In a video published on Harvard Business Review’s YouTube channel, Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks argues that boredom is not a flaw of the human mind but a necessity. His message is direct: “You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored.”
The brain’s “default mode network”
According to Brooks, boredom switches our thinking to a set of brain structures called the default mode network. It turns on when we have nothing else to think about, for example when we forget our phone and wait at a traffic light, and it steers the mind toward big questions such as “What does my life mean?”
Brooks illustrates how much people avoid this state with experiments by his Harvard colleague Dan Gilbert. Participants sat alone in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except a button that gave them a painful electric shock. As Brooks describes it, “A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing.”
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“A doom loop of meaning”
Brooks links today’s rise in depression and anxiety in part to people not knowing the meaning of their lives. The cause, he says, is in our pockets: the screen has allowed us to shut off the default mode network almost completely.
“If every time you’re slightly bored you pull out your phone, it’s going to get harder and harder for you to find meaning,” Brooks says. He calls this “a doom loop of meaning” and “the recipe for depression and anxiety and a sense of hollowness.”
The professor’s own protocol
Brooks says he follows his own advice. He has a no-device policy after 7 p.m., does not sleep with his phone, keeps devices away from family meals and takes regular social media and screen cleanses. He describes the start of each cleanse this way: “It’s like children screaming in my head because that’s how dopamine is saying, get the phone, get the phone. That’s addiction.”
His advice to others is concrete: go to the gym without your phone, commute without even the radio, and build up to periods of boredom of 15 minutes or longer. As the skill grows, he says, people become less bored with their jobs, their relationships and ordinary life, and begin “digging into the biggest questions in your life, purpose, meaning, coherence, significance.”
Brooks closes with a message to his own children and to everyone else: “Put down your phones. You need more meaning in your life. And so do I.”
