An original TeaLamp explainer based on the sources listed below. Prepared by the TeaLamp Editorial Team with the help of AI.
We treat boredom as a problem to be solved, and our phones have made it almost extinct. The moment a queue forms or a meeting drags, a hand reaches for a screen and the empty minutes fill with noise. Yet a small body of research suggests we may have thrown away something useful. Boredom and creativity, it turns out, are closer cousins than they look: a dull stretch with nothing to do can leave the mind freer, stranger and more inventive than an hour of focused effort.
Key takeaways on boredom and creativity
- In a 2014 experiment, people who spent 15 minutes copying numbers from a phone directory came up with more creative uses for a pair of cups than people who skipped the boring task.
- The effect grew stronger the more passive the boredom: in a second experiment, people who simply read the phone numbers were more creative than people who copied them.
- When volunteers were left alone with only their thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes, most did not enjoy it, and two thirds of the men chose a mild electric shock over sitting quietly.
- An undemanding break helps creativity only for problems you have already wrestled with: in a 2012 study it improved repeated problems by about 41 percent, but not brand-new ones.
- Professional writers and physicists reported that about one in five of their most significant daily ideas arrived while their minds were wandering, not while they were working.
The phone book experiment, on the desk. Image generated by AI.
The phone book experiment
The clearest test of boredom and creativity comes from psychologists Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire. In a study published in 2014 in the journal Creativity Research Journal, they asked 80 volunteers to do something deliberately dull: copy telephone numbers out of a phone directory for 15 minutes. A control group skipped the chore entirely. Then everyone was given the same creative task, to dream up as many uses as possible for a pair of polystyrene cups.
The bored group did better. Its members produced more ideas, and more original ones, than the people who had gone straight to the creative task. Mann and Cadman then ran a second experiment with 90 more volunteers, this time with three groups: one copied the numbers, one simply read them, and one did nothing boring at all. The readers, whose task was the most passive and left the most room for the mind to drift, were the most creative of all. The authors’ explanation was daydreaming: the duller and more passive the task, the more the mind wanders, and wandering is where fresh connections form.
The room with nothing in it
If boredom is so useful, why do we run from it so hard? A famous series of experiments by Timothy Wilson and colleagues at the University of Virginia gives an uncomfortable answer. In 2014, in the journal Science, they reported 11 studies in which volunteers were left alone in a bare room with nothing to do but think, for between 6 and 15 minutes. No phone, no pen, no book. About half of the participants rated the experience at or below the middle of the enjoyment scale, and most said they found it hard to concentrate. Their minds wandered constantly, even with nothing competing for attention.
Then came the study that made headlines. Volunteers were first given a mild electric shock and asked how much they would pay to avoid feeling it again. Most said they would pay something. Then they sat alone for 15 minutes with a button that delivered the same shock if they pressed it. Among those who had said they would pay to avoid it, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women pressed the button at least once. One man pressed it 190 times and was set aside as an outlier. The researchers’ conclusion was blunt: most people seem to prefer doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.
The result is often quoted as proof that we hate our own thoughts, but the fuller picture is kinder. On average, participants rated just thinking as somewhat enjoyable, not miserable, and when asked what they had been thinking about, most reported pleasant things like weekend plans. The shock, rated only mildly unpleasant, may have been curiosity as much as escape. What the study really shows is that unstructured thinking is harder than we assume, and that we reach for stimulation before we give our minds a chance to settle.
The wandering mind at work
The link between a wandering mind and a creative one has been tested from another angle too. In 2012, Benjamin Baird and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, gave 145 students a classic creativity test: list unusual uses for everyday objects such as bricks and toothpicks. Then the students took a 12-minute break. Some did a demanding memory task, some rested quietly, some had no break at all, and some did a simple, undemanding task that let their minds drift. When everyone returned to the same problems, the undemanding-task group improved the most, by about 41 percent on the problems they had seen before. The other groups showed no such gain, and nobody improved on problems they were meeting for the first time.
The same pattern shows up in working life. In 2019, psychologists Shelly Gable, Elizabeth Hopper and Jonathan Schooler asked 98 professional writers and 87 theoretical physicists to report their most creative idea of each day, and what they were doing when it arrived. About one in five of those ideas came during spontaneous mind-wandering, while doing something else entirely, and the wandering ideas were rated just as creative and important as the ones formed at the desk. They were also more likely to arrive as a sudden “aha” moment, the feeling of a stuck problem finally giving way.
Why doing nothing feels so hard
Part of the difficulty is that an idle mind is not an empty mind. When we stop feeding it tasks, the brain does not switch off. A network of regions often called the default mode network becomes more active, replaying memories, rehearsing the future and joining up ideas that were never in the same room. That is useful work, but it feels like nothing is happening, and it is the opposite of the quick feedback our devices train us to expect.
The seventeenth-century thinker Blaise Pascal put the discomfort more sharply: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” Four centuries later, the phone in our pocket has made staying quietly in our chamber almost a lost art. Every idle moment now has an exit, and we take it before the wandering mind has had time to do its quiet work.
There is also a difference between the two kinds of boredom the research describes. The boredom that helps is a pause inside a life that is otherwise full: a walk without headphones, a train window, a sink full of dishes. Chronic boredom, the flat, stuck feeling of a life with nothing in it, is something else entirely, and no study suggests it is good for anyone.
The sink of dishes: a low-demand task that lets the mind wander. Image generated by AI.
How to use boredom on purpose
Start with the hard part. Read the brief, sketch the draft, argue with the problem for a while, so your mind has something to chew on. Then do a low-demand task that leaves the hands busy and the mind free: wash the dishes, fold the laundry, take a walk without a podcast, or stand in the shower. The research says the task should be easy enough to let the mind wander, not so demanding that it captures your attention, and not a rest in which you sit and try to think, which most people find oddly hard.
Leave the phone behind for these stretches. The Wilson experiments suggest that the moment the mind feels the itch of idleness, the hand reaches for stimulation, and a phone is the fastest cure for the very state that helps. A notebook nearby is a better companion: wandering ideas are slippery, and the good ones often vanish before you are back at your desk.
What boredom cannot do
None of this makes boredom a cure for a creative block, and the research has honest limits. The gains were modest and specific: better ideas on problems already in progress, not a flood of genius on demand. The studies were small, mostly with students, and they measured creativity with short laboratory tasks, not with novels, inventions or businesses. The 2019 study of writers and physicists relied on self-reports, and its authors said so plainly.
Boredom also cannot replace the work itself. The wandering mind needs material to wander through. A person who has never wrestled with the problem will not find the answer in the shower. And for some people, at some times, an idle mind drifts toward worry rather than ideas. If sitting quietly feels bad rather than merely dull, that is a signal to talk to someone, not to push through it.
Why it matters
We have built a world that treats every idle minute as a waste, and then we wonder why fresh ideas are scarce. The research on boredom and creativity does not ask us to be bored all day. It asks for something smaller and more practical: a few unfilled minutes a day, protected from the phone, after the real work has begun. The mind does some of its best thinking when it looks, from the outside, as if it is doing nothing at all. A dull afternoon, a long walk, a sink of dishes: these are not the enemies of a creative life. They may be where it quietly happens.
Related reading
For another way an unhurried mind does its best work, see our story Why a Walk Helps You Think More Clearly.
Frequently asked questions
Does being bored really make you more creative?
In small doses, yes, according to the research. People who did a boring task first came up with more creative ideas afterward, and the effect was strongest when the boring task was passive enough to let the mind wander. It helps most with problems you have already started thinking about, not with brand-new ones.
Why is sitting alone with my thoughts so hard?
Because an idle mind is not an empty one, and it does not give quick feedback. In one famous study, people left alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes mostly found it unrewarding, and many preferred a mild electric shock to sitting quietly. The discomfort is normal, and it usually eases once the mind settles into wandering.
How long should a boredom break be?
The experiments that found an effect used 12 to 15 minutes of an easy, undemanding task after working on the problem first. A good rule is to work on the problem, then step away for a quarter of an hour with something simple for your hands and nothing for your phone.
Sources
- Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2014). Does being bored make us more creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165–173.
- Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77.
- Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122.
- Gable, S. L., Hopper, E. A., & Schooler, J. W. (2019). When the muses strike: Creative ideas of physicists and writers routinely occur during mind wandering. Psychological Science, 30(3), 396–404.
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