In yesterday’s Thursday HotSeat we looked at different ways of building the ability and practice of being present in life and business, in order to access more intuition and synchronicities, resulting in more ease and flow.
There’s a great video by Professor Arthur Brooks from Harvard called ‘You need to be bored. Here’s why’, which supports these understandings and is very interesting. He recommends embracing boredom to foster creativity, introspection, and a deeper sense of meaning and happiness, explaining that our Default Mode Network, which supports these things, only switches on when our brains are less stimulated.
He pointed out that in modern living, with devices with us most if not all of the time, we are constantly highly stimulated and may also habitually reach for a device in moments where there is space enough for the Default Mode Network to kick in, in an effort to avoid our own thoughts and any potentially uncomfortable, unanswered higher questions relating to the meaning of our lives etc.
He described a study in which participants were put in a white room with nothing available to do, except for the opportunity to push a button which gave them a painful electric shock, and how almost 50% chose to shock themselves multiple times during a 15-minute period, rather than sitting quietly with their own thoughts. One man shocked himself 190 times despite saying earlier that he would pay to not be shocked.
It illustrates that without practicing being present with ourselves and consciously creating time for that, it is easy to be addicted to staying stimulated preventing us from understanding ourselves and the higher thought systems available to us.
Over stimulation from phones etc has been proven to promote depression and anxiety. However, the opposite is also true, in that spending regular time being ‘bored’ can improve happiness and decrease feelings of boredom in other areas of life such as work and relationships.
It’s interesting to ponder, especially within the context of being successful business leaders with the relevant responsibilities and level of activity that can often accompany that.
The video is nearly 6 minutes in length and is definitely worth a watch.
