Not long ago I realized something that stuck with me: I am bored a lot more than I thought.
Until recently I didn’t even register it as boredom. I thought I was unmotivated and innately resistant to getting things started. In these moments it was much easier to reach for my phone and fill this uncomfortable pause by checking instagram, watching some reels, or scroll through some reddit posts. Anything to not confront myself with that itch of restlessness.
It occurred not only at home, but also when waiting for the bus, standing in line, or sitting through a dull section of a lecture.
This probably doesn’t sound groundbreaking to anyone reading this. We all do it and most of us have this reflex of reaching for our phones when we feel bored. But it wasn’t until i stumbled across a video by journalist Johnny Harris that I started questioning this habit more than I usually do. A video that I can highly recommend to anyone by the way: Why Everything is Making You Feel Bored.
In the video, Harris talks about the modern relationship between boredom and motivation. He mentioned that the constant drive to eliminate boredom can paradoxically erode our motivation and creative capacity. And that embracing boredom, sitting in it rather than avoiding it, can actually enrich our creative process.
Since then I’ve been looking into the topic and changing the way I think about attention, bordeom, and creativity.
Boredom and the Creative Process
The first piece of academic research I came across was a study by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, published by Consciousness and Cognition in 2014: Does being bored make us more creative?
Their experiment was quite simple: one group of participants were asked to copy numbers out of a phone book – a deliberately boring task. The control group did not perform any initial task. Afterwards both groups were asked to come up with as many uses for a pair of plastic cups as possible.
The result: participants who had been primed with boredom generated more creative and diverse ideas than the control group. Mann and Cadman’s explanation is that boredom encourages mind-wandering. A state in which our brain forms new associations and explores different mental territories.
Different Kinds of Boredom
Research by Thomas Goetz and colleagues called Types of boredom: An experience sampling approach identifies five types of boredom:
- Indifferent Boredom: A relaxed, indifferent state
- Calibrating Boredom: A slightly unpleasant feeling, prompting thoughts about different activities
- Searching Boredom: A ore intense desire to find engaging alternatives
- Reactant Boredom: A highly unpleasant state, characterized by restlesness and a strong urge to escape the situation
- Apathetic Boredom: A particularly unpleasant form, marked by low arousal and feelings akin to helplessness or depression
Understanding these nuances could be important. While certain types of boredom, like searching boredom, can stimulate creativity, others, like apathetic boredom, might hinder creativity.
Make the User Bored?
In addition to changing how we approach the creative process, boredom could also be an important emotion to instill in users. Instead of the conventional approach of minimizing user boredom at all costs perhaps we should consider how to harness its creative potential.
Intentional pauses in digital experiences could on the one hand allow users for their minds to wander and encourage moments of reflection, but might also result in a lot of frustration for the users if they are not receptive for it. A specific ruleset could be interesting.
Developing a new Design Process
In most design processes today we tend to optimize for efficiency, flow, engagement, and constant stimulation. We pack brainstorming workshops, sprint cycles, and ideation sessions filled with activities and prompts. We check notifications while waiting for feedback and often leave little room for mental idleness.
But if boredom can foster creativity, as research suggests, maybe we should design boredom into the design process instead of avoiding it. Creating space for disengagement and intentionally embracing boredom could be a valid and valuable phase. For example, before an ideation session, designers could schedule a period of low stimulation, spending fifteen minutes on an undemanding and repetitive task such sorting materials, going for a short walk without media input, or simply looking out of a window. This would allow the mind to wander freely and tap into its associative processes.
Throughout longer creative phases, alternating between focused work sprints and unstructured, boring breaks could encourage the brain to process ideas in the background and make unexpected connections, which aligns with creativity research by Sio & Ormerod from 2009 that suggests that incubation periods can enhance problem-solving and originality.
The exact structure of a new design process and the utility of boredom in it still need to be thought about but the potential effects are fascinating and, to my knowledge, have never been considered in the context of a framework before.
Research to be done
At this point, much of the existing research on boredom and creativity focuses on correlations or experimental effects in controlled settings. Studies like those by Mann & Cadman (2014) and Bench & Lench (2013) suggest that inducing boredom can temporarily boost creative output. However we still lack a clear understanding of how structured boredom impacts real-world creative processes over time. Can boredom really improve creative output consistently in a corporate context?
There are still several open questions. How often and how long should boredom phases be integrated to yield great creative benefits? Are certain types of boredom more conducive to creativity than others? We know little about how boredom plays out on a team level. While boredom may foster divergent thinking in individuals, does it have the same or a similar effect in collaborative settings, or does it risk disengaging the entire group. There is a challenge in balancing boredom with professional constraints (tight deadlines, fat-paced workflows, client expectations, etc.) which remains an open and practical concern.
Why I think this matters
As design culture becomes increasingly optimized for speed, constant creativity, and measurable output, we risk losing one of the most human elements of the creative process: the minds ability to wander, reflect, and synthesize. Exploring a design process that makes space to slow down and embrace the feeling of boredom offers a way to reclaim this ability – ideally without reducing productivity and instead fostering deeper creativity.
