays alert while the mind is free to wander.

We’ve lost that aimless wandering that comes from boredom. We’ve optimized every idle moment with feeds, alerts, podcasts, to-do lists, reminders. The constant din has suffocated our dream time.

Ideas don’t emerge on command, they surface when we give them breathing room to germinate, assimilate, and present themselves: First thing in the morning, during a monotonous cardio workout, staring out the car window.

Jen explained that meditation works because it recreates what boredom once gave us for free: a pause long enough for the brain to stop reacting and start synthesizing.

Our most productive time can come from our least productive moments.

Here’s a little experiment to try. Go into a room without distractions and try sitting quietly for 15 minutes. Compare how you feel afterwards to any other 15 minutes that day.

Let me know your results!

Embrace the rare, uncomfortable minutes where nothing happens… until something does.