MindsKeep Blog

The Enemy We Cannot Tolerate

You know the reflex. You are standing in a checkout line. The person ahead of you is paying with a handful of coins, counting them one by one. There is a lull of perhaps twelve seconds. And before those twelve seconds are over, your hand has already reached into your pocket, unlocked your phone, and opened an app. You do not decide to do this. It simply happens. The moment threatens to become empty, and your body moves to fill it.

This reflex is so automatic that most of us never notice it. We live inside an economy of constant distraction, where every gap in attention is an opportunity for a notification, a scroll, a refresh. The average person checks their phone dozens of times a day, and many of those checks are not responses to anything—they are preemptive strikes against the possibility of being alone with an unoccupied mind.

What are we so afraid of? The answer, surprisingly, is boredom. Not the dramatic, soul-crushing boredom of a three-hour lecture on tax law, but the small, ordinary boredom of a quiet moment. The boredom of waiting. The boredom of walking without a podcast. The boredom of sitting on a couch with nothing to do. We have constructed an entire digital infrastructure to ensure that this kind of boredom never touches us, and we treat its arrival as a minor emergency.

But what if boredom is not the enemy? What if it is one of the most underrated resources for a healthy, creative, self-aware life? Over the past two decades, psychologists have begun to study boredom with the seriousness it deserves, and the findings are quietly revolutionary. Boredom, it turns out, is not a void. It is a signal. And like all signals, it contains information—if we are willing to listen.

What Boredom Actually Is

Before we can make peace with boredom, we need to understand what it is. Most people define boredom loosely as "having nothing to do," but psychologists have found this definition inadequate. Boredom is not simply the absence of activity. It is a specific emotional and cognitive state with its own signature.

In a landmark 2012 paper, psychologists John Eastwood, Alexandra Frischen, Mark Fenske, and Daniel Smilek proposed what they called the attentional failure model of boredom. They defined boredom not as a lack of stimulation, but as a failure of attention: the aversive experience of wanting to engage in satisfying mental activity but being unable to do so [1]. This is a subtle but crucial distinction. Boredom is not "nothing is happening." It is "I want to be engaged, but I cannot find a way in."

Think about it. You can be surrounded by stimulation—a crowded room, a noisy café, a screen full of content—and still feel bored. Conversely, you can be alone in a quiet room with a single book and feel utterly absorbed. Boredom, in Eastwood's framework, is not about the external environment. It is about the relationship between your attention and what is available to it. When your attentional system cannot successfully connect with the stimuli in front of you, boredom arises as a frustrated desire for engagement.

Boredom is the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity. It arises from a failure of attentional systems to successfully connect with available stimuli, producing a frustrated desire for engagement.

Eastwood, Frischen, Fenske & Smilek, on the attentional failure model of boredom [1]

This model explains why boredom feels so unpleasant. It is not passive. It is active and effortful. Your brain is trying to engage, scanning for something to hold onto, and failing. The result is a restless, dissatisfied, slightly agitated state—the feeling of being trapped in a waiting room with no magazines and no phone.

Two Flavors of Boredom

Researchers Wijnand van Tilburg and Eric Igou have identified two distinct experiences that people commonly call boredom, and understanding the difference is essential for working with it productively [2].

The first is boredom from lack of challenge. This is the boredom of a task that is too easy, too repetitive, too undemanding. You are folding laundry. You are sitting through a meeting that could have been an email. Your brain has capacity to spare, and the activity in front of you cannot absorb it. This boredom says: "I am capable of more than this."

The second is boredom from lack of meaning. This is the deeper, more existential boredom. You might be busy—even challenged—but the activity feels empty. It does not connect to your values, your goals, or your sense of purpose. You are checking boxes, running on autopilot, and a quiet voice asks: "Why does any of this matter?" This boredom says: "This does not feel meaningful to me."

Both forms of boredom are uncomfortable, but they carry different information. The first tells you that you are underutilized. The second tells you that you are misaligned. Neither is a reason to reach for your phone. Both are reasons to pay attention.

Boredom as a Signal, Not a Sentence

If boredom is a signal, what is it signaling? Psychologists Shane Bench and Heather Lench offered a compelling answer in their 2013 paper "On the Function of Boredom." They argued that boredom is an adaptive emotion—one that evolved to serve a specific purpose. That purpose is to motivate change [3].

Think about other emotions and their functions. Fear signals danger and motivates escape. Disgust signals contamination and motivates avoidance. Joy signals reward and motivates repetition. Anger signals obstruction and motivates confrontation. Each emotion is a messenger, delivering information about your relationship to the environment and preparing you to act on it.

Boredom, Bench and Lench proposed, signals that the current activity is no longer serving a useful goal. It tells you that you are investing time and attention in something that has stopped being rewarding, challenging, or meaningful. And it motivates you to switch—to disengage from the current activity and seek out something new [3]. Boredom is not a punishment. It is a nudge. It is your brain saying, "Whatever you are doing right now, it is not working. Try something else."

This functional view of boredom reframes the entire experience. The discomfort of boredom is not arbitrary. It is designed to be unpleasant enough that you will do something to make it stop. But here is the critical point: the "something" does not have to be a distraction. It can be a reorientation. Boredom is asking you to change, but it does not specify what kind of change. You can change your activity (pick up your phone), or you can change your relationship to the moment (pay attention, reflect, create).

The Meaning Connection

Van Tilburg and Igou took this further, arguing that boredom is fundamentally a threat to meaning. When you are bored, they proposed, you experience a discrepancy between the meaning you expect from an activity and the meaning it actually provides [2]. Boredom arises when an activity fails to satisfy a valued goal. And because meaning is so central to human well-being, boredom is powerfully aversive—it signals that something important is missing.

This is why boredom can feel so existential. It is not just "this is dull." It is "this does not matter." And that feeling, however uncomfortable, is valuable. It is a compass. It tells you when you are spending time on things that do not connect to who you are and what you care about. If you never feel bored, you may never notice that you are living on autopilot.

The problem is not boredom itself. The problem is that we have become so skilled at eliminating boredom that we no longer hear what it is trying to tell us. We have muted the messenger. And in doing so, we have cut ourselves off from a powerful source of self-knowledge.

The Creative Power of the Unengaged Mind

One of the most surprising findings in boredom research is that boredom can make you more creative. This seems counterintuitive—how can a state of mental disengagement produce novel ideas? But the evidence is consistent and compelling.

In a 2014 study, psychologists Karen Gasper and Brianna Middlewood at Penn State University induced different emotional states in participants—boredom, elation, relaxation, and distress—then measured their creative thinking. They found that boredom, like elation, promoted associative thought: the ability to connect distant ideas, see unusual patterns, and generate novel associations [5]. Participants in the boredom condition performed better on tasks requiring divergent thinking and conceptual flexibility than those in relaxation or distress conditions.

Why would boredom boost creativity? The answer lies in what happens when your mind is unengaged. When you are focused on a specific task, your attention is narrow and constrained. You are following established paths, applying known rules, staying within boundaries. This kind of thinking is efficient, but it is not where creative breakthroughs happen. Creative insights typically come from making connections between ideas that seem unrelated—from seeing a pattern that no one else has noticed.

Boredom loosens the constraints. When your mind is not anchored to a specific task, it begins to wander. It makes associations. It revisits memories. It plays with ideas. This is the mental state in which "aha" moments occur—the shower thought, the walk-away insight, the idea that arrives when you stop trying to force it. Boredom creates the conditions for this kind of thinking by removing the anchor of focused attention and allowing the mind to drift into its associative networks.

Boredom, like elation, promotes associative thought—the ability to connect distant ideas and generate novel associations. When the mind is unengaged, it loosens cognitive constraints and enters a state conducive to creative insight.

Gasper & Middlewood, on boredom and associative thinking [5]

The Challenge of Being Alone with Your Thoughts

Of course, there is a catch. Allowing your mind to wander—truly sitting with an unstructured, unoccupied mind—is harder than it sounds. In a famous 2014 study published in Science, Timothy Wilson and his colleagues at the University of Virginia asked participants to sit alone in a sparsely furnished room for six to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. No phone, no book, no pen. Just their own thoughts [4].

The results were striking. Many participants found the experience deeply unpleasant. So unpleasant, in fact, that in a follow-up experiment, a majority of male participants—and a significant number of female participants—chose to administer a mild electric shock to themselves rather than continue sitting alone with their thoughts. They preferred physical pain to the discomfort of an unoccupied mind [4].

This study became famous because it seemed to reveal something profound about modern life: we have become so unaccustomed to being alone with our thoughts that the experience is genuinely aversive. But it is important to understand what the study is and is not saying. It is not saying that thinking is inherently unpleasant. It is saying that unstructured thinking—thinking without a task, a prompt, or a goal—is a skill that many of us have lost. And like any lost skill, it can be rebuilt.

This is where journaling becomes transformative. Journaling gives your unstructured mind a gentle scaffold. It is not a task that demands focused attention in the way that work does. But it is also not pure, undifferentiated mind-wandering. It is a middle ground—a way to be with your thoughts while giving them a direction. The page is a container for the unengaged mind, a place where boredom's creative energy can be channeled rather than fled from.

The Boredom Journal: A 15-Minute Practice

The next time you feel boredom rising—the checkout line, the waiting room, the quiet evening with no plans—try this instead of reaching for your phone. The Boredom Journal is a simple 15-minute practice that turns boredom from something to escape into something to explore. It combines what Eastwood taught us about attention, what Bench and Lench revealed about boredom's function, and what Gasper and Middlewood showed about creativity.

You do not need to do this practice perfectly. You do not even need to do all fifteen minutes. The goal is not to become a boredom expert. The goal is to interrupt the reflex—the automatic reach for the phone—and replace it with a moment of curiosity. Each time you choose curiosity over distraction, you are rebuilding the muscle of unstructured thinking. And each time, boredom becomes a little less threatening and a little more interesting.

What to Expect

The first few times you try this, it will feel awkward. Your mind will resist. You will think, "This is stupid. I could be scrolling." That resistance is exactly the point. It is the sound of a mind that has been trained to flee stillness, and it will soften with practice.

Over time, you may notice something unexpected: boredom becomes a signal you look forward to. Not because it feels good, but because you have learned that it often precedes a useful insight, a creative idea, or a moment of self-understanding. The boredom that once felt like an interruption becomes a doorway. And the journal is the key that opens it.

Making Peace with Empty Time

We live in a culture that treats empty time as wasted time. We fill our commutes with podcasts, our workouts with music, our waiting rooms with phones, our evenings with streaming. We have constructed a life with no gaps, and we have done it so thoroughly that we no longer remember what gaps are for.

But gaps are not wasted. Gaps are where the mind does its best work. They are where ideas connect, where memories resurface, where meaning is made. The brain's default mode network—the system that activates when you are not focused on a specific task—is associated with creativity, self-reflection, memory consolidation, and social cognition. It is the network that turns raw experience into understanding. And it only activates when you stop doing.

Boredom is the doorway to this network. It is the feeling that arises when focused attention releases its grip and the mind begins to wander. We have learned to fear that feeling, to flee it, to fill it. But in doing so, we have cut ourselves off from one of the most valuable mental states available to us.

Journaling offers a way through. It does not demand that you sit in pure, undifferentiated boredom—the kind that made Wilson's participants shock themselves. Instead, it gives you a gentle structure, a container for the wandering mind. You are not doing nothing. You are writing. But the writing is loose, associative, exploratory. It is focused enough to be bearable and open enough to be creative. It is the bridge between the discomfort of boredom and the insights it can yield.

And because this kind of writing is deeply personal—because it involves the raw, unfiltered material of a wandering mind—it deserves a space that is truly private. This is why I believe the kind of encrypted, privacy-first journaling that MindsKeep offers matters for this practice. When your entries are encrypted on your device before they ever touch a server, when not even the platform can read what you write, you can follow the boredom wherever it leads. You can write the strange associations, the half-formed ideas, the memories that surprise you. You can be honest in a way that the distracted mind rarely allows.

Boredom is not the enemy. It is a messenger. It tells you when you are underchallenged, when you are misaligned, when you are on autopilot. It creates the conditions for creativity and self-discovery. And it invites you, in the quiet gaps of your day, to be more fully present to your own life. The next time you feel it rising, try not to flee. Pick up a pen. Open a journal. See where the boredom takes you.