Are you still afraid of boredom? It might help you
Twenty minutes a day of doing nothing, on purpose, and what an ADHD brain does when nothing is on offer. The science of boredom has a better story than the productivity industry.
If you are like me - tired of postponing your life to tomorrow, next week, next year - you know the feeling of life passing by. The postponed tasks and unmet ambitions trail you like ghosts. They are there at night. They are there in the morning. And to get away from them you binge Netflix, scroll TikTok, smoke weed, anything to avoid turning round and looking at them.
Boredom, for someone with ADHD, is not neutral. It is close to painful. The constant need for stimulation and the trouble managing attention make sitting still and doing nothing feel impossible, and stress-inducing before it feels anything else. What I have learned is that letting myself be bored is closer to a necessity than a luxury, especially with ADHD. It is a skill. It is harder for us than for most. And the payoff, in clarity and in getting things done, is out of all proportion to the effort.
The Misunderstood Virtue of Boredom #
For years I treated boredom as an enemy, a void to fill with any distraction to hand. Then I read Sandi Mann’s The Upside of Downtime and started looking at the research behind it. Boredom tolerated rather than fled turns out to be a catalyst: in Mann’s own experiments, people who had first done a boring task produced more creative ideas afterwards than people who had not (Mann, S., 2017) (Mann, S. & Cadman, R., 2014).
My Experiment with Boredom #
So I tried it. Twenty minutes a day, sitting quietly, no phone, no music, letting the mind go where it went. That is a strange thing to do in a world built to hijack attention every ninety seconds, and the first week was genuinely unpleasant. I kept going. Something shifted.
The Transformational Power of Mind-Wandering #
In those sessions of apparent nothing, my mind wandered, and in the wandering it kept arriving at solutions to problems I had thought were stuck. This is a documented effect. A period of undemanding activity, during which the mind is free to wander, improves performance on creative problems compared with resting or working straight through (Baird, B. et al., 2012) (Sio, U. N. & Ormerod, T. C., 2009). One caveat the popular version leaves out: the famous Harvard phone study found that a wandering mind is, on average, an unhappier one (Killingsworth, M. A. & Gilbert, D. T., 2010). Wandering is good for ideas and mixed for mood. Both things are true.
For those of us with ADHD the practice is harder at the start. Our minds are wired for constant engagement, and stillness feels like an itch. That is exactly why it is worth doing. The restlessness that makes boredom hard is the restlessness that, given nowhere else to go, starts producing.
Boredom as a Gateway to Self-Understanding #
Creativity is the small benefit. The larger one is what boredom forces you to look at. Psychologists no longer treat boredom as a mere lack of stimulation but as an aversive state with a job: John Eastwood defines it as wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity, and that discomfort pushes the mind inward (Eastwood, J. D. et al., 2012) (Danckert, J. & Eastwood, J. D., 2020).
In my sessions the noise of the day fell away, and what was left was the set of fears and uncertainties the noise had been covering. I did, without meaning to, what psychologists call autobiographical planning - the mind wandering to your own life story and to what you are going to do about it, which Smallwood and Schooler describe as one of the main things a wandering mind is for (Smallwood, J. & Schooler, J. W., 2015). It is not comfortable. It is useful.
Sorting through the clutter, I found that many of the tasks that had haunted me were smaller than I had let them become. Faced directly, in boredom, they broke into parts I could actually do. Mann puts it as boredom giving us the opportunity to explore and search our own minds, to find out what we want (Mann, S., 2017) (Deal, L., 2014). That was my experience exactly.
Sitting with boredom turns out to be a form of mindfulness, which most psychological therapies now use in some form. Present with your thoughts, not judging them, not fleeing them, you start to see the patterns: what you think, how you react, what is really driving you. That is where most useful self-knowledge comes from.
In those quiet twenty minutes I met my fears and, more surprisingly, my actual wants. That self-awareness has changed how I take on most things since. Doing nothing, it turns out, can produce the most significant somethings - the insights that would not have arrived while I was busy.
Conclusion: A New Perspective on Life and Productivity #
Boredom changed what I mean by productive. Not every second filled, but the mind given room to breathe, reflect and make something. If you are caught in the loop of postponing and distracting, and especially if you have ADHD, try twenty minutes of nothing. It may hold more of what you have been avoiding, and more of what you want, than the next episode does.