The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How I Stopped Fearing Boredom

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Dr Laurie HATES boredom! Since childhood she's found it so painful that she'll do anything to avoid being bored. She'll watch crappy TV. She'll find extra work to do. She'll snack. But boredom is actually an incredibly useful tool to boost our happiness and creativity.   With the help of leading boredom experts, Dr Laurie learns how to embrace doing nothing and finds that in the midst of tedium our brains can come up with the most amazing breakthrough ideas. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. TV off. So this is for a whole podcast season that we're doing on stuff that I'm bad at. Okay. This is a whole episode about boredom, because I feel like I'm pretty bad at boredom. You are. The 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal was convinced that he knew the single greatest challenge facing our species. All of humanity's problems, he said, stem from man's inability to sit down quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal was lucky he didn't meet me or my mom. But I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're bad at boredom.

Yeah, no, I didn't do well with doing nothing. As a matter of fact, waiting for you if I went and made a puzzle. I couldn't just sit and wait for you to call back. I don't know if it's heredity or just learned behavior. But I got it from you. Yeah, it's one of the many wonderful things you got from your mother. Psychologists define boredom as a transient, unpleasant, affective state in which an individual feels a pervasive lack of interest, such that it takes pained, conscious effort to attend to an activity. But you may not need a professional to tell you

how dreadful boredom is. Many of us have experienced what happens when you're stuck in some dull lecture, or a long checkout line, or folding the laundry, or doing some humdrum task at work, or reading a novel you're losing interest in. That's when that yucky feeling seeps into your brain. I literally have no patience whatsoever. That's never been one of my virtues.

It's not as bad now because I have a cell phone. So I don't find it as traumatically, emotionally traumatic as it used to be. This season is all about the happiness challenges that I struggle with. And boredom is a big one. My one big memory of you and boredom is when we took you to eat a book. And you were bored to death. I have always hated being bored. And you sat on the train very nicely, very quietly,

and you made up a song about boredom. You sat there and did boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom, and you sang for like 15 minutes. But the research shows I'm not alone. Take one study by the psychologist Tim Wilson and his colleagues. They tested just how far the average person would go to avoid feeling bored. They stuck individuals in a small room without their phones,

said, please entertain yourself with your thoughts as best you can, and left them there for up to 15 minutes. But the subjects were given one activity they could turn to if they got really, really desperate. They were handed a small button, which when pressed would deliver a 4 milliamp electric shock. 4 milliamps isn't agony, but it isn't exactly painless either. Would a brief period of boredom be so bad that people would resort to shocking themselves just to stay entertained? Yes, yes it would.

A third of subjects chose to shock themselves. One guy pressed his button nearly 200 times. Now, I haven't been so bored that I've opted to shock myself, but I have tried other equally pathetic ways to escape boredom. I can't remember the last time I stood in a checkout line without whipping out my phone. I repeatedly recheck email inboxes that I know are empty, and I re-scroll news sites that I've already read through. I've watched entire seasons of reality TV shows, not because I enjoy them, but just to have something to do on work-free nights. And I boredom snack. A lot. These activities are a huge waste of time, and pretty embarrassing for a so-called happiness expert.

But I can't help but turn to them whenever I start to feel that sting of tedium. Can science show us a healthier way to navigate or maybe even embrace boredom? Could being able to sit down quietly in a room alone deliver important benefits that we just don't expect? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy?

The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Dr. Laurie Santos. Sandy Mann's first job after graduation was working in a clothing store. There weren't many customers, and the hours kind of dragged. We weren't allowed to stand around. We had to look busy, unfolding and then refolding sweaters. So it's mindless, mind-destroying, meaningless task, unfold, refold, unfold.

So I guess that's where my journey into boredom started. Sandy's the author of The Science of Boredom, The Upside and Downside of Downtime. You might think that boredom is just this like deep part of the human condition, you know, one of the many emotions that we all share. But you've argued in the book that if we look back historically, boredom, the way we think about it right now, seems to be historically a relatively recent phenomenon of kind of mentions of boredom are relatively recent. So give me a sense of the sort of history of boredom. Well, I think the first mention of it was Charles Dickens when he referred to ennui, which is boredom, in one of his earlier books. So that would be in the 19th

century. And so we sometimes think about boredom as being inherent in a person, like you're an easily bored person. So you're right. So we can be boredom prone. Some people are more prone to boredom than others. And there's a boredom proneness scale to measure how boredom prone you are.

Ooh, a boredom proneness scale? I decided to try it out on my mom. You answer these statements from one highly disagree to seven I really agree. Yep, I'm game. Time always seems to be passing slowly. Six. In situations where I have to wait, such as in a line, I get very restless.

Seven. It seems that the same things are on television or movies all the time. Seven. That one's for sure. I am good at waiting patiently. One. As I suspected, I am good at waiting patiently. One. As I suspected, I am very high on the boredom-proneness scale. And my mom is even worse.

Pretty bad, huh? But susceptibility to boredom isn't just about what's inside us. So sometimes our environment gives us cues that encourage us to be bored. So there was this really interesting experiment where they got people to do quite a boring repetitive task and they slowed the clocks down in one of the experiments and they left it normal in the other.

I tracked down a couple experiments like this. The conclusions they reached are intriguing. When scientists gave people a mundane task and sped up the clock, then participants thought, wow, time's flying. I must be really engrossed in this. But when people doing exactly the same task looked up to see that the hands on the clock, then participants thought, wow, time's flying. I must be really engrossed in this. But when people doing exactly the same task looked up to see that the hands on the clock

had barely moved, then they tended to think, God, this must be so boring. And similarly, they had another condition where they had noise in the background, like a television going in the background. So if we're struggling to concentrate, sometimes we might interpret that as, oh, I'm struggling to concentrate, I must be bored. So we'll rate something as more boring. So these are sort of things in the environment that contribute to our perception of boredom. But no matter whether the boredom is real or induced, it's still a drag. When I asked people in some of my research, what does boredom feel like?

A lot of the words used were things like draining, demotivating, tired. I might explain the dramatic metaphors we use for boredom. We get bored to tears or out of our minds. We even get bored to death. We're so scared of boredom that we'll try anything to avoid it. Like, for example, filling up our calendars to the breaking point. I think too many of us are too busy, too stressy, too much in a hurry. We've got to be doing and doing.

And it's almost like a competition to see who can be the most stressed. We even turn to behaviors that are much more unhealthy than a bit of overwork. So that could be drugs. It could be driving too fast. It could be doing dangerous activities. It could be comfort eating. So all these things aren't really healthy, but they give us that stimulation that we're desperately craving. But nowadays, you don't need to hop in a sports car to banish boredom.

You can just pull out your phone, whether that's in a line, on a train, waiting for a friend, or even sitting on the toilet. Yep, surveys show that 90% of us take our phones to the bathroom. the toilet. Yep, surveys show that 90% of us take our phones to the bathroom. We've got the world at our fingertips now. We should not know what boredom is anymore. Our kids should be saying, mummy, what's boredom? You know, I don't know what that is. What is it? And I would be saying, oh, I remember when I was a lass, you know, we used to have boredom. And they go, oh, what's that? But we don't have that. Our kids seem to be more bored than ever before. So we're in what I call this whizzy, whizzy, bang, bang environment where everything is noisy, flashy, whizzy, fast.

And it's all new and novel, constant newness and novel, bombarding our senses. But the problem is, it's quite addictive. Have we all become so used to having a library, a cinema, an arcade, and a shopping mall in our pockets, that a minute without our phones seems like an eternity? So we're always after the next new thing, the next new thing to stimulate us. Sandy says that all this constant running from boredom is a big problem, since there's a good argument that we need it in our lives. We want to make boredom work for us so

we can get the benefits of it. Boredom, like all human emotions, is probably there to teach us something. If we let ourselves become bored, what might we learn? Sandy has a lab at the University of Central Lancashire, so she stuck a group of students in a small room to do nothing. Some of them couldn't stand it, and after five, ten minutes, they said, no, you know, I can't stand this. But those who got through that kind of pain threshold, beyond that fidgety frustrated searching for stimulation phase that was very uncomfortable that we label boredom they got through that and they went into this kind of zoned out phase where their minds wondered and they chilled and they relaxed and they came out saying you know that was amazing that was really relaxing I feel great and

it's like having a warm bath and all this sort of stuff. I thought, oh, I could offer this as a kind of spa activity. You know, you don't need anything else. I'll just put them in a room with no stimulation. I'm not all that convinced that I'd be able to endure a boredom spa treatment. It still sounds kind of scary. I think the problem is that we don't get past that stage. We just get rid of the boredom.

We escape, don't we? We don't let ourselves get through the pain barrier. And CID promises that on the other side of that pain barrier are some pretty wonderful things. But more on that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. In first grade, my teacher, Mrs. Shork, wrote a report card for me, which started with, when I think of Jonathan, I imagine him at the end of the line, shoes untied, five feet behind everybody else, totally preoccupied, and yet completely content. Neuroscientist Jonathan Schooler hasn't ever feared being bored. He even looks for opportunities to escape stimulation. I have a long hallway and I will just happily pace, not in a worried way, but just in a sort of playful way, back and forth and let my mind go

from one topic to the next topic to the next topic. The UC Santa Barbara professor long ago learned how to break through the boredom pain barrier and to enjoy what's called mind wandering. Sort of the standard way that I think about mind wandering is when the mind is captured by an internal train of thought which is entirely unrelated to what's going on in one external environment. Our minds sometimes wander when we don't want them to, stopping us from completing important or even enjoyable tasks. My favorite example is when you're reading. And almost everybody has had this experience of reading along

and suddenly realizing that their eyes have been moving across the page, and yet their mind has been entirely elsewhere. And this unintended mind wandering doesn't always feel good. So there was a very influential study that was titled, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind. And essentially what they did was to have people be pinged at random times through their cell phones and ask them what they were doing, whether or not their mind was attending to what they were doing, and how happy or unhappy they were. was attending to what they were doing, and how happy or unhappy they were. And what they found was that when people reported that they were mind-wandering, they were substantially less happy than when they were on task, suggesting that mind-wandering may be a significant source of unhappiness. Jonathan was surprised when he first read the study, because it simply didn't

fit with his own positive experience of mind-wandering. Not only have I been mind-wandering my whole life, but I've been enjoying it. Puzzled, he devised an experiment forcing subjects to perform an incredibly monotonous task. You have to press a button every time you see a number, except for the number three, where you have to withhold a response. And you can imagine that this gets rather boring over time. As expected, people found this task painfully boring. I do not recommend this as entertainment. And their overall mood dropped significantly. They were remarkably less happy at the end than they were at the beginning. But did some people make it through the task

feeling better than others? And were those the folks that let their minds wander away from the job at hand? Every few trials, Jonathan pinged subjects and asked, Just now, were you paying attention to the task or were you mind-wandering? And the more often people mind-wandered while engaging in this task, the less their happiness dropped. So it seemed that basically the mind-wandering was insulating them against the boredom, providing them with an engaging, entertaining opportunity to sort of escape from the doldrums of this task. But Jonathan also found that this only applies to a certain kind of mind-wandering. A train of thought that causes you to worry about your credit card debt or fret about your next performance review isn't a recipe for happiness. Jonathan found that you'd actually be happier concentrating on a dull task

than entertaining yourself with those kinds of thoughts. But if you begin thinking about something interesting and cool, then you'd actually be happier in the experiment. So this appears to be the silver lining of a mind in the clouds, which is that if you can find the right topics to mind-wander about, if you're mind-wander about, if you're mind-wandering

about things that you find especially interesting, perhaps things that you're particularly curious about, that this may have a very different relationship with well-being. And getting into this particular state of mind-wandering has a host of other benefits too. There have been many cases described for really thousands of years of individuals aimlessly mind-wandering and suddenly having an epiphany. Take the discovery of water displacement. The Greek mathematician Archimedes was asked whether a king's crown was made of pure gold or just gold-covered silver. But he wasn't allowed to take the crown apart. The problem puzzled Archimedes for weeks.

He couldn't figure it out until he took a very boring bath. As Archimedes' mind wandered, he thought about the change in the tub's water level as he stepped in. And he came up with a solution. And as legend has it, he shouted, Eureka! And then climbed out of the bath and ran through the streets naked in his excitement of his discovery. When the amount of water the crown displaced was compared to that displaced by a piece of gold of matching weight, it was found that yes, the crown was indeed a cheaper imitation. Boredom has also given us beloved works of fiction. An Oxford professor was grading papers one day, something I know can be very tedious. His mind

started to wander, and he scribbled a line of prose that launched a now famous fantasy series. The professor? Well, he was J.R.R. Tolkien. And the opening line? In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Jonathan Schooler has asked more than a hundred writers and physicists to note whenever they are struck with inspiration. About 20% of the ideas that these individuals had happened when they were not at work, nor when they were actively pursuing the problem. They were in the shower, they were writing a check, they were doing chores, and some creative idea would arise. Boredom can feel really, really yucky.

But Jonathan began to realize that the purpose of boredom might be to shove our brains into a more creative zone. When neuroscientists get interested in studying how some mental process works, they often stick subjects inside an fMRI brain scanner and measure which parts of the brain are active when they engage in that mental process. If a neuroscientist wants to learn, say, how brains do arithmetic, she might pay her subjects to do a bunch of math problems inside the scanner and measure which parts of the brain fire most when subjects work on these problems. It was during just such a set of studies that researchers made an unexpected discovery about

what happens in our brains when subjects take a break and stop doing stuff. What they discovered is that there was a network of regions that were especially active when people were not given anything to do. They were more active when they were not given anything to do than when they were actually actively working on the task. Neuroscientists called these regions the default mode network. And surprisingly, they aren't some backwater bit of the brain. They're the parts of our gray matter that control the smartest activities humans are capable of. Things like making sense of other people, thinking creatively, and what's known as autobiographical planning. Essentially mental time travel, where you are projecting yourself into the future or into the past. Many neuroscientists were puzzled, but Jonathan

knew exactly what was going on. Participants in the fMRI scanners were bored. They had simply let their thoughts roam. We're mind-wandering. What are we mind-wandering about? Well, we're thinking about what we're going to do in the future. We're reflecting on what happened in the past and how we might have done it differently. Jonathan wondered if he could use this default mode network to generate boredom-induced epiphanies in the lab, creating the same kind of aha moments

that Tolkien and Archimedes had had. So he handed people a brick and told them to come up with as many uses for it as they could. And there are uncreative uses of a brick, such as to build a house. But then there are more creative ones, such as grinding it up and using it as paint. Some people worked on the brick problem continuously. What can I do with this brick? What haven't I thought of yet? But other test subjects were interrupted and given a task so boring that Jonathan was pretty sure

that they'd start to mind wander. They then resumed figuring out uses for the brick. The ideas this group came up with were judged to be nearly five times more creative than those suggested by the people who weren't given a break to mind wander. The second group didn't say, oh, build a wall with the brick. They thought it could be used as a dumbbell or even turned into makeup. And this suggests that mind wandering may be

particularly useful for the kind of problem where you're stumped, the kind of problem where you say, I need to sleep on it. You might also say, I need to mind wander on it. I've clearly been taking my own mind wandering for granted. I mean, thinking back on it, I do get some of my best ideas when I'm stuck on a long train ride, when I'm in the shower. But I've been so scared of boredom for decades and decades. Can I really learn to love it now? The Happiness Lab will be right back. We'll be right back. When I go around lecturing about boredom all over the world, I always ask, does anyone in the audience not know what boredom is?

And there's always one person that puts their hand proudly in the air and says, I'm never bored. Or only boring people are bored. Psychologist Sandy Meehan encounters lots of people who are totally unwilling to accept the benefits of boredom. Oh, you've got time to be bored. Oh, look at you, you know, you're obviously not important enough. Important people don't have time to be bored. You know, I think, well, maybe they're missing out. And if you don't want to miss out on the upsides of boredom,

Sandy's first suggestion is practice, practice, practice. Take 20 minutes each day to get used to the feeling. Go where you'll be free from distractions. No phones, no email alerts, no one bothering you. Then do something really dull for a few minutes, like doodling or folding laundry perhaps. Don't take music with you. Or if you do take very gentle, boring, not stimulating music.

Swimming is really good because you can't take anything in with you to listen to. So you've literally got no stimulation, so your mind can wonder. The next part is easy. You don't really need to concentrate, and you can just let your mind wonder. If you do struggle, neuroscientist Jonathan Schooler suggests trying a meditation practice called open mind monitoring. You essentially are just watching your thoughts without trying to get too attached to them. A thought arises, you witness it, and then you let it pass. And you just take this very open-minded, passive stance to watching your mind. There is a slight risk that rather than coming up with a scientific breakthrough

or a creative new use for bricks, your mind might settle on thoughts that are upsetting or anxiety-provoking. You might worry about money or work or your health. So it's worth preparing ahead of time, coming up with a list of topics that you know you'll have fun thinking about. And then you can sort of practice

shifting to the topics that you find more engaging. But Jonathan says it really is worth the risk. He worries our aversion to boredom is having a detrimental effect on our development as a species. When people have idle moments, they're much less likely to just sit there than they were before

because they can pull out their cell phone and start looking at social media. So all these situations, such as being in the doctor's office or standing in line that previously would have been occupied by mind-wandering are now being occupied by smartphones. And since smartphones are the enemy of mind-wandering, and mind-wandering is the friend of discovery, it's possible that we're missing out on lots of potential creative and scientific advances. There's a classic case of Poincaré, the mathematician who discovered non-Euclidean geometry

and was stepping on a bus and suddenly the solution to this problem came to mind. So if Poincaré had been looking at his smartphone while he was waiting at the bus stop instead of mind-water, he might not have come up with a solution to fuchsia and functions. And I think that's a real concern. And if you happen to be mind-wandering rather than paying attention in math class,

let me assure you that we're all super lucky that Pancaré took that boring bus ride. Now that Jonathan's framed it like this, I'm beginning to worry about all the breakthroughs we're never going to make as a species, unless we get a lot more comfortable with being bored. I was thrilled to hear all of Sandy and Jonathan's expert advice, but not just so I could share it with all of you.

I couldn't wait to tell my mom. You need to tell me I really need to listen to this podcast, right? This one is for me. When we met again over Zoom, I launched into all the benefits of boredom. I explained that it was time for our family to embrace feeling bored, even if it took some work. I think the Santuises are really bad at being bored. I don't find it as bad for you because you are creative and imaginative. Uh, what? From our earlier conversation, I assumed my mom thought that my proneness to boredom was as bad as hers. But as we talked more, my mom explained that I wasn't as bored as a kid as I remembered. You had quite an imagination and you were creative, so you could pretty much entertain yourself.

My mom sweetly launched into lots of memories I had forgotten. Times that I'd successfully translated boredom into all kinds of creative pursuits. And other antics my mom was happy to remind me about. You know, you had the eight millimeter camera, which you did spoof TV shows and spoof movies and created haunted houses in the cellar. You know, I mean, you created more stories and games. Ones that I readily inflicted on my little brother and my friends. And I think that's because you were bored.

So it might have been us being bored was why we did so much weird stuff as kids. I think rather than being bored, you used your creativity, you know, like singing the song Boring. Boredom, boredom. I mean, there are a few people that would have thought to do that. Most people would have bitched and moaned and done all that other stuff. You just sang. Boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom.

It was really nice to remember that there was a time that I appreciated boring moments. Boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom, boredom. Recognizing the creative value that Kid Laurie got out of boredom has made me even more committed to embracing that uncomfortable feeling now. We all need to start treating boring activities as a luxury, as a time to let our minds kick into their creative default mode so we can come up with our next big idea. And that's why Adult Laurie is ready to embark on a hardcore boredom training regimen.

I'm going to start by picking out some fun topics to think about, like themes for my next Halloween party or ideas for new podcast episodes. I'll also drop my usual music playlist when I'm out on my daily walks, just to make sure my mind has the space it needs to wander a bit. I hope you'll consider joining me in my quest to embrace a bit more boredom. And I also hope that you'll return for the next episode in this special series exploring my personal challenges on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.