PodcastRebecca HassS3 2Comment

S3 E52: How Boredom Helps Your Creativity + Productivity (Part 2)

PodcastRebecca HassS3 2Comment
S3 E52: How Boredom Helps Your Creativity + Productivity (Part 2)

I share more takeaways from the excellent book Bored And Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive And Creative Self, to help you make more mental space for boredom, which leads to creativity and more meaningful productivity!

 
 

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello, everyone, welcome to Episode 52 of Being A Whole Person. 

Today we're gonna talk even more about the book Bored And Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive And Creative Self by Manoush Zomorodi, which is such a fabulous book. Go back to last week's episode to hear the first five if you haven't already. You don't necessarily have to listen to these in chronological order, but I kind of give you an intro to the book in that episode, so it's probably best to listen in that order. 

But first, a couple announcements: the Support Your Creative Focus bundle is still available. I'm offering this to celebrate the third birthday of Coaching for Creative Wellness, which was two weeks ago today, and we're taking the whole month to celebrate. 

So what's in the bundle is my e-book, Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity, which is a PDF workbook for creating a humane, sustainable to-do list that can evolve with your energy level, and make sure that you have space in your schedule for rest, for breaks, for things that replenish your energy, because we can't work constantly. 

If you're in the northern hemisphere, it is getting darker and darker every day, the holiday season is stressful. There's a lot demanding our attention and our energy right now, and these tools are so helpful. 

Because it's easy to download something, and harder to actually put it into practice with the bundle, you get a 45-minute one on one coaching appointment with me. We'll go through your schedule, your to-do list, check it out, see what is there that needs to be there, maybe what's there that doesn't need to be there. We'll make an actual concrete plan, and perhaps tweak your schedule a little bit to put your goals into action. If you're not sure what to prioritize, and what to focus on, we can talk through that too. But, most importantly, you will have a plan to work on your most important creative work without burning out, with room for rest. 

Then you also get a month of Compassionate Creativity Coworking Club membership. So you have four dedicated times on your calendar, once per week, on Tuesdays, 3:30 to 5pm Pacific, that specific time is set aside for this most important work, this sacred commitment to yourself. So let's make some space for these important things that are going to replenish your energy and fuel your best creative work, so that you really know you're moving toward what you want to be doing in life. That's what we all want, right? 

Announcement number two, of course, write and review the show. Thanks to the modern world that we live in, the old algorithm is really important in helping the show be found by more people. I want to spread this message of being kind to yourself in your creativity, of replenishing your energy, treating yourself like a human, as you do all these things. So the more that this podcast gets out, the more we all get to do that. It doesn't need to be anything super long, you can just write a few sentences, or just pop some stars in there. It all really helps and is really appreciated. Thank you so much. 

So let's get into more takeaways from Bored and Brilliant. Number six: games and gamifying can help your mental health. A lot of times we think about video games or games in general as a waste of time, or something that takes you away from what's really important. There's some really interesting research referenced in Bored and Brilliant by Jane McGonigal, who's the director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. She wrote the book SuperBetter, which is all about making life achievements and to-dos and all this stuff into a game. She also created a game called Jane the Concussion Slayer to help herself recover from a concussion - having little things to check off and make it into a game makes you want to do things more. 

Games allow us to improve at things, and when we're doing that we experience excitement. We experience having more physical energy pride in our accomplishments. It also really helps us create a sense of certainty. If I know I'm going to be able to accomplish something, I'm more likely to want to do that, than some more amorphous creative goal that can feel futile. The endowed progress effect, like I talked about in the last episode, is that if we know that we're going to be able to complete something, our brain is more likely to make us want to do it. And we can use that to our advantage when it comes to getting things done. 

In the book, they define a game as an unnecessary obstacle where the goals you're trying to achieve are harder than they need to be. Of course, that is created artificially within a game, and you also have things that might feel harder than they need to be in your real life, too.

If you combine those feelings with some optimism, a sense of common ground, shared attention, that means, for some people, games make reaching out to their fellow game players easier than connecting with other people in their daily life. 

If you reverse all of those conditions, that's basically the clinical definition of depression. The same two regions of the brain that are chronically under-stimulated when you're depressed, are hyper-stimulated when we play video games. So it's really natural that people want to self medicate depression and anxiety with video games, and it can become addictive. 

The number one indicator of whether video games are going to make a person's life and mood better, or have a negative impact, is if the person sees the games as being meaningfully related to reality. So, the challenge is to enjoy or identify with actions in the game, so that when you stop playing, you continue to love and enjoy them. Playing video games for short bursts to elevate your mood, and level of physical energy, and then getting back to your everyday life in a more positive state. 

You can set a timer - they say, to be Zen with your gameplay, set a timer for 20 minutes. Then when you're finished with the 20 minutes, you go on and do something else. That can be hard to do, because video games also want to keep us playing, but many video games have actually been shown to have similar effects to meditation in terms of what your brain state is like and how it's transformed. Of course, not every game is like that. Some can be very stressful, but you can kind of pick and choose based on what kind of mental state you need to be in that day. 

They also suggest that to squash cravings, stop an anxiety attack or remove ruminating thoughts like, when you're anxious, you can set a timer for 10 minutes. That dose of video game can be really helpful. 

So again, it's kind of like going back to that food metaphor. The moderation of it is what allows it to be helpful, dosage is important. It's also not super helpful to berate yourself for time spent playing games. If this is an affordable tool to alter your brain state in a non pharmaceutical way without side effects, that actually can be a really great thing. I'm not here to prescribe anything in particular, nor am I here to be your mental health professional, but just food for thought. 

Jane McGonigal also recommends that people who feel addicted to games focus on what the abstract qualities in these games are that really appeals to them, and then look for those qualities in other aspects of real life. So like with anything, it's about knowing what your intention is behind it. If you feel like it's too much, then it's probably too much. Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do. 

And if it feels silly to you to make something into a game, that's okay. I have used the app Plant Nanny for drinking water, which I know I've mentioned on the show before. And it's basically like a little cartoon plant that you feed water to, however many times a day. You can set the size of the cup, you know, how many ounces, and it goes toward your daily goal. Then your little cartoon plant grows, and it grows, and then you get to put it in the garden and collect seeds and all these little things. Part of my brain was thinking, why do I need all this stuff just to drink water, but it works. So if you need a game to make you do a healthy thing, and that's what works, I think that's awesome. 

Takeaway number seven, embrace boredom with boundaries. You don't need to feel shame or guilt about it. So to really take control of our bored time, in a business setting, we can't feel guilty about it. If you're doing creative work, you're going to need lots of mental space. And you know that if you sit down and you're like, “I'm going to get an idea today,” that that is, of course, the day in which no good ideas will come to you, because we're not totally in control, as much as we would like to be. The ideas come when they would like to come. 

On the outside, this might look like inactivity, it might look like we're lazy, or just kind of weird to other people, but really, we know that's part of the process. So that space might be what leads to you doing your best work. No one can shame you about this. It can be really tempting to look for a solution to tech overload that is technological in nature. Yes, that can help, like those apps that reduce your ability to access certain websites, or certain apps on your computer or your phone. But when it comes down to it, it's always an emotional or psychological issue, right? And it comes down to having more self awareness. 

So how much boredom do you really need? If you don't feel like you have enough, check in with yourself about where you could add in some white space in your schedule, where you could take a long walk, or do some kind of tedious activity in between a more stimulating activity so that you really get more space for mind wandering. Really, if you're working on any new discipline, or endeavor, it's good to create targeted goals, and it's also really good to experiment with strategies, because the first time you try something that might not be the way that it works best with you. 

You can always make agreements with yourself to set boundaries. It's not like you have to have idle time for days on end, you can do it in whatever pocket of time works for you, and isn't going to cause you to miss out on everything else in your life. It's a tough sell, sometimes, to commit to this intangible activity, when we can't see the immediate productivity in it. But we have to trust rest, we have to trust boredom to get some of these insights, and allow your brain to go into that state. 

Takeaway number eight, noticing is the first step in creating. It's not as romanticized as the actual work of creating. We need to collect inspiration, we need to collect external things that we notice to get an idea sometimes. You might want to imagine what someone else is thinking about, you might want to zoom in on a detail of something that isn't the most obvious. Crucially, if you are glued to a screen, you might not be able to notice as many things. Getting out in nature, I usually do have my phone with me on a walk, but I don't have it out unless I need to look at it for something, or unless, maybe, I want to use an app to identify a plant or something like that. But for the most part, I'm looking around me, I'm in the world. 

There's a really cool example of this in the book where the performance artist Marina Abramovic did a show called Goldberg in 2015. It was a performance of box Goldberg Variations. Before the performance, the audience had to come in and lock their phones in a box, or, you know, turn them in somewhere. Then they sat for 30 minutes, with noise cancelling headphones on in silence before the performance even began, with the idea that if you're running in distracted, if you're still looking at your phone, if you're still texting somebody, you're not really ready to hear anything. you're not really ready to have a deep experience of taking in that experience. 

Marina Abramovic tends to be on the more dramatic side of things, but she says, the only way for us to survive is to go back to simplicity. I think there is a lot of truth to that. Sometimes we're afraid of what we might find when we let our minds wander, right? Like, when we have to be alone with our brains, there might be a lot of scary thoughts in there. That can make it less appealing to just sit back and see what's in there. Of course, if you're not letting your brain do that you're missing out on all those potential creative insights. 

The futurist Rita King, who I mentioned in the last episode, says her secret to putting herself in the minds of people who live in the future is being radically present, which is a pretty interesting concept to think about - the future and the present coexisting at the same mental spot. She achieves this by recording all the little things that make an environment unique to itself. So it all comes back to being present. 

Sometimes the biggest ideas actually start with tiny observations. So, maybe you don't have to worry about the big ideas, you just have to worry about collecting whatever ideas you can find, even if they're tiny, and your brain will take care of the rest. It's always busy making connections and evolving your idea into something else. You just never know what little tiny idea is going to maybe even latch on to something else that you've already realized. Who knows what might happen. 

So getting deeper into the topic of being present, takeaway number nine: there are different types of mindfulness, which can help us focus. Often people have this rigid definition of what meditation is, or what mindfulness is. They imagine sitting on a cushion in silence, or a whole weekend of a meditation retreat, or something like that. That stuff is great, but meditation and mindfulness can look so many different ways. It's really just paying attention to what's going on where you are. 

Something really interesting that they mentioned in the book is that meditation in that traditional sense is actually more rigid, and does not encourage mind wandering, because you're encouraged not to follow your thoughts, you're encouraged to just observe them and let them go. So that type of meditation is actually kind of uncreative, but there are different ways you can be mindful, and different things to be mindful of. 

I'm not saying that meditation, and letting go of thoughts is a bad thing. Returning to the breath and all of these practices are great for reducing anxiety, and they're great for helping you tame your mind and learn to focus. That's awesome. It's just that that's not directly creative, as much as sort of an open awareness type of meditation, the type where you're encouraged to notice your experiences or your senses. That stuff is what really gets your mind wandering, going, and making you open to any thoughts in a more non judgmental way.

So it might be cool to play with different kinds of mindfulness practices. I really like a listening walk, where you observe everything that you hear as you walk. I know I'm not always paying attention to all the auditory things that come into my mind. It could be cool to write them down. That might lead to something creative later, or can be just for its own sake, too, of course. 

There's a beautiful kindness meditation that they mentioned in the book, that is a 10 second practice, where you bring a person into your mind, probably someone you care about, and you think, “I wish for this person to be happy.” You think that for three breaths in and out, and then you repeat, and do this every day. Then your wish for other people's happiness turns into a habit, which will also bring you happiness, too. Bonus, you can try to wish happiness for people that you find to be harmful. That can be a next level compassion practice, but start with someone you care about already. That's going to be much easier, it will spill over into other things. 

Takeaway number 10, we have to step back from the noise in order to be able to prioritize. This idea has been central to my work with my coaching clients for a long time, because I tend to work with people who are very ambitious, doing a lot of things, and are in a state of overwhelm, and possibly burnout. 

When you're in that state of overwhelm, you might be too stressed out to ask yourself if what you're doing is indeed the most important thing you should be doing. If that thing is getting you closer to what your big goals are, and I'm only using “should” within the context of what you believe you should be doing, not an external “should” for me or anybody else, but we all know those moments, right? Where we're kind of busy, but we're not actually productive, we're just kind of reacting to things around us or doing things so that we can feel busy, but they're actually not as important as something else. So you might have to take some mental space and some extra rest time to get to the point where you can actually judge what is important. It takes some slowing down to get there. 

Greg McKeown, who wrote the book Essentialism, was quoted here as saying, “Technology is a great servant, but a poor master.” He's also saying that his biggest hurdle isn't actually information overload like we think it is, but opinion overload, like taking in other people's opinions about what you should be doing, or what's important. We don't even realize that we're taking in so much while we're scrolling through Instagram, but that can be happening, you're subconsciously taking in all of these messages. Being more intentional about your internet diet, and what you're taking in can help you avoid having just too much noise. 

I should also mention, which I've mentioned on the podcast before, that the word “priority” was never plural, until recent times. “Priorities” plural did not exist, because priority was, this one thing is the most important.

I also learned that in the book Essentialism, and it's kind of unthinkable to most of us to say, “I only have one priority in life.” Maybe not to you, but those of us who like a lot of different things have a lot of different priorities, and inherently that has a lot of juggling. So there's a lot to sort through there, potentially. 

In conclusion, we do have to let ourselves be bored to be brilliant. Small progress is still meaningful. It's really interesting, at the end of the Bored and Brilliant challenge, the participants only decreased their time spent on their phones by six minutes, or one less pickup of their phone during the course of a day. That could sound kind of dismal, like,”Only six minutes, really? We did all this stuff, and that's it?” But, a psychologist commented on this and said, “It's really not clear to me that six minutes isn't meaningful.” 

In order to fix a problem, first you have to realize it's a problem, right? Then you have to figure out the source of the problem. So, going through these challenges really helped people realize what the source of their technology addiction and distraction is. When it comes down to it, it's an issue of motivation. We need to want to get off Facebook or Instagram in order to do it. And we also have to believe that we can.

So, go ahead, believe in it, you can do it. And if you don't yet, you can practice believing in it. I believe in you, I believe in your capacity for growth. That capacity for growth is really, really exciting. 

This episode is not me shaming you for any tech addictions that you may have. But just encouragement that if you feel like you're spending too much time on things that don't matter to you, that you absolutely do have the ability to turn that around, and that you don't have to do huge actions in order to have an impact on your life. 


So if you need my help in sorting through any of this stuff, check out the Creative Focus bundle. Check out some of my other resources, you can book a free call with me. I'm always here to help, and I'm always rooting for you. So have a wonderful week, and I'll see you next time.

Pianist and composer