One of the most famous lines from the AMC television show “Mad Men” is “Only boring people are bored.” It’s the response of icy character Betty Draper to her son, Bobby, when he complains about having nothing to do one summer day.
But Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks, who wrote “The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life,” encourages people to lean into boredom. Brooks argues in a recent article for Harvard Business Review that boredom is good, especially in this age, when it’s all too easy to fi ll time with a mindless doomscroll. Brooks says when people are bored or otherwise not occupied cognitively our brains use the default mode network, defi ned as “a group of brain regions that are active when a person is not actively engaged in external tasks.”
It’s a period “When you think about nothing while your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life,” Brooks says. “What does my life mean? You go to uncomfortable existential questions when you’re bored.” By rarely letting brains explore those spaces, people are more prone to depression and anxiety because their lives can feel hollow. Brooks challenges people to not look at their phone the moment they wake up or to go for a walk without listening to a podcast or music.
Start small with being bored. Five minutes here, 10 minutes there and work your way up. “Watch your life change,” Brooks says. “No. 1, you’ll be less bored with ordinary things in your life. If you get better at the skills of boredom, you’ll be less bored with your job. You’ll be less bored with your relationships. You’ll be less bored with the things that are going on around you.”
