Can boredom ever be good? Part 2Can boredom ever be good? Part 2
All In The Mind
Last week we heard about the different shades of boredom that people can experience in a dull moment. Although it’s considered a broadly negative emotion, believe it or not, it seems boredom can sometimes be beneficial - especially when it lets us daydream. Some research suggests it can even promote our creativity. But do people differ in how they experience boredom? Are some more likely to be able to benefit from getting bored?
29:05•24 May 2020
Can Being Bored Make You More Creative?
Episode Overview
- People vary in how prone they are to boredom, and traits like extroversion, age and gender can influence how often boredom shows up.
- Experiments suggest that, in some conditions, feeling bored can boost creativity and lead to more original ideas.
- Personality traits such as openness to experience, need for cognition, learning goal orientation and an internal sense of control may help some people use boredom constructively.
- Letting yourself be truly bored instead of instantly escaping into phones or entertainment can create space for reflection and creative thinking.
- Boredom can highlight a lack of meaning or a mismatch in challenge, offering a chance to rethink what you do and how you do it.
“And what I say to these people is, you're too busy. If you're not bored, you're too busy.”
What secrets to maintaining sobriety can be uncovered from something as ordinary as feeling bored? This conversation on All In The Mind zooms in on boredom as a complex emotion that can feel crushing for some and oddly productive for others. Host Sonica Dar teams up again with ABC science reporter Carl Smith to compare their very different lockdown experiences: Carl found boredom could lead to daydreaming and ideas, while Sonica felt it as a real emotional slump.
From there, you'll hear from psychologist Dr Sandy Mann, who explains "boredom proneness" and why she worries when people say they never feel bored, arguing there's "so much creative potential from being bored". Professor Thomas Goetz breaks boredom into five types and talks about how personality, age, gender and environment shape how often you feel bored and how badly it hits.
He also stresses that doing nothing isn’t automatically boredom – the key is that dragging sense that time has stopped and it feels unpleasant. The episode’s big experiment story comes from Dr Gi-hun Park, who had students sort red and green beans for half an hour, then tested how many creative excuses they could invent.
Those who were bored by bean-sorting came up with more original ideas, especially if they scored high on traits like openness to experience, need for cognition, learning orientation and an internal sense of control. You’ll hear practical ideas too: letting yourself be “properly bored” instead of instantly grabbing your phone, treating boredom as a cue to question meaning and challenge in your life, and using short, quiet moments to stare out the window and let your mind wander.
It’s a gentle reminder that while boredom can feel awful, it might also be the starting point for change. So next time boredom creeps in, will you reach for your phone or let your mind wander instead?
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