On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Can’t Sit Still Without Distraction? (Train Your Brain With THIS Daily Practice & Embrace Boredom!)

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Today, Jay explores a truth most of us instinctively avoid: we no longer know how to be alone with our own thoughts. He reflects on how our constant need for stimulation, scrolling, watching, filling every empty second, is not just a habit, but a quiet escape from ourselves. What we often dismiss as “boredom” isn’t something to fix, but a signal, quietly guiding us toward clarity, deeper self-awareness, and inner peace. Jay brings in modern neuroscience to explain why boredom is not empty at all. He introduces the concept of the Default Mode Network, the part of the brain responsible for self-reflection, creativity, empathy, and imagining the future. This system only activates when we stop consuming and allow our minds to wander. In a world engineered to keep us constantly distracted, we are gradually disconnecting from the very mechanism that helps us understand ourselves and generate our best ideas. In this episode you'll learn: How to Stop Reaching for Your Phone Automatically How to Turn Idle Moments Into Creative Breakthroughs How to Activate Your Brain’s Default Mode Network How to Build a Daily Practice of Doing Nothing How to Break the Habit of Constant Stimulation How to Create Space for Deep Thinking and Clarity You don’t need to fill every moment to live a meaningful life. The pauses you’ve been avoiding may be the very spaces where clarity, peace, and creativity begin. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty JAY’S DAILY WISDOM DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX Join 900,000+ readers discovering how small daily shifts create big life change with my free newsletter. Subscribe here: https://news.jayshetty.me/subscribe  Check out our Apple subscription to unlock bonus content of On Purpose! https://lnk.to/JayShettyPodcast  What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 00:33 Can Anybody Just Sit Still Anymore? 03:01 What is the Scientific Definition of Boredom? 12:33 The Persuasion Machines 16:09 The Ancient Art of Doing Nothing 18:07 #1: Understand What You're Doing 18:49 #2: The 3-Minute Hold 20:13 #3: Do One Boring Thing 21:14 #4: Get Bored on PurposeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Hart podcast guaranteed human. I'm Lori Siegel, a long-time tech journalist. And consider my new podcast, mostly human, your bridge to the future. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur, anyone can build an app. And it's very empowering. Each week, I'll speak to the people building that future. And we're going to break down what all of this innovation actually means for you. What I come to realize is that when people think that they're dating these AI companion,

they're actually dating the companies that create this. We're experiencing one of the greatest tech accelerations in human history. And let's be honest, that can be messy. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. But it's my belief that we should all benefit from this moment. Mostly human will show you how. My goal is to give you the playbook, so you can benefit. The reason I say agency is because if we can give power,

back to people, then I think that's probably the best thing we can do for your mental health. Listen to Mostly Human on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Stephanie Young, host of Love Trapped, the story of former Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd, caught in a pregnancy hoax. You doctored this particular test twice in So-ins, correct? I doctored the test ones. As the season continues, Laura, Scottsdale Police. Laura Owens finally faces consequences.

Breaking news at Ameriopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. Open your free IHeart Radio app, search Love Trapped, and start listening now. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side. a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.

Listen to 2%. That's TWO% on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Jay and today I want to talk to you about how to be bored. Maybe there's a lot of you out there who don't know how to be bored anymore. You're always distracted. You're always running to the next thing. You're always trying to fill your gaps. Be busy.

Maybe you struggle with dealing with the thought. thoughts in your head when you actually slow down and pause. If you want to know how boredom can be powerful for your brain, this episode is for you, and if you want to know how you can change your life and actually use it to your advantage, don't skip this episode. In 1654, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a sentence that I think might be the most underrated, most urgent, most terrifying truth ever put on paper. He wrote,

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Think about that. This was 1654. No smartphones, no television, no radio, no newspapers delivered to your door, no telegraph. The most sophisticated entertainment technology available was a harpsichord and a good candle. and Pascal looked at the people around him, the richest, most educated, most powerful people in France, and concluded that the root cause of war, corruption, cruelty, recklessness and misery was that nobody could just sit still. They hunted, they gambled, they threw lavish parties,

they picked fights with neighboring kingdoms, they pursued scandal and intrigue at court. not Pascal argued because they actually wanted those things, but because the alternative, being alone with their own thoughts, was too unbearable to face. Now, I want you to pick up your phone. You're probably on it already, but don't actually do it. Just imagine the moment. You know the moment I mean, you're standing in line at the coffee shop,

you're waiting for the elevator, you're sitting on the toilet, you're in the first 10 seconds of an ad and you can't skip yet, and your hand moves almost before you've made a decision to the phone, to scroll, to the feed, to anything that fills the gap. What are you running from? Pascal knew. He was watching people run from it in 1654. This doesn't make you weak. You're not wrong. You're not a bad person. The thing you're running from doesn't have a name in polite conversation. We call it boredom like it's a minor inconvenience, like being slightly cold or having a headache, something to be treated, something to be

eliminated, something that signals there's a problem to be fixed. But what if boredom isn't the problem? What if boredom is the solution? And someone has been very carefully, very profitably taking it away from you. Welcome to something I call the sacred void. Now before we dive in, Now I want to talk about what boredom actually is. Scientists got this wrong for 100 years, so here's the truth. I need to start by rehabilitating boredom's reputation, because it has been absolutely destroyed. For most of the 20th century, psychologists treated boredom as a deficiency state,

a signal that something was missing, stimulation, purpose, motivation. The implicit assumption was that a healthy, engaged, well-adjusted person, shouldn't experience boredom. If you were bored, something was wrong with you. You lack discipline or ambition or the right attitude. Teachers told students to stop being bored. Parents loaded children's schedules to prevent boredom from ever arising. The entire architecture of modern productivity culture was built on the premise that idle time is wasted time. This was one of the great intellectual errors of the modern era. In the last 20 years, a small group of researchers, most of them working in obscurity, many of them initially laughed at by their colleagues,

began to look at boredom with fresh eyes. And what they found completely inverted everything we thought we knew. The first revelation was definitional. What is boredom actually? psychologist Sandy Mann at the University of Central Lancashire spent years researching this and arrived at a definition that stopped me cold when I read it. She found that boredom is not the absence of stimulation. It is actually a state of wanting stimulation but being unable to find anything satisfying.

It's a kind of restless searching state and itch without a scratch. And here's where it gets interested. When man and our colleagues actually studied what that restless searching produces, they discovered something nobody expected. They ran an experiment where one group of participants was given a classic creativity test, the kind where you have to think of as many uses for a common object as possible, like a plastic cup.

They listed their ideas, average results. Then they ran another group through a boring task first. copying numbers out of a phone book by hand for 20 minutes. Just copying numbers. The most tedious activity they could construct. Then they did the same creativity test. The board group wasn't slightly better. They were dramatically better.

More ideas, more original ideas, more unusual ideas. The boredom had done something to their thinking. Man did a second version. this time she made the boring task even more passive, just reading numbers from her phone book rather than copying them. Even more boring. The creativity scores went up even further. Boredom wasn't the enemy of creative thought. It was the precondition for it. But why? Why would sitting with empty frustrated restlessness make you more creative? The answer lives in the most important brain system you might have never heard of.

And I need to spend some real time here because once you understand this, you will never look at an idle moment the same way again. The default mode network. This is the most important brain system that no one tells us about. For most of neuroscience history,

researchers studied the brain by giving people tasks to do and watching which regions activated. Solve a puzzle, this area lights up. Process language, that area, recognize a face, this region. The operating assumption was that the interesting action happened when the brain was working. Well, nobody thought to ask was, what is the brain doing when it's not working? In the 1990s, neuroscientist Marcus Reichel at Washington University

in St. Louis was doing exactly this kind of task-based brain imaging. And he kept noticing something strange. There was a network of regions that consistently deactivated when people were given tasks to focus on. They went quiet during directed attention. And when the task ended, when the person was just resting, just letting their mind wonder, this network came roaring back online. Reichel called it the default mode network, the DMN, the brain's default setting. For years, the DMN was dismissed as background noise, idling like a car engine at a red light, wasted energy, the brain burning glucose for nothing. Then in one of the great slow burn reveals in science history,

researchers started actually studying the DMN, and they found that it was not idling at all. It was doing the most sophisticated, most important, most deeply human cognitive work of your entire mental life. Here is what the default mode network is responsible for. I want you to listen to this list carefully. The DMN is the system that generates your sense of self. Your ongoing narrative of who you are, what you value, where you've been, where you're going. When you lie awake and think about your life, that's the DMN.

When you feel the particular ache of regret or the particular warmth of gratitude, the DMN is assembling those experiences. The DMN is where you process other people's minds. When you try to understand why someone acted the way they did, to imagine their inner experience, to feel empathy, that requires the DMN. It's the system that makes you socially intelligent, that makes you capable of compassion rather than just reaction.

The DMN is where you simulate the future. When you imagine a difficult conversation before it happens or envision what a decision might mean for your life five years from now, that is DMN activity. It's your brain's flight simulator, your rehearsal space. And critically, the DMN is where creative insight happens. Not the grinding, effortful part of creativity, not the application of rules, the breakthrough moment, the sudden connection between two things that seem uncorrelated, the solution that arrives apparently from nowhere in the shower. That is the default mode network firing. And in fact,

some researchers now believe that the highest levels of human creativity are not primarily a function of the focused, task-oriented brain at all. They are a function of how well your DMN operates and how often you give it the space to do so. And here's the thing that I want you to write down right now about DMN. It cannot activate when you are consuming. Listen to that again. Your DMN can't activate when you're consuming. The default mode network, your self-reflection system, your empathy system, your creativity system, your future simulation system, your meaning-making system, it cannot run while you're taking in external stimulation. When you're scrolling, the DMN is suppressed.

When you're watching, the DMN is suppressed. When you're listening to a podcast, yes, including this one, when you're engaged with external input, the DMN is offline. It only comes online in the gaps, in the pauses, in the waiting, in the boredom. Now, I want you to think about how many gaps you have left in your day. When was the last time you stood in a queue? Without your phone? The last time you waited for a meal at a restaurant, without your phone.

last time you sat in a waiting room for a doctor or a dentist, and just sat. The last time you took a walk without headphones, the last time you lay in bed in the morning without immediately reaching for a screen. If you're like most people in the modern world, those moments are nearly gone. Eliminated with remarkable thoroughness and with them, quietly and invisibly, something essential has been disappearing from your inner life. Right now, I'm about 130. I'm at 183. We should race. No, I want to leave here with my original hip.

On the podcast, The Matchup with Alia, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests. On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ, Clarissa Shields, and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and what it really means to be ladylike. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search the Matchup with Alia and listen now. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Hello, gorgeous, it's Lala Kent. Host of Untraditionally Lala.

My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley. Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditionally Lala, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate. I've been full on over sharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz. I had a little bone to pick with Schwarzy when he came on the pod. You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife? I almost flipped a pizza in your lap.

Oh my God, I literally forgot about that until just now. Sorry, I don't want to blame alcohol. I got to blame that one on the alcohol. This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on life in. Because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to. We're growing, we're thriving. And yes, sometimes we're barely surviving. But we do it all with love.

It's unruly, it's unafraid, it's untraditionally la la. Listen to Untraditionally Lala on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in so much, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.

I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for. sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, the lesbian, Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap.

Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until Justice. served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Researchers at the University of Virginia ran a study that I find poignant. They asked participants to sit alone in a room with their thoughts for 15 minutes. No phone, no book, no music, just sitting. The only thing in the room was a button that if pressed would deliver a mild electric

shock. Sixty-seven percent of men and 25 percent of women chose to shock themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. One man shocked himself 190 times. One hundred and ninety times. Pascal was right in 1654. We just now have the neuroscience to understand exactly why, and we have something he couldn't have imagined, an industry that has spent billions of making the avoidance of your own mind not just easy but irresistible. Now I want to talk to you about how the attention economy surgically removed boredom from your life. I want to be really precise here because I don't think this is an accident. I don't think that you feeling bored and feeling like it's a weakness or the need for constant

stimulation is your fault. I don't believe this is something that you did to yourself. I think it is a designed outcome and the people who designed it knew somewhat what they were doing. In 2017, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, began speaking publicly about something he'd witnessed from the inside. He described how the technology industry doesn't simply make products. It makes persuasion machines. Systems explicitly engineered to capture and hold human nature for as long as possible. using the same psychological techniques developed for slot machines and gambling.

Harris called it the race to the bottom of the brainstem. Not a race to make you smarter or more connected or more fulfilled, a race to find the lowest, most ancient, most reflexive part of your neurological architecture. The part that responds to novelty, to social approval, to potential threat, to pattern and reward, and plug directly in the world. into it. The core mechanism is intermittent variable reward. The same mechanism that makes slot machines the most addictive gambling devices ever invented. You pull the lever, you scroll down and sometimes you get something rewarding. A funny video, a surprising piece of news, a notification that someone liked

what you posted. And sometimes you get nothing interesting. The randomness is not a flaw. The randomness is the feature. It's what makes you keep pulling the lever. Keep scrolling, keep checking, Your dopamine system was not designed for this. It evolved to motivate you to pursue food, warmth, safety and connection, scarce resources in a world where effort was required to find them. It was not designed to interface with a system that provides infinite, instant, algorithmically optimized stimulation calibrated specifically to the profile of your individual psychology. And so, you find yourself, as most people do. checking your phone somewhere between 96 and 150 times per day.

Not because you decided to. Not because you want to, but because a system smarter than your conscious mind has learned exactly which lever to pull, exactly when to pull it, and exactly how to keep you coming back. Stop scrolling, I need you to understand this about notifications. Every notification is an interruption.

Every interruption breaks your focus, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to the same level of deep focus you were at before. 23 minutes for a single notification glance. Most of us receive dozens of notifications per day, which means most of us never, not once,

not for a single sustained period, reach the depth of focus and the depth of mind-wondering necessary for their default mode network to do its best work. But here's the thing about your attention being stolen. You can reclaim what was taken. And this is where we go back, way back, to the people who understood the value of empty moments

more clearly than almost any thinkers in history. I want to talk to you about the ancient art of doing nothing, what the wisest humans who ever lived knew about the sacred gap. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, writing 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome, was surrounded by precisely the same problem Pascal would observe 16 centuries later. Rome was a city of spectacle. Gladiator games, theatrical performances, political intrigue, constant noise and crowd and stimulation. Seneca watched his fellow citizens lurch from entertainment to entertainment,

from party to party, and he wrote something that reads like it was composed. yesterday. Seneca wrote, It is not that I am brave enough to be bored. It is that I know what boredom is for. He called it Oteum, often translated as leisure, but that translation loses something crucial. For Seneca, Oteum was not relaxation. It was not passive rest.

It was purposeful emptiness, deliberately cultivated spaciousness, time not organized around doing or consuming, but around being, around allowing the mind to roam, to integrate, to discover what it actually contains. Seneca believed that the quality of a person's oetium determine the quality of their thinking, not their reading, not their study, their oteum, the time when the books were closed and they just sat. He wrote letters in that state. He had his deepest philosophical insights in that state, he believed that you could not genuinely know yourself without regular intentional time spent in silence with your own mind. So what I want to share with you

is the practice of how to be bored. I want to give you something real, not a manifesto, not a list of things to feel guilty about, a practice. First, understand what you're actually doing when you reach for the phone. You're not making a decision, you're executing a reflex. a reflex that has been installed and strengthened over years of training. The first step is simply to notice it. To put a tiny gap between the stimulus, boredom, and the response, scroll. You don't have to resist it. Just notice.

Oh, I'm bored. And my hand moved. That noticing over time is everything. You cannot change a reflex you're not aware of. Second, practice what I call the three-minute hold. When you feel boredom arriving, that restless, uncomfortable itch, make a deal with yourself. Three minutes. You're going to hold still for three minutes. No phone, no book, no music. You're just going to let the discomfort be there. Look at a wall. Look at the sky. Look at your hands.

For the first minute, it will feel terrible. Your mind will ping pong. It will tell you this is a waste of time. it will generate a small flood of anxious mundane thoughts, things you need to do, things you said, things you're worried about. This is all normal. Sit with it. In the second minute, something usually shifts. The chatter doesn't stop, but it changes character. It becomes slightly less urgent. Your gaze, if you let it, will start to drift and soften. Your breathing more slow without you telling it to. In the third minute, something opens. Not always, not dramatically, but a quietness begins to gather. And sometimes, sometimes, something arrives from below. A thought you didn't expect, a memory you hadn't planned to have, a connection between two things in your life that you suddenly

see clearly, a feeling that had been waiting patiently behind all the noise. That's your default mode network coming online. That is OTIM. Third, every day, do one thing that allows you to be bored. Walk without headphones. Eat breakfast without your phone. Sit outside for 10 minutes after work, doing nothing. Lie in bed for five minutes after you wake before checking your phone. Wash your dishes without any distraction. These are not sacrifices. These are investments. Each boring ritual is a deposit in the account of your inner life. Each one is giving your default mode network, your creativity, your empathy, your self-understanding, a little bit of time to run. The remarkable thing is how quickly it compounds. People who begin simple boredom practices just like these

often report within two or three weeks that they feel more creative, more emotionally present, more able to access their own feelings more interesting to themselves. Not because they've learned anything new, because they've given their knowledge they already have space to breed. Number four, and this is the most important one, get bored on purpose before your hardest problems. Before a difficult creative challenge, before a decision that matters,

before a hard conversation you need to have, take 10 minutes and do something mind-being. mindlessly mundane. Wash the dishes, fold laundry, take a short walk. You're not procrastinating, you're activating your most sophisticated cognitive machinery. You're greasing the right wheels. What seems like wasted time is often the thing that makes everything that follows work. I want to come back to Pascal. He wrote his sentence in 1654, long before slot machines, long before television, long before the algorithm that knows you better than your friends do, that has mapped the exact contours of your restlessness

and is a piece of content already selected, already queued, already waiting for the precise moment your attention starts to drift. Pascal looked at kings and philosophers and soldiers, people with every resource, every advantage, every stimulation their world could offer, and he saw them running. We are all running,

running from a person, running from a place, running from silence, running from ourselves. I'm not judging you. I'm grieving what you're missing out on. I want you to know that the most important things, the things that make life worth living, that make humans capable of wisdom and love and genuine creativity, those things could only be found in one place nobody wanted to go.

The quiet stillness. the peaceful room, the empty moment, the uncomfortable, awkward silence. That's where it all is. That void is not empty. It only looks empty from the outside, from the inside. If you can hold still long enough to get there, it is the most populated, most alive, most genuinely yours place you will ever stand. Your self is in there. Your best ideas are in there.

your deepest relationships being shaped in there by the quality of the attention you're developing or destroying right now today in every idle moment. The technology is not going anywhere. The algorithm is not going to develop a conscience. Nobody is going to give you your boredom back. You have to take it one uncomfortable minute at a time. Now you know, go be bored.

Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential. I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I think envy is the thief of joy. I think social comparison is invaluable. Hey, it's Nora Jones,

and my podcast playing along is back with more of my favorite musicians. Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin. You related to the Phantom at that point. Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that. That's so funny. Share each day with me each night, each morning. Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Stephanie Young, host of Love Trapped, the story of former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd, Potna Pregnancy Hoax. You doctored this particular test twice in so much, correct? I doctored the test once. As the season continues. Laura, Scottsdale Police. Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. Open your free I-Heart Radio app, search Love Trapped, and start listening now.

I'm Bailey Taylor, and this is It Girl. This podcast is all about going deeper with the women's shaping culture right now. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work behind it all. As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated. So you have to work extra hard in a way that doesn't compromise who you are in your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja. Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.