Dealing With Boredom

Boredom is an interesting emotion, I think the general populus have never fully learnt how to deal with their boredom. Especially when survival is now very easy, people have no choice but to now confront themselves and their thoughts when they are alone.

What Is Boredom?

The easiest way to spot boredom is to realize when you are trying to distract yourselves. Everytime you aimlessly scroll through short-form content or open a random video on YouTube.

The reason I say this is because for a long time, I confused boredom with depression and pain. I didn't accurately labelled the emotion as boredom, and I tried to fix myself with depression alleviation techniques (which didn't work) because I wasn't depressed, I was bored.

Boredom is when you are sitting there without a purpose, mission or meaning. So when we become purposeless, we detach from life itself. We stop becoming engaged in the activity we are doing (with life) and we enter into a lucid state of mind.

The Lucid State Of Mind

The reason why you're so afraid of boredom is because you are afraid of the lucid state of mind. When you enter this state, your mind will wander and try to seek that purpose, mission and meaning.

But often, a lot of the times it will wander towards unresolved and disturbing thoughts and emotions. Most people do not want to face this internal battle they have been putting off and the knee jerk reaction is to find a distraction.

But I would like to suggest to you that boredom is actually a great tool for self -improvement. Boredom is the most likely time where you will generate insights, because the subconscious mind is hardest at work during times of boredom.

Boredom As A 3rd Order Consequence

Boredom is not a primary symptom, its a secondary one caused by something else. Often boredom can only fill your space when you are taking a break from your purpose, mission and meaning.

So when you disengage (usually caused by pain) you go away and take a break. Then, you become bored. It is pain, then avoidance, boredom then distraction. You must catch yourself at any one of these 4 steps.

I'm not telling you to suffer through the pain, sometimes we hit a roadblock and we just need some time to generate insights and relax. Problem being, when we allow ourselves to reach distraction, no insight generation is possible.

It is not the boredom which is bad, it is the distraction which is the problem. What you need to do is to replace the connection between boredom and distraction. Soon I will suggest you ways to change distraction into insight.

The Deadly Cycle

The deadly cycle becomes this, you encounter a problem which leads to pain. Once you reach your pain treshholds you will disengage from the activity which leads you into boredom. Once you're in boredom, you find distractions.

Because you have went into distractions to satiate your boredom, no insight was possible (generated) to fix the problem that was causing you the pain in the first place. So you go back to the activity a few hours later, just to do it all over again!

Boredom serves as this intermediary for the mind to create solutions and ideas to potentially fix the problem that was causing the pain. What I suggest to you is that you turn boredom into a machine to generate jaw-dropping insights that will change your life.

Journalling

By far the easiest way to turn boredom into an insight machine is to have a small notebook you can have in your fannypack. Usually thoughts comes in sections with clear ideas and thoughts.

What you do is just give that a title and write whatever it is down. Use boredom as a means of contemplation. Now the thoughts you would be generating probably wont be very helpful, you would write stupid things like "I feel depressed but I don't know why."

Thats not the purpose. The purpose of journalling your boredom is to create some distance between your thoughts so that you can float up above them to analyze them from a 3rd person perspective.

From all the noise you written down, a pattern will emerge and an insight will come resulting in one big conclusion and the "aha" moment. You must not focus too much on the content of what you have wrote, but the feeling and "gist" of what you are journalling.

Let Boredom Roam

The other best option if you don't want to do so much work writing everything down is to just sit there in boredom and let your mind roam. This is the more emotionally challenging option as the mind can roam really fast.

The key technique here is to let go of whatever it is that boredom has shown you. Perhaps it was some unresolved trauma, well, let that go and allow your mind to roam further.

You must think of boredom like a crazy kid in the library, he just goes to the bookshelves at random and pull out random books. His attention span is short, so he throws the book everywhere without putting it back properly before moving on to the next one.

You want to allow your mind to keep roaming until you find the insight you want to solve your problem. For a simple and easy to solve solution, roaming might only take 5 minutes for you to jump back up again and get back to whatever you were doing.

But if it is a difficult solution, you might be roaming for hours. This type of roaming is when it can become really difficult. Not every thought will be an insight, in fact, a majority of them would be trash.

A Random Search

You will often hear that when people really hit a massive dead end, they will just pull out some random book of their shelves and get some inspiration there. Bascially you're introducing some chaos into a static enviorement to make it dynamic again.

I recommend you fall back to this method if letting your boredom roam is going to make you go insane. Sometimes the subconscious just don't have enough information laying around in the back of your mind to make the necessary connections for an insight.

Just go read some random article, learn something random, revise old notes. You do run the risk of doomscrolling and getting into distractions when we get into this territory, so make sure that you are going into it with a clear focus and intention in mind.

Flow State

Some people just drive or walk around the city with some music on to utilize their boredom. By far, this is the best and most "lazy" way to generate insights. Problem with this is that it takes the longest as well.

The drawback to this is that you cannot immediately take action upon your insight when it does come. You might need to "rush back home" or quickly write it down. Sometimes thats not possible when you are preoccupied with an intermediary activity.

I recommend doing activities that trigger flow state only when you are depressed or its in the middle of night. It oddly have a mysterious way that "uplifts" your mood and you can write down your insights and sleep on it for tomorrow.

No Mind

An interesting feature of enlightenment is that the enlightened person can sit in the present moment for a majority of his day. This means no thoughts whatsoever! Boredom is not possible during heightened periods of awareness.

Boredom is still ultimately seeking, a seeking for purpose and meaning. With enlightenement, you have no attachment and no seeking. So you can cut the whole tree down and circumvent the entire problem alltogether.

Realistically for us materialistic paridigmed individuals stuck in survival, this will not be possible nor accessible yet. But if you did transcend all survival pressures, maybe you figured women, money and life out in your 20s and 30s, then this can become a serious suggestion you can strive for.

Conclusion

Hope you found this explanation of boredom to be insightful. I certainly did. In fact I was shocked by my own insights. I was struggling with this problem for a really long time.

That's it for me. Best of luck. Please check out my other posts and practice everything holistically. Send me an email if you want a specific topic written. You can see "coaching" to see if I have room to onboard new students.

Cheers,
FriendlyWrenChilling.