Bailing on Boredom

Consequences of turning spare time into screen time

If I had a penny for every time my mom insisted that I spent too much time on my phone while I was in high school, I would have upgraded my iPhone a long time ago.

Despite my mom’s qualms, I refused to believe that I was “wasting” time on my phone–I only used it when I had nothing better to do. Screen time was an innocent, welcoming escape from the dull and lonely moments that inevitably popped up in my day, from waiting for my orthodontist appointment to lying awake in bed at night after drinking too much caffeine.

It wasn’t until I was asked to think of a research topic for a freshman writing course that I decided to give my mom’s nagging a second thought.

Sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper entitled “Possible Inquiry Questions”, I remembered the long Saturdays that my six-year-old self spent staring at the ceiling for what seemed like an eternity while waiting for a friend to come over or for my mom’s distant call that it was “time to go.” I was hit with a sense of nostalgia for those dreaded hours, and realized that while they were filled with uninvited boredom, they were also filled with daydreaming, imagination and reflection.

Now, constant access to the world in my pocket frees me from my boredom whenever I want it to. But by minimizing boredom in my life, could I also be minimizing the reflection and imagination that used to accompany my boredom? What happens to a brain that is never allowed to be bored? I wanted to find out what science has to say.

Photo by Derek Midgley

First Clues: The Psychological POV

When asking questions about the extremely mysterious organ that is our brain, there are three distinctive fields that each offer insight from different viewpoints and with different terminology… neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology.

Unsure of where to start, I assumed psychology was the broadest and most likely to have relevant research. Messing around with various keywords, however, I was surprised at how little I could find about the effects of boredom and mind-wandering. After several hours of searching, two main points came to the surface:

• Spending time being bored increases people’s creativity. Multiple studies have indicated that doing something really boring and conducive to mind-wandering, such as copying names from a phonebook, increased people’s creativity and problem-solving abilities (Mann and Cadman, and Baird et al.).
• People tend to avoid spending time alone with their thoughts. In a recent study, participants were asked to sit in an empty room and think about whatever they wanted for 15 minutes. Afterward, when asked how much they enjoyed their experience from 1 to 10, the average response was less than 3. When given the opportunity, some of them even chose to do an unpleasant task like getting an electric shock over being left alone with their thoughts.

These findings made me realize that it may not be an accident that we are restricting our time to reflect by being on our phones — it could be that we’re intentionally using technology to escape being alone with our thoughts. What’s more, by avoiding boredom we could be curtailing the benefits it has on our creativity.

As interesting (and alarming) as this was, my research seemed to come to a dead end. I couldn’t find the answer to why people seemed to dislike thinking and why being bored made them more creative. I decided to change directions and follow up on a term from neuroscience that was briefly referred to in one of the articles, the Default Mode Network.

The Default Mode Network

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a relatively new concept in neuroscience. Upon the invention of modern neuroimaging techniques like MRI, scientists worked hard to understand the activity that occurs in our brains in response to doing various tasks, but they were so busy looking at what activity occurred in response to things that they neglected to notice certain activity that occurred in absence of stimulus. It wasn’t until 2001 that Dr. Markus Raichle pointed out a network of areas in the brain that seemed to turn off whenever someone focused on a particular task and back on again when no task was at hand. His observation unleashed a plethora of research about the brain’s default, “task-negative,” network, and over the next ten years it became apparent that these areas of the brain are involved in very personal, identity-related thought processes such as:

• Considering what we’ve done in the past and what we may do in the future
• Understanding the thoughts of other people
• Reflecting about ourselves
• Evaluating different perspectives and establishing morals
• Considering our own emotions and empathizing with others

Suddenly, the solution to my inquiry question seemed glaringly obvious…

When we are constantly stimulated by technology, we limit the function of the DMN, as well as the creativity, originality and sense of identity that the network supports.

Because the DMN functions when we are alone with our thoughts and my previous research demonstrated that people don’t like being alone with their thoughts, I hypothesized that DMN activity is like homework for our brain — it’s necessary, but also (by definition) not stimulating. High connectivity in the DMN is also correlated with depression and rumination, another reason why we may naturally avoid this state of mind.

So activating our DMN is key to forming our identity, but not very fun. Perhaps that is why it is set as an unavoidable default for our brain. In the past, the nature of human life provided ample down-time in which people were forced to think. Now, for the first time in history, the perfect distraction from our thoughts is in our pocket, ready to save us at any moment from the discomfort of facing ourselves. Could this revolutionary antidote for boredom offset the brain’s natural balance of reflection and task-related thought?

The Twist

I decided to email my ideas to Dr. Jonathan Smallwood, a leader in the science of reflection and self-generated thought. I was thrilled when he emailed me back, but as soon as I started reading his email my thrill turned to mild horror.

“I think that the Default Mode Network is actually important in social interactions and performing tasks like watching television or reading,” he wrote. “Consequently I think that smart phones mean that we can use the DMN to interact with people at a distance.”

My entire thesis was based on the idea that technology usage deactivates the DMN.

Awkward.

How on earth did I miss this?

The deadline for the first draft of my paper was steadily approaching. I reminded myself I was doing work for a writing class and not a research methods class; I could write an impressive essay based on my botched hypothesis and get away with it. But my curiosity (and perhaps my ego) wouldn’t let me.

I frantically searched my university’s databases for the studies that Dr. Smallwood alluded to. Scrolling through articles I realized that, since 2012, research about the DMN has taken an entirely new turn. This recent research shows that viewing the DMN as a task-negative network is a gross oversimplification of it’s function — it can actually be very much involved in certain kinds of tasks, particularly autobiographical tasks and evaluating the thoughts and stances of others.

While I had based my hypothesis on the assumption that a task such as scrolling through your Facebook feed or texting a friend would deactivate your DMN, recent research is pointing to the opposite as being true. The DMN becomes active when we are thinking about the lives of other people and preparing to socialize. Because of the very social nature of our technology usage, one could conclude that the DMN is active (if not overactive) in our 21st century lifestyle.

So if we are using the DMN while we’re checking out our Twitter notifications rather than simply reflecting, is there a problem? I took a step back and thumbed through my bibliography.

My attention was caught by the research of Andrews-Hanna, Smallwood and Spreng about how the particular content of DMN activity is critical when understanding the network’s outcomes. They pointed out that while hypoactivity and hyperactivity of the DMN at waking rest are associated with different mental disorders, “harnessing the beneficial aspects of self-generated thought and associated [DMN] activity requires the ability to adaptively regulate the content underlying this internal experience.”

In other words, it’s not just about how much you use the DMN, it’s about the actual content the network is working with when it functions.

Bringing the content of our DMN activity to the center of the picture, a new understanding of how technology may be effecting our brains began to fall into place.

A Shifted Perspective

As my earlier research showed, letting our minds roam free can be unpleasant. It’s much easier to simply follow a train of thought that’s already in existence.

When we fill our spare moments with technology, our DMN activity takes place in the more interesting, social context of the digital world. It’s spared from the discomfort of having to function free-form. Technology directs our DMN content for us.

The only downside to that is… technology directs our DMN content for us.

This becomes a bit disconcerting when you consider how the functionality of our DMN is so closely tied to our identity, our sense of self and our stance towards the world.

If we don’t give ourselves the chance to let our minds wander outside of the influence of technology, how will we form ideals and values that our truly our own? A study by Annisette and Lafreniere in 2015 indicates that perhaps it’s difficult. They found that frequent bouts of social media usage were negatively correlated with reflective thinking and moral life goals.

I thought back to the first few papers in my bibliography, the ones about how boredom increases creativity. It would seem that allowing the DMN to regulate it’s own content in an environment of unadulterated boredom is important for developing unique, original thoughts about ourselves and the world around us.

If we habitually extinguish boredom with technology instead of allowing the brain to enter into it’s default mode, we’re essentially letting the thought processes that are supposed to help us form our individual stance towards society be endlessly intruded by that very society. So while we will have a mirage of strong individuality since the DMN will still be functioning as much as (if not more than) ever, the culture that technology feeds us with must have an abnormally heavy, overbearing influence on the person we become.

Now, I know I’m just a teenager who got overly-involved in her college writing project — I’m not a scientist.

But still, I think this research begs us each to ask ourselves… Do we have a healthy relationship with technology, or could we be using it to avoid facing ourselves?

Since research indicates that our natural tendency is to avoid free-form reflection, with today’s unprecedented availability of distraction it seems fitting that we be intentional about taking the time to unplug and face ourselves. It may be weird, unpleasant, or even terrifying at first. But by doing so, we give ourselves the chance to develop our own unique perspective and aspirations, and ultimately, live a more purposeful and fulfilling life. So don’t be afraid to stare at the ceiling sometimes — you may thank yourself one day.

“A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men…”

- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930)