What A Little Boredom Might Get You

There are so many options out there today on the market to entertain us, we might hardly ever find ourselves feeling bored at any part of the day.

Whether we are engaged in mundane tasks like taking the train or bus to work, waiting for our next appointment to start, or standing in line etc, we have the option of listening to audio books, playing games on our phones, checking on e-mails, and a lot more.

We can turn to many tools and outlets today in order to fill that void and escape the boredom.

After all, who really wants to embrace the boredom?...

For many, this feeling is very difficult to deal with and it can feel like you are slowly going crazy if you go from a highly stimulated environment, to having to all of a sudden entertain yourself with something like your imagination.

It turns out though, that boredom might play a big part in helping to motivate creativity in our lives.

Previous studies have shown that exercising a bit of boredom might help to improve our divergent thinking and convergent thinking skills. And researchers suggest that the boredom effectively increases the daydreaming effect involving creativity.

When participants have been tested in previous studies, on their divergent or convergent thinking ability, they were required to engage in a boring task before being analyzed on their creativity. It turned out that the more boring the task they were engaged in, the more likely their creative abilities were going to get a little boost. Participants have repeatedly demonstrated superior creative performance in studies against others who were either elated, distressed, or relaxed.

Other scientists have suggested that boredom might even help to push an individual to search for deeper satisfaction and meaning in their life.

Psychologists have previously referred to boredom as the seeking state. This is because the feeling of being bored might have prompted us to try something new, that we otherwise never would have tried or thought to engage with had we not been feeling bored in our life. And trying something new in our life might end-up resulting in more reward and satisfaction for us later on. Embracing the boredom rather than trying to entertain our way out of it, might be just what we need to give ourselves a needed push to go out and try new projects and goals

If we want to increase the creativity in our life then it might help us to let our mind wander a little bit the next time any feelings of boredom arise.