You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why.

ARTHUR BROOKS: You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn't be clearer. Let me give you the good side of boredom in general. Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied otherwise cognitively, which switches over our thinking

system to use a part of our brain that's called the default mode network. That sounds fancy. It's really not. The default mode network is a bunch of structures in your brain that switch on when you don't have anything else to think about. So you forgot your phone and you're sitting at a light, for example.

That's when your default mode network goes on. We don't like it. My colleague in the psychology department here at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, he did experiments where people had to sit in a room for 15 minutes with instructions to do absolutely nothing, and there was nothing in the room to do, except there was a button in front of them

that they could push. And if they did, they gave themselves a painful electric shock. Sit there bored, or get a shock. A big majority of the participants gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing. We don't like boredom. Boredom is boredom is terrible. Why is boredom so bad? Well, because the default mode network makes

us think about things that might be kind of uncomfortable. When you think about nothing while your mind wanders and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning in your life. What does my life mean? You go to uncomfortable existential questions when you're bored. That turns out to be incredibly important, incredibly good. One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression