How Your Schedule Ruins Your Creativity: Revisiting the Importance of Boredom


Does your day-to-day look like this? Wake up, make breakfast, drive to work in intolerable rush hour traffic, get to the office at 9am, attend meetings, respond to never-ending emails, have lunch at 12pm, get back to the grind at exactly 1pm, go home at 5pm, scroll on your phone or watch TV while eating a microwave dinner out of exhaustion, stress about all the unfinished tasks you’ve left at work, and finally, go to bed to repeat the same thing the following morning.

What do you think is wrong with this typical day-to-day life? Sure, there’s nothing so bad about it. It’s stable; it pays the bills and keeps a roof over your head. However, how does going through this schedule for five days a week for the rest of your life going to make you feel? I believe this sort of schedule kills your spirit of creativity because you don’t have time to experience a deep sense of boredom or reflect on your actions and the direction in which your life is moving. But, you might ask, why should I reflect on my life, be bored, or discover creativity? Creativity adds positive energy to your life when the exhaustion of day-to-day survival depletes your mental health. Imagine being engrossed in a new idea, one would be excited to test it out and experiment if it’s a good idea or not. Boredom and reflection are the keys to unlocking the enthusiasm, excitement, and positive anticipation that comes from creativity.

If you sit in a chair and allow yourself to do nothing, your mind will be so bored, it’ll come up with random chores to do or make you pick up your phone and scroll through social media. However, if you let the emotion of boredom be, continue to sit with it, and accept its existence, your mind will start to calm down and reach a reflective state. The mind will evaluate the state of things like the trajectory of your life, your wants and desires, and your default emotional state. Experiencing boredom is needed to reach the introspective, self-reflective state because boredom triggers the mind to switch from processing and reacting to external stimuli to integrating past experiences into your existing knowledge base.

The mind has a couple processes or modes of operation, one that deals with external stimuli and judges how to react to outside forces. The other state deals with the inner world and processes the effects of whatever external stimuli you’ve experienced. I will call the first mode external processing and the second mode internal processing. Sitting through more than a few minutes of boredom intentionally disconnects your mind from external stimuli, coaxing your mind to switch to introspection mode.

Introspection leads to creativity because internal reflection deals with making sense of the unknown and the immaterial. Ideas are abstract and don’t have material form, so one needs an introspective mind to create abstract ideas. One can get inspiration from external stimuli, however, outside information can only be used to generate something new only after it has been integrated into your existing knowledge base through introspection and self-reflection. Integration of new experiences allows the brain to create new connections between bits of information in your knowledge base. Only then will one be able to transcend simply consuming information, to transform from a consumer into a creator.

How does this relate to your day-to-day routine? The routine presented in the introduction is one that is full of external processing. For example, the mind engages in external processing while driving because one must be aware of other cars to travel safely. One must listen to coworkers talk during meetings and process other forms of communication to avoid losing one’s job. One bombards one’s mind with a barrage of photos and videos on social media. A lot of mental external processing goes on to participate in these tasks. The typical daily routine stresses the mind with too much external stimuli processing. This is why one gets home from work feeling exhausted. If you can incorporate introspection into your daily routine, you can face each day with new-found energy and ideas about how you want your life to turn out. You can turn your life from a machine routine into an adventure.





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