Boredom has a bad reputation. It’s the feeling everyone tries to avoid, usually by reaching for a phone the second a gap in stimulation opens up — a red light, a line at the store, a quiet moment before bed. But a growing body of research suggests that reflexively eliminating boredom might be costing us something real: the mental space where creativity, problem-solving, and self-reflection actually happen.
What boredom actually is, neurologically
Boredom isn’t your brain doing nothing — it’s your brain doing something different. When external stimulation drops away, activity shifts into what’s called the default mode network, a set of brain regions that activate during mind-wandering, daydreaming, and unfocused thought. This isn’t idle downtime; it’s linked to memory consolidation, future planning, and — notably — creative idea generation. Several studies have found that people who complete a boring task right before a creative problem-solving exercise actually perform better than people who went straight into the task without a boring buffer first.
In other words, the discomfort of boredom isn’t a malfunction. It’s often the exact condition your brain needs to make unexpected connections it can’t make while busy processing new input.
Why we’ve engineered boredom out of daily life
Smartphones didn’t invent the urge to avoid boredom, but they made avoiding it essentially frictionless. Where a person waiting for a bus in 1995 had no real choice but to sit with their own thoughts, that same wait today gets filled almost automatically with a phone. The result is that many people now rarely experience the kind of unstructured, unstimulated mental space that used to be a normal part of daily life; brief pauses, commutes, waiting rooms, all now default to being filled.
The problem isn’t that phones exist. It’s that the near-total elimination of small boring moments may be quietly removing a mental process that used to happen constantly in the background of ordinary life.
The link to attention span
There’s a separate but related concern: constant novelty-seeking appears to train the brain toward shorter attention cycles. Every time boredom gets interrupted with a quick dose of new stimulation, it reinforces a pattern where the brain expects frequent novelty and finds sustained, unstimulating tasks (reading a long article, sitting through a meeting, working through a hard problem without distraction) increasingly uncomfortable. Some researchers describe this as a kind of attentional muscle atrophy — the capacity to tolerate low-stimulation focus weakens the less it gets used, similar to how physical capacity declines with disuse.
This doesn’t mean boredom is always productive
It’s worth being honest about the limits here: chronic, unrelenting boredom, especially the kind tied to lack of meaning or purpose over long periods, is genuinely associated with negative outcomes, including lower wellbeing and, in some studies, increased risk-taking behavior as people search for any form of stimulation. The benefit isn’t boredom as a permanent state; it’s brief, regular exposure to unstimulated moments, not the elimination of all novelty and engagement from life.
The distinction matters: an occasional boring commute used to think through a problem is different from feeling chronically understimulated in your work or relationships. The research supports the former as valuable, not the latter as something to seek out.
A few practical ways to let some boredom back in
- Leave a few genuinely empty gaps in the day — a walk without a podcast, a commute without scrolling, a few minutes before bed without a screen. These don’t need to be long to matter.
- Notice the urge to fill silence, and let it sit for a moment before reaching for a phone. The discomfort tends to pass, and what often follows it is exactly the kind of unstructured thinking the default mode network specializes in.
- Use boring moments as thinking time rather than something to eliminate. A shower, a walk, folding laundry — these low-stimulation activities are consistently reported as common settings for unexpected ideas and insights, likely for the same neurological reasons.
- Treat attention span like a trainable capacity. If long, unstimulating tasks feel unusually hard, that’s often a sign of how conditioned the brain has become to frequent novelty, not a fixed trait — and it tends to improve with deliberate practice, the same way physical endurance does.
The honest takeaway
Boredom isn’t something to chase for its own sake, and chronic understimulation in life more broadly is a real problem, not a virtue. But the reflexive elimination of every small unstimulated moment throughout an ordinary day may be quietly cutting off a mental process — undirected thought — that’s been linked to creativity, problem-solving, and even basic attentional stamina. Letting a little boredom back in, in small, ordinary moments, isn’t nothing. It might be one of the more overlooked mental habits worth rebuilding.
- Mann S, Cadman R. Does being bored make us more creative? Creativity Research Journal. 2014;26(2):165-173.
- Raichle ME, et al. A default mode of brain function. PNAS. 2001;98(2):676-682.
- Westgate EC, Wilson TD. Boring thoughts and bored minds: the MAC model of boredom and cognitive engagement. Psychological Review. 2018;125(5):689-713.