Why is Boredom important for our Happiness?
Our bodies work in a delicate balance. If it is hot, the body causes itself to sweat to lose heat. If it’s cold, the body activates mechanisms to keep the body warm. Everything in the body is a balance, and the greater the imbalance, the stronger the body’s response to restore the lost balance.
If a person is only subjected to hyper-stimulating things, such as constantly listening to music, watching large amounts of videos of a few seconds on social media in a short time, constantly watching movies, etc., the brain will be in a constant state of alert, to absorb all the information it is receiving.
However, the brain wants to maintain a balance, and this state of hyper-attention costs the brain a lot of energy, so it tries to counteract it by generating the opposite emotion to hyper-stimulation — boredom.
The greater the person’s addiction to videos, movies, and screens, the stronger the brain’s response to generate boredom, this is the reason why things that used to entertain us no longer do, it seems that nothing satisfies or gives us pleasure anymore.
Our brain is trying to preserve itself, yet we don’t realize it. Boredom is the reference for our brain, whatever is more positive than the state of boredom is interpreted as pleasure, and whatever is more negative is interpreted as suffering. But if we deregulate this reference, quickly life will turn into constant suffering because the brain is desperately trying to restore the balance and we don’t realize it.
Boredom is important because it regulates our reward system, without it, our brain becomes overstimulated and is no longer able to feel pleasure/happiness from simple things.
If you feel that nothing motivates you anymore, that things that used to give you pleasure no longer generate the happiness they used to, you have probably spent too much time on social media, watching Youtube videos, movies, etc.
Try to slow down your consumption of hyper-stimulating things, learn to live with boredom, don’t fight it, read a book instead of watching a video, get some sun, and look at the sky for 30 minutes instead of being focused on social media. Do this regulation of your organism and soon you will see that simple things have a new flavour, that the happiness of the old days will come back, and that things that never brought you happiness will bring you happiness from now on.
Slow down and embrace the boredom, your happiness can be at a distance from simply doing nothing funny, isn’t it?
