Bored stiff on your holiday? It'll do you the world of good! How boredom broadens the mind...
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The summer has hardly begun and I’m already exhausted by the globetrotting. Not my own, you understand, but that of my friends.
They’re all over the place. One’s going to Montreal for a comedy festival, another will be learning to sail in Croatia, and my best friend will be trekking through Peru. As you do. Or rather, as she does.
I, on the other hand, will be doing the same thing I’ve done every year since I was born. I will spend two weeks sitting in my aunt’s kitchen in Kerry, in the west of Ireland.
Happy days: Marianne Power's holiday heaven is doing nothing in rainy Ireland
Not for me the clubs of Ibiza or friends’ villas in Tuscany — instead, I will spend my precious summer holiday drinking tea, eating fruitcake and looking out of the window at the driving Irish rain.
We will spend hours discussing the rain, analysing whether it’s ‘dirty’, ‘bouncing’, ‘soft’ or just plain old wet. And, if I’m lucky, in between all this rain chat, there’ll be a couple of days where the clouds part and we can actually leave the house.
Otherwise it’s like one long Sunday afternoon trapped at home as a teenager. By the end I will be so bored that a text from O2 telling me about their roaming charges will feel like an event.
So why do I go? Because I love it.
Down time: Britons should spend more time doing very little on holiday rather than trying to be as productive as possible
Compared with my life of deadlines, demands and distractions, being bored is the ultimate luxury.
It gives my brain time to process all the stuff that’s gone on this year; it helps me to remember the joy of tiny things, such as the fun to be had kicking around a ball with my teenage cousins; and it reminds me of what’s really important in life: just being with family — even if you spend most of the time moaning about how bored you are.
Of course, friends who are either jetting off to exotic locations or engaged in a military style operation to keep the kids occupied 16 hours a day for the next six weeks think that this is a giant waste of the sacred two-week holiday. Shouldn’t I be white-water rafting in Canada? Or learning how to speak Italian in Florence? ‘Go see the world! Do something!’ they say.
It seems that in our over-stimulated modern lives just doing nothing is about as socially acceptable as drinking wine for breakfast (which I don’t do, by the way, no matter how bored I am). Our obsession with being busy and productive all the time is so pervasive that it’s even seeping into our holidays.
Our irrational fear of boredom — which, when it becomes obsessive is now a recognised medical condition called thaasophobia — is such that we cannot even stand still in a Ryanair queue without reaching to play with our mobile phone.
Action-packed: Travelling to exotic locations and keeping the kids entertained can make for an exhausting holiday (posed by models)
But, finally, the tide is turning: this summer it seems that boredom is coming back into fashion. In the past few months, a host of academics and scientists have been finding out that far from being a source of depression and frustration, boredom can have surprising benefits.
In his fascinating new book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey argues that boredom ‘exists to help you prosper’.
‘Boredom is linked with having ideas, it gives us space to daydream and dream up new ways of going about a problem,’ he says. ‘It is not something we should be afraid of, it’s something we should listen to.’
Many of the great Eureka moments of scientific and artistic inspiration are borne of boredom he says, citing Samuel Johnson and Andy Warhol as two famous figures who used chronic boredom to fuel their writing and art.
Adrian Savage, author and editor of life coaching website Lifehack.org, agrees. He says many people think ‘being bored is a major sin’ — something to eradicate completely from life — but that nothing could be further from the truth.
‘Being bored turns your mind inward and encourages reflection,’ he says. ‘When you’re rushing about, there’s no time to think.
Life affirming: Marianne says being bored doesn't make you boring
‘With time to consider what you’re doing and why, you may just come up with some useful questions about the direction you’re headed in.
‘Boredom is nearly always essential to creativity. Boredom stimulates the search for better ways to think like nothing else does.’
In fact, a recent study has found that being bored actually changes the way we think, increasing the activity in the regions of the brain responsible for autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and imagining hypothetical events.
This is why you remember people you haven’t thought about in years, or plot ways to change your life, or in my case write a book, at the end of a two-week holiday.
Being bored helps us to see the big picture — the picture we are too busy to see in our day-to-day lives.
Indeed, yet another report, published this May by the University of Limerick, found that boredom makes us more likely to do altruistic things such as giving blood or donating to charity.
The author of the study, which was given the sweet name Bored George Helps Others, said it was because: ‘Boredom makes people long for challenging and meaningful activities, turning towards what they perceive to be really meaningful.’
So far from being as drag, being bored can be an opportunity.
‘Next time you find yourself saying, or thinking, that you’re bored, be happy,’ says Adrian Savage.
WHO KNEW?
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‘You’ve just been handed a gift you can use in any of these ways. If you do, you’ll find that being bored is sometimes the best state to be in.’
So how do I use the ‘gift’ of boredom? Do my fortnights of idleness make me into a saint or a creative genius? Alas no.
But they do remind me of what I do and don’t want out of life. Every time I gaze out my aunt’s window or pass an hour sitting on her back garden wall with nothing to do but kick my legs, I remember what it was like to be the teenage me, enduring what seemed to be a life of unending boredom.
Back then I would escape the adult kitchen chatter about sick relations and what to make for dinner, and sulk at the thought of all the fun things my friends were doing on their foreign holidays.
I would seek refuge on the wall at the back of my aunt’s garden and gaze at the field of cows and the heavy grey sky, dreaming about what life would be like when I was grown up, what clothes I would wear, what job I would do, what countries I would visit.
Astonishingly, 20 years later almost all of those dreams have come true. Being bored gave me the time to think these things up and the determination to make them happen — boredom is the greatest motivator.
Which is why, despite having vowed as a teenager that when I was an adult I would spend my summers in kidney-shaped swimming pools, drinking cocktails and flirting with waiters called Stavros, I crave the boredom of my Irish breaks more and more.
In a life of ever-increasing activity, these wet summers are the only time that I look properly, not only at the rain, but at my life.
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