Tag: brain

$$$ WHY BOREDOM CAN BE VERY GOOD

$$$ WHY BOREDOM CAN BE VERY GOOD

For me I define boredom like this: It’s when you must be fully engaged and present and actively working on a project…AND it is always a monotonous one, one that you must FORCE yourself through.

Working at a pre-K twice each week has really shown me what boredom is. You have to be engaged in the scheduled activities of the two-year olds. You’re going through all the motions and unlike an arduous hike where you get to view the gorgeous scenery at the summit, or a workout where you feel the biological surge of blood flow and adrenaline as well as the knowledge that you’re actively improving your physique and making a difference in your health, working with two year olds you feel like you’re just keeping them in the right place. Your attention isn’t free to wander; it is consumed by each child’s every second impulse to throw something or to escape. Also, you’re not really getting to see the progress that they’re making because they won’t be with you next year and they’re someone else’s children.

 Lately I have become fascinated by whether boredom can have an impact on motivation levels. Could it help develop the right mental framework for experiencing the dopamine drive, the feeling to engage in a task and to enjoy doing it? Could it bring about new ideas?

 I am actively trying to lean into boredom. I want these moments of boredom to fill my days so that I can be more creative and come up with a variety of useful and novel ideas. I’m using boredom as a tool to ultimately sharpen my senses and my experiences.

 Just as buying more lottery tickets increases your chances of winning, more ideas increase your ability to generate more ideas from your subconscious. These are the kinds of ideas that can be streamed into the pipeline of your awareness. The more of these you have, the more likely you are to come up with an original synthesis. This could be an invention, business idea, or a strategy to do something that no one has ever thought of before.

It’s absolutely fascinating to consider that all the raw materials of the universe surround you on a moment-to-moment basis. But these must be extracted from the chaos; they must be rearranged. You can come up with something out of the drudgery of your own life and produce an original idea.

 Let’s pivot back to boredom. The more I learn the more I see that punctuating your day with 20 minutes of monotonous boredom is a recipe…a conduit to having divergent thinking. Only then can you piece the strange or unseemingly disconnected thoughts together.

It’s the fusion of ideas that we desire. Often, it’s a problem that requires a solution.

Say, you don’t like the way your house looks. Or, you don’t know how to attract more followers to your Instagram account. Maybe you really want to figure out a way to develop a line of interesting home decor items that reflect your aesthetics, your artistic tastes and personality. Perhaps you want to figure out a way to make more friendships and more personal connections in your day-to-day life.

One of the interesting things about our brains is that when we are truly bored, when we’re going through repetitive thoughts our brains default mode network activates. This is considered the opposite of executive function. If executive function is when your brain is engaged in a complex and detailed thinking, the default mode network is when you’re NOT attempting complex or detailed thinking…you’re not doing high level math or constructing elevated literary prose. These require lots of conscious effort. They need the management of your attention so you can retrieve information from your memory to compose or create something or understand something.

 How do you know when the default mode network turns on? The best way to know is if you suddenly hear the voice within your head. You hear not just the ruminating thoughts about “what you should have said” or “why did she say that to me?” but you hear things like, “Maybe I should turn one of my living room walls into a “Butterfly Wall” with lots of pictures of butterflies.

 In other words, when the default mode network arrives, random ideas start coming. Ideas that may or may not be useful. You will notice that they start to flutter through. They are allowed through the gate because you have deactivated the main executive controller—the pre-frontal cortex. You’re doing mindless tasks like folding laundry, going for a walk, taking a shower, or washing dishes. A new idea comes at you. You think, ahh, maybe I should try that…maybe I should research that phenomenon? Maybe I should write about that phenomenon! When these kinds of thoughts start coming, you know you are in the default mode network.

 When you’ve finally arrived (and ANY music, listening to podcasts or beeps from your phone will not help you get there as quickly) you need to know that this is where interesting connections between ideas are made. This is where the real MONEY-MAKING CONCEPTS HAPPEN.

 Different things that your subconscious may have picked up at different times of the day or days ago or even weeks ago may spontaneously bubble up and combine to make a very wonderful idea. This is where inventions happen. This is where powerful plots to movies break out, where two pieces of disparate data reproduce a new concept. Sometimes these concepts are quite useful. They may help resolve in earlier conflict period you have been dealing with.

New approaches, new inventions, new paintings, new business plans, new plots to novels or plays or gardening landscapes develop in this state. They make themselves tangible to your conscious state brain.

This is exactly why periods of boredom, monotony, and stillness end up giving you such a wildly incredible edge. But it makes total sense! You can’t understand brightness without the dark, and you can’t see the bright ideas without the simultaneous background of monotony…your own feelings and experiences of deep boredom. Yes, going through repetitive motions will get you there.

It is a literal fact that your brain will start to conjure up its’ own unique creations if you let yourself step into boredom and monotony on a regular basis. You need this kind of “contrast state” to push your brain to rearranging and re-managing itself as it works with less stimulation.

I can attest to these many times over the course of my life. The times where I really allowed boredom to prevail, the more likely my brain could reconfigure itself, bring up storage boxes from the basement, so to speak. More storage boxes to look through? More stuff for it to work with!

Thinking About The FLOW STATE

Thinking About The FLOW STATE

I want to crack the code on flow. I want the sense of feeling phenomenally enraptured and overtaken by the experience at hand and the simultaneous useful connections that I am generating.

I desire the feeling that I am being productive but enjoying it thoroughly.

 You can enjoy something to an extent, and it is not useful or productive. You can do something productive and it not be rapturous, enjoyable or even bearable.

 We all desire the collision of both; a delightful, immersive undertaking that is also useful. We want something that can be a stepping- stone to some other potential operation or action. In the end, we don’t want to waste our time in either boredom or mindless indulgence.

 It is important to realize that flow states are free for the taking.

 A mindset of abundance realizes that flow states must be accessible at least several times a day. Consider Buddhist monks. They live in a meditative and contemplative states.  Research suggests that monks can get into a state of absorption—a cousin to flow—several times a day.

One of the well attested ways to get into a flow state is by picking out an object and looking at it closely. Visually inspect the object and look at all its features. You want to pick out several aspects of it that are general themes, like color and shape.

 Next you guide your attention to other aspects of it. You might zoom into tinier details like the intricate pattern impressed upon it. You might consider the overall texture and then gaze deeper into this object and consider how lumpy it is. Perhaps there is a scratch mark or imperfection. You may also look at how this object sits next to other objects. Consider its position in space, does it invoke a sense of beauty? Does it seem oddly placed?

Think about the original creation of this object, was it made in a factory with a machine or was it a human hand that made it? Have you considered the entire process Involved in making this object? How was it formulated and then brought to the market? Think about the entire chain of events.

 The entire point of this exercise is to flagellate your mind with all the details of the object so that you merge into it. You want to push out the part of your mind that thinks of self by fully deleting the self in the process.  Even as I try to formulate these words, I find myself diving deeper into the state of flow. As I do this, I find myself more engaged and more deeply committed to the enterprise of writing.

Flow does require effort and time because you must use time to commit yourself to this effort. You must diligently engage your attention all the way– you don’t want any extra attention left to ruminate on someone’s disparaging remark.

One of the most fascinating things I have learned about this mental state is that there is a definite link between physical pain reduction and entering into flow. Flow is an analgesic.

Recently I broke my left wrist while ice skating. I fractured my wrist in several places.  The bone pain plus the stinging, throbbing pain from the incision (where a metal plate was installed) is so intense I can hardly think, create or engage with life. Two Norco pills are not assuaging the intensity today.

What I am learning is that getting into a flow state is a great way to override or downregulate the thalamus–the relay station for sensory information in your brain. In other words, engaging in a challenging activity that nudges up to one’s learning ability is the perfect place to be for pain management.

 I’m pursuing art and painting today. I’m going back and forth between sitting still resting my throbbing arm and then going back to painting with my dominant, right hand. The pain comes and goes but I do notice that as I come up with new ideas for the placement of color or the abstract arrangement of shapes on my canvas, I am taken away from my pain experience, even if momentarily.