Why We Should Focus on Removing Boredom From our Everyday Lives
“For me, the opposite of happiness isn’t sadness but boredom.” — Sushant Singh Rajput
Throughout our days we experience ups and downs. Ups filled with spurts of energy and excitement pumped by dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. Downs where we feel tired, slow and relaxed. We experience highs of happiness and ‘good feelings’ when something great happens in our life, seeing a puppy on the sidewalk or when we experience a romantic engagement. We look back at these experiences to motivate ourselves to grow and explore new adventures in our lives. To seek similar experiences that get the dopamine flowing in our brain that results in that same ‘good feeling’.
Boredom is actually pretty easy to define. We have what we call levels of arousal, this is the energy that helps us experience our ups and downs. High arousal means we are experiencing spurts of energy and excitement psychologically and physically. Low arousal means we are basically filled with low/little energy, feeling both tired and relaxed. Boredom is having high arousal but nothing to focus that energy on. We have the will and need to exert energy out towards an activity but have no activity at that time to exert the energy towards.
When we experience boredom we are actually missing the opportunity to be productive, to learn and to grow. Later in the day we might then stumble upon a task we want to do or get done but being that we may have used up all our energy for the day, we are experiencing low levels of arousal and cannot get ourselves to complete the task. Think of it as missed opportunities of progress in ones growth as a human being.
Some say boredom is “good”, as it forces creative thinking and pushes one out of their comfort zone of everyday activities. This is an inaccurate argument, because in order for one to be creative, they must be focusing on a specific idea at the time of creation. Being creative means you are solving some problem, the very existence of that problem being the focus of the individual, that person is already not in a state of boredom but in a state of productivity. They are setting their focus onto learning and growing, remember, boredom is the existence of non-progressive thought which does not imply creative thinking at all.
I myself remember feeling bored a lot when I was younger when there was no internet. Nowadays I find it extremely hard to find myself bored, if anything I feel a bit overwhelmed with number of activities to do. I had a terrible mindset of needing external things to keep my mind occupies and distract me altogether. Nowadays I find myself engaging with life that challenges me and makes me really think of solutions to problems. But not everyone is as engaged in as much as I myself am and still find themselves bored frequently. I am consistently trying to solve problems, thinking of what to write about and share with my audience, how to better myself each and everyday. A handful of people do not think like this on a daily basis or focus their energy to always solving problems.
Boredom Cycle
Boredom has some psychological side effects and key elements that exist causing us to experience boredom. We notice our difficulty to concentrate becomes counter-productive to fixing our boredom. We begin to try and fix it by amusing ourselves through day dreaming and occupying our minds… this can continue for however long and always results in realizing that we are still bored in the end. Boredom also shows often, that we have little control over the situation in which we are experiencing the boredom. Whether you’re sitting in a waiting room, waiting for the plan to take off, sitting in traffic, we may have little control over the current environment. This then leads to negative experiences with the situation that caused us boredom moving forward. Say you visit the doctors with your grandmother when you were young and get stuck in the waiting room for over 2 hours with absolutely nothing to occupy yourself with. This experience caused high levels of boredom and stress. In the future, every time you visit a doctors office you reflect on this experience of boredom, triggering high levels of stress every time you visit a doctors office. This stress results in a decrease of ability to pay attention, therefore boredom, the continual cycle all over again.
In order to prevent this cycle, we must fix the way we treat situations where we have loss of control and difficulty concentrating. As cliche as it may sound, daily meditating is actually a really great practice I myself have adopted into my everyday life. I focus my energy onto a problem or an internal entity and basically incubate that energy until I find myself in more control of my surroundings and environment where I then can then exert it onto a productive activity. I rarely find myself mind wondering or trying to distract myself with senseless distractions like television that I had no initial interest in engaging with or thinking that I am bored altogether, it’s a nasty habit that many have.
Lets start to focus and harness our energy onto things we can control, experiences that help us grow and progress humanity into a more abundant future, instead of focusing the energy on problems we have no control over. This is the big picture, we can do so much if we can harness this excess arousal of energy onto things that are productive and not distractions in life. Every human being can become a pillar of productivity and growth, as a result, a much happier individual that can have such a positive impact on the world. Boredom is the first psychological hurdle to overcome in order to begin this progress into a brighter future.
Thank you for supporting Branden! Branden is currently finishing his first book due to be published and released late 2019. Please feel free to reach him at anytime with any questions or even just to discuss any science, mathematics and technology!
