In this episode, Dr. K’dee Crews and Amanda Anguish show why boredom is a feature—not a flaw—revealing how small doses boost creativity (convergent thinking), problem-solving, resilience, and true rest, plus simple ways to add healthy “white space” to busy lives.

<p>In this episode, Dr. K’dee Crews and Amanda Anguish show why boredom is a feature—not a flaw—revealing how small doses boost creativity (convergent thinking), problem-solving, resilience, and true rest, plus simple ways to add healthy “white space” to busy lives.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Beautiful Minds Wellness

The Brain People Podcast 2025

Amanda Anguish

Daniel Binus

Politics and Mental Health

Psychology of Marketing

K'dee Elsen Crews

Complex PTSD Part 1

Complex PTSD Part 2

Anger-Management

DBT Skills

Psychedelics

Dark Psychology

Shame

Men-vs-Women

Ultimate Health

Barbara O'Neill

True Remedies

John Scharffenberg

Longevity Secrets

The Upside of Boredom

Welcome to the Brain People podcast, a show where 4 mental health experts team up to bring you practical tools for overcoming mental health challenges.

The Brain people don't replace your doctor or therapist, but we will give you some extra tools to help you on your journey.

So join us as we fight mental illness 1 episode at a time.

Hopefully you're not bored as you're listening to this episode because we're gonna be talking about boredom but not probably as you might think we will.

We're gonna be talking about the benefits of boredom.

I'm a licensed clinical psychologist, your host for today, And I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Amanda English, and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And this episode is inspired by your own boredom, right?

I, I would like to be bored more often, especially after learning the benefits of it, but more actually, I think I've been inspired because, you know, we like to talk about things that we talk about in our therapy sessions, things that come up.

And I've noticed, not only have I seen this in life, Just people seemingly, what do they do when they're bored?

But also just hearing people talk about, you know, clients talk about, oh, how many different extracurricular activities their kids are involved in?

Or, you know, what do I do when my kids say they're bored?

You know, that's probably a pretty popular 1.

And we think it's a problem, and so we fill it with more things.

We automatically assume, we talk about beliefs, we automatically assume, oh, well, I have to hurry up and fix this because we assume it's a problem.

And I wanted to, I really wanted to dive in a little bit deeper and ask the question, which I like to do with a lot of things is, is this really a problem?

And if it is a problem, or if it isn't a problem, then maybe I should be addressing it differently.

And I think I don't know if you're gonna talk about this but my mind goes to this the type of society that we live in today and just being overly stimulated overly busy and not just busy with work but also busy with entertainment in a way that yeah we're kind of treating boredom as if it's this illness or something that we have to a flu that we have to get rid of and what if it's not?

Yeah I used to work in a very low socioeconomic situation and I would notice that the people that I was working with, which they weren't making a lot of money in their roles, they would tell me every weekend, oh, I'm taking my 2 and 3 year old to Disney on ice.

And I'm thinking, that sounds expensive to do this like every weekend.

Or, oh, I've got my kid in, And this is other people, not just the people I worked with, but.

I've got my kids in like 3 or 4 extra curricular activities, and I'm thinking, wow, that's how do you manage all of your kids and all of those different curricular activity, extracurricular activities?

Because are you ever home and they're not eating dinner together as they're constantly on the road and couples are having to split to go to their kids games and practices and things like that.

And I thought, this doesn't sound sustainable.

Like how do, how are we actually operating at this capacity because we're afraid of being bored or we're afraid that our kids might be bored.

Yeah I think that's a big component like that fear of being bored and being left with ourselves without any distraction.

Mm-hmm and maybe some people will be able to relate with this, but I've lived, you know, many number of years before smartphones and the internet and all of this sort of thing.

So I remember a childhood where I didn't have these things and I was in fact bored a lot of the time.

And so I've started to just pay attention and I wonder if, you know, some of the parents that might even be my age or slightly younger are actually not remembering those days too and what we used to do before.

We had all of these things to distract us and entertain us.

I was watching a video recently and you're talking about parents and kids and how kids have all this anxiety and so forth and they're like what do you think is a big contributing factor and I was expecting them to say phones, right, media and they actually highlighted that they were having too many extracurricular activities causing a lot of pressure but also not allowing for kids to then have that space of boredom, I guess, they didn't use that word, but for creativity and for connection and for other things and I was like wow You know 1 day if I'm a parent like I want to be intentional to not just fill the time But and also we're kind of in a society that's pushing for productivity and success, but we're lacking in these other areas that are really important.

And really they showed in that video they're talking about how kids can it actually doesn't there's no better outcome, There's no change in the outcome for success later on, whether the kids played outside or did these extracurricular activities.

And I was like, wow, you would think that, you know, cello and piano and all these things would be more beneficial than playing.

But there's something even beneficial for playing and boredom that we don't recognize.

Yeah, we might've read a similar article because I read 1 and I was even talking with Dr.

Binus at 1 point about how even sometimes these extracurricular activities, if they're doing more and more and more of them, like even other practices that they're doing outside of even the extracurricular activity, to get better at that, it actually sets them up to be even worse sometimes in sports because they don't care about the big game anymore because they're in so many different games that it's like no big deal if this 1.

So even in professional sports, if they get onto that place, it's not even a big deal anymore to them.

But I wanted to highlight a study that came out in 2013 that talked about especially small doses of boredom are actually beneficial when it comes to academic but specifically creative thinking and they use the term convergent thinking.

So if we talk about divergent thinking, that's being open to a lot of different possibilities.

Like just, you know, that could be like a brainstorming session or something like that.

That would be what we would consider divergent thinking.

But convergent thinking is similar to that, but opposite as well.

And that is that we're taking a lot of ideas and boiling them down to 1 solid solution.

So a lot of our problem-solving is actually helped by having small doses of boredom.

So well what does that look like if that were to play out?

So how convergent thinking works is you're looking at all of the possible solutions that you might have, but then each, as you take each 1 of those possible solutions, you start looking at, okay, what are the pros and the cons of each of these solutions?

And then you imagine, like, played out how would that look?

And then based off of that, you can find, like, okay, this is the 1 that's probably going to make the most sense.

And I started thinking about that a little bit more and I thought, you know, where is 1 of my favorite places to do conversion thinking?

I mean, I do know I'm doing it, but I didn't realize in the topic of boredom like what I was actually doing.

And if I'm alone in the car and I don't have the radio on, what am I doing?

I'm problem solving and I don't even really think about it as problem solving, but by the time I get home, maybe a 20 minute drive, some things of, I know, oh yeah, I want to talk to this person.

I want to have this conversation or oh, I want to write this down in my notebook with all my ideas of things that I want to do because I'm going to whittle it down to this thing or I have a presentation I'm working on.

All of that happens in a very boring setting of just driving from 1 place to the other.

And it's interesting because it's actually in the mundane moments where our brains already know, like, this is, I know how to get there.

I don't need to think about it I just go that's where the most creativity happens is when we're doing mundane things or when we're completely bored.

And that reminds me of how so many of my clients say you know I hit the bed and all these ideas and problems, the brain is bored enough, right, that could be beneficial, but just not that time, right?

So creating boredom in some ways, carving that out in ways that could allow the brain to have this conversion thinking.

We don't, we, you know, I have, I met, wanted to mention even when it comes to scheduling, a lot of times when I'm talking with people, they think a schedule is to be filled.

I have to, from the time I wake up in the morning to the time I go to bed, I have to be so productive with my time that they start to forget even, well, what about the transition time?

Are you, you might start work at this time and end work at this time, but did you consider like how long it takes you to drive there?

Oh, do you consider how long you need to go to the bathroom throughout the day?

Like to stop to take a water break or those types of things.

And people go, Oh, no wonder I'm so stressed out because they don't think of transition and even mundane moments as being needed in their schedule.

But also too is Have I scheduled mundane or boring downtime, we might call it, into our schedule?

Like you said, if we go to bed at night and we haven't spent that time, the brain goes, oh good, you're going to listen to me now because I've got all kinds of ideas.

I, it, they've just been shut out because you've been, you know, watching something, listening to something, talking about something, and you never had that downtime to just be in the moment to process things.

There's a great book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry that even those transition periods where it might be driving, it might be you're on the toilet.

We have even then distracted ourselves and not given our brains those time to wander.

So the book highlights like wandering is really important but now we have podcasts.

Well, sometimes, yeah, you can turn it off.

Or you're on the toilet looking at your phone, right?

Just all these other moments that our brain could have reprieve and have...

Because reprieve really does help with that creativity that you were mentioning.

Like I said, when we get in the car, we turn on the radio, rather than appreciating that as downtime, boredom time, whatever you want to call it.

And then I think that's 1 of the reasons why our kids say I'm when our kids say I'm bored, we go, Oh, no, I have to fix this.

Whereas, you know, I, I was even challenged hearing somebody say, Well, you're bored.

Instead of saying, Oh, here's 15 different things like pick something hurry up, giving them the option of saying, or doing what do you want to do with that now?

Series

The Brain People Podcast 2025

The Upside of Boredom

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