Patience Is Bitter, but Its Fruit Is Sweet
In a less intense way, we all enter this less-than-optimal state when we turn to our devices to alleviate the experience of boredom. The distractions we seek don’t only consume our time, however. They also degrade many habits of mind that require time and patience to form, such as empathy, awareness, and emotional regulation.
We enjoy the efficiencies and distractions technology brings, but they leave us less skilled at patience. They teach us to value efficiency above all and to be suspicious of idle time, when we should see idle moments as opportunities for reflection and renewal.
With rates of anxiety rising in the U.S., particularly among teens, it is also worth considering how the frenetic pace of the online world, where so many of us spend so much of our time, contributes to our sense of feeling overwhelmed and out of control. Reclaiming our idle time and reorienting ourselves away from screens is one of many small yet radical acts that have the potential to improve the quality of our daily experiences.
Daydreaming seems a fusty term in an age when productivity and usefulness are prized. But as psychologists and neurologists have found, a wandering mind––often the first signal of impending boredom––is also a creative mind. In the 1960s, psychologist Jerome Singer, the grandfather of daydreaming studies, identified three kinds of mind-wandering: the productive, creative “positive constructive daydreaming,” obsessive “guilty–dysphoric daydreaming,” and “poor attentional control.” Singer believed daydreaming was a positive adaptive behavior—a bold departure from the conventional wisdom at the time, which linked daydreaming to other psychopathologies such as excessive fantasizing.
Singer’s work found strong associations between daydreaming and the personality trait “openness to experience,” which demonstrates sensitivity, curiosity, and willingness to explore new ideas and feelings.
Daydreaming is also a prompt to memory. As Stefan Van der Stigchel argues in Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction, “When you are daydreaming (or mind-wandering, as it is referred to within scientific circles), memories that you thought were lost forever can come to the surface again.” He adds, “The neural activity that can be observed when you are daydreaming is very similar to that found in the ‘default network,’ a network of regions in the brain that are active during periods of rest.”
We must cultivate habits that allow for mindwandering and daydreaming. We must, every day, try to reclaim the time that technology has colonized.
Unstructured, unmediated time is especially important for the development of creativity in children. “In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished,” wrote Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in their examination of declining scores on the Torrance Test for creativity among American children. They hypothesize that one of the reasons creativity scores might be declining is children’s increased use of screen-based technologies during downtime. Rather than being left to their own imaginative devices, their wandering minds are often captured by devices—smartphones and other screens that grasp their attention and, in the process, prevent all other possible uses of those moments of idle time.
Aristotle is said to have warned, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
Parents have a crucial role to play in teaching children how to deal with boredom, and it can be as easy and as old-school as simply telling them: “Go outside and play.” Instead of handing a child a slot machine of distraction, encourage them to come up with their own game or activity. Rather than structuring and organizing an activity for your children, let them figure that out for themselves, or with their peers. Children are extraordinarily creative when given the space and time to indulge their wandering minds, but this often requires first overcoming the immediate challenge of handling their frustration and boredom. Placing the burden of alleviating one’s boredom back on a child isn’t a punishment; it’s an opportunity for them to find creative solutions to their discomfort and, as they mature into adults, to identify and cope with feelings of frustration.