I always thought that being bored was one of the worst things in the world. I always tried to fill up all the time I had by watching Netflix, listening to music and hanging out with friends. The goal was always to not be bored. While my mom used to tell me that being bored was very healthy, I disagreed. That changed when I started using boredom in my advantage. Because I couldn’t avoid it anyway. When I tried to avoid it by watching Netflix, Netflix got boring at some point. Because even watching Netflix or hanging out with friends can make me feel bored. But what then is the use of feeling bored if it’s something we as humans can’t avoid?
I believe that being bored is a way to understand what you really want. We often tend to furfill our boredom with easy dopamine kicks like social media, Netflix or sometimes (junk)food. Although this is an easy way to satisfied yourself, it’s not a sustainable solution. The problem is that you don’t know what to do, cause you don’t know what you want. But how do you get to know what you want?
There are a view different ways to do it and that really depends on what you like as a person. I do think that trying out the different ways can help you even more, cause everything gives you a different perspective. The first way is to check what you liked as a young kid, what subjects in primary school did you really like, what hobby’s and what were you for kind of a kid? When I looked back at my primary reports and what my teachers wrote about me, I discovered that I used to like creative subjects a lot. One of my teachers wrote that I was always very silent in drawing and painting classes, while I was very talkative in other classes. She also mentioned that I loved colours and picking them. At the time I didn’t have any creative hobby’s, so I started trying out different once and I noticed that I really missed this in my life.
The second option is writing towards yourself. Although this feels very weird at first, it really helps. When you get bored, just grab a pen and paper and start slowly writing. It doesn’t matter what you write, maybe just start with something random. At some point, It will put your thoughts on papers and in this way you can think further and further and ultimately understand yourself better. I started doing this after I looked back in my reports. I wanted to start doing something creative but I didn’t know what, so I just started writing. I came up with ideas to do and the more I wrote the more concrete it became. In the end, I understood that I liked visualizing things. Sometimes with colours, sometimes by drawing and sometimes with writing. So I just picked one (writing) and I took a creative writing course to see if I would like it. Although writing in that way wasn’t the thing for me, I did learn a lot about myself. Besides I wasn’t bored on my Thursday nights cause I had an extra thing to do during the week, the course.
The third thing I rarely do, but I know it can really help is drawing or rather visualizing like I said. It doesn’t matter if you can or can’t draw, but when you’re bored and you randomly start drawing it can help you process your thoughts. Sometimes you make a drawing about what you want, sometimes it’s something you still have to process. The key thing here is that when you’re bored, you’re conscious isn’t very active. So when you start just doing something randomly like drawing I feel like your unconscious sometimes can show I little bit of what it wants or needs. Also in some forms of creative therapy, this is done. For me this helps me at times to see what something would look like. For instance, when I wanted to change my schedule I made a drawing of how my week would look like. It wasn’t a good drawing, but I understood how my time would be defined and by doing this I got the motivation to change it. Because seeing what I would look like made me feel good.
So these are the things I do when I’m bored. Sometimes I even plan nothing on purpose just to be bored and do one of these things. Now it’s really something I need, but since I haven’t been bored a lot. Being bored is just a sign you’re not doing enough interesting things. I mean yes sometimes being bored might be healthy, but it’s healthy because you start thinking about the things you really want or the things that you still have to process. It’s something that’s necessary and if you keep filling the boredom up with things that give easy dopamine. The boredom will haunt you, but understand your boredom and It won’t be so bad anymore.
