Here’s how boredom can spark your best creative ideas

Four lessons on boredom and creativity from Manoush Zomorodi’s Bored and Brilliant

In early 2020, I read an article about the creative benefits of letting yourself become bored. A couple of months later, the world was locked into their apartments, separated from friends and family, and deprived of all access to public spaces.

It was the annus horribilis for all of us, but as days stretched into weeks and weekdays blurred into weekends, I began to find solace in my idle time. A chance recommendation from an avid reader I know pushed me towards Bored and Brilliant, by Manoush Zomorodi, and I bought it the same day.

Check it out on Amazon: Bored and Brilliant — How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, by Manoush Zomorodi

When Zomorodi became a new mother, she spent hours pushing a colicky baby around in a pram — the only way to get him to sleep. If the motion of the pram stopped, he woke up. So Manoush pushed her baby around for miles every day, spending hours with only her own thoughts.

After more than a decade of working in broadcast journalism, this was a dramatic change of pace. At first, she was frustrated and bored, but a few weeks in, she began to notice a shift in the way her mind worked. For the rest of this book, Manoush Zomorodi examines the idea of boredom as a creative tool.

Let me start by saying that I am not a fan of non-fiction, and even though the book was highly recommended by a friend, I wasn’t sure. I love everything about fiction and believe it is the greatest form of art in the world.

However, I’d observed that the hours of repetitive tasks like sanitizing groceries or cleaning the house had triggered some pretty cool creative ideas for me. This book seemed to be saying the same thing, so I ordered it right away.

The book has an interesting structure. Manoush Zomorodi created the seven-step Bored and Brilliant program, in which participants volunteered to spend less time on their devices and more time working on their capacity for boredom. While the author discusses the findings at each step, she also offers expert quotes and findings from various studies around the world.

If you’re considering participating in the experiment, check out these short Bored and Brilliant podcasts.

Lesson 1: When you’re not doing anything, your brain is hard at work.

If you’re daydreaming while making your bed, your brain goes into default mode. This means it begins to process information, solve problems, and connect the dots of your life.

Free mental time allows your brain to clear out clutter, after which your brain circuitry begins to make connections between things you’ve seen, felt, heard and read, and to wander to possibilities, which is, after all, exactly what creativity is.

This is what Julian Shapiro talks about in his viral post, The Creativity Faucet.

Lesson 2: Boredom pushes you to create your own sources of entertainment.

When you’re spacing out during a monotonous task, your brain is not receiving the stream of stimulus you would usually get from your phone, from the world around you, or from social media. This is when it turns inward, creating its own thoughts for entertainment.

This is different from the time you have when you’re stuck in traffic or waiting in the dentist’s office for an appointment. During these times, you’re thinking ahead to the next task, worrying about your root canal treatment, or planning the rest of your day’s schedule. Your brain is behaving differently than it would if you were absent-mindedly weeding the garden, staring out of the window on a long plane ride, or driving down an empty highway with no traffic.

In that moment, suspended in time, your brain is primed for what we call brainwaves or epiphanies. When people ask writers, “Where do your ideas come from?”, we never know. But if I were to really think about it, the ideas probably came during a long shower or while I was clearing out my closet.

Lesson 3: There is a ‘right way’ and a ‘wrong way’ to do boredom.

Boredom or mind-wandering can be bad for you if it takes you to the wrong place. If your mind-wandering leads you to dwell on negativity, to feel anger or guilt, or to obsess about everything that is wrong in your life — that can be bad for your mental health.

When you use your mind-wandering to plan future goals, dream about your success or joy, and devise strategize new ways to achieve what you want, it can be a huge benefit. This is when you are giving cues to your brain, telling it what you want and preparing it to create ways to reach your goals.

Lesson 4: Valuing boredom and free creative time is not the same as being anti-technology or anti-screen.

Our devices are not the only things standing in the way of us being more creative. In fact, our devices widen our horizons by giving us access to more diverse sources of information, allow us to build our own communities that nurture creativity and inspiration, and help us find bigger audiences for our work that we would ever have thought possible.

So if we can’t blame our devices for our lack of free time, let’s examine our habits more closely. We schedule our days down to the hour, applaud employees for multi-tasking, and tell children not to daydream. We fill our weekends with activities — brunches or outings with friends, shopping or errands — and do everything we can to avoid boredom. Is all that activity getting in the way of creativity?

Next time you have a few moments to spare, don’t whip out your phones to scroll through social media or check emails — try pondering your big dreams or creative goals instead.

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