#342： Why Boredom is Good for You
Episode Stats
Summary
In the age where smartphones provide constant stimulation, many of us have forgotten what it feels like to experience the monotony of boredom. And while on the surface that might seem like a good thing, my guest today highlights research that suggests not being bored can actually make us dumber and less creative.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast in the age where
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smartphones provide constant stimulation many of us have forgotten what it feels like to experience
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the monotony of boredom and while on the surface that might seem like a good thing my guest today
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highlights research that not being bored can actually make us dumber and less creative her
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name is manusha zomorodi she's the host of the podcast note to self and the author of the book
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bored and brilliant how spacing out can unlock your most productive and creative self today on
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the show manusha shares her experience of how feeling scattered and less creative led her to
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create an experiment that tested whether her lack of boredom in recent years was to blame we then
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dig into the philosophy of boredom why we dread it so much manusha then goes into what the latest
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research says about the benefits of boredom like increased creativity more productivity and
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improve mental well-being and then she walks us through some exercises you can do to help inject
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a bit more boredom in your life i know it's going to sound crazy and counterintuitive boredom is good
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for you but it is after the show's over check out the show notes at awim.is slash boredom
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manusha zomorodi welcome to the show oh brett thanks for having me uh so you recently published
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a book bored and brilliant rediscovering the lost art of spacing out this was the impetus behind the
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book was this experiment you did with your with your podcast you're the host of note to self um
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wnyc and uh you had your listeners go through this experiment of kind of re-evaluating the relationship
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with their digital devices i'm curious what was the impetus behind that experiment like did you have
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a personal experience where you're like i need to get a handle on how my devices control my life
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like a personal breakdown brett is that what you mean exactly well yes the answer is absolutely yes i
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mean as you know your job as a podcast host is to come up with great ideas for your show and i a
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couple years ago just had this moment where i was like i felt just dried up like there was nothing
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going on upstairs it felt different than writer's block it was more like a barrenness that i felt
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and so i started to sort of try and think back when had i had my best ideas in the past and it was
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such a cliche it was like oh it was when i was staring out the window on a long car ride
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or it's you know when i didn't have kids and used to take long showers you know or um it was when i
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used to push my kid's stroller and i realized like in all those moments what was not in my hand it was
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my smartphone and so i sort of thought that and now every time i have a crack in my day sort of a few
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minutes here a few minutes there whether it is waiting to get my coffee or waiting to get on the
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subway what do i do i look at my phone i mean we all look at our phones now and so it sort of made
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me think like oh those moments in my day where i used to sort of space out they were kind of boring
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maybe there was something actually super important going on and actually if i think about it i really
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haven't spaced out or been bored since i got a smartphone because i never need to be and it sort of
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made me sort of wonder like is that a good thing or a bad thing right and did you talk to other
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individuals like in your field of people you know who are you know creative types suffering from the
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same sort of like i don't have any good ideas anymore well for me you know i always go straight
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to my audience and my listeners have certainly taught me that whenever i am feeling something i am
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not that special i am not alone there are probably a lot of other people who are thinking the same thing
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and they started sort of you know stories started coming in about people sort of wondering what was
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happening to their brains when uh they were looking at their phone all the time because i think and and
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what i realized was that a lot of the research is you know our experiences are vastly ahead of the
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research being done in any lab so by the time they sort of figured out what the long-term implications
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could be of looking at our smartphones all the time or never getting bored getting rid of a human emotion
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we may have been looking at these things you know at this point like over for a decade right i mean
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the first iphone came out in 2007 so i think for me it was sort of a a wake-up call like whoa we have
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to start asking these questions and try to answer them um more quickly than we wait for a double blind
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controlled study to come out that maybe is we do or or don't believe so yeah so i said to my audience
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i was like okay how about for one week we try to tweak our smartphone habits we see if we can get a
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little bit more boredom or spacing out back in our lives and and we see if it ignites something if it
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jumpstarts our creativity or or something else happens and so we went on this i mean this journey
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where every morning they would wake up they'd get a mini podcast uh with the science sort of explaining
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either something uh neurologically that was going on in their brains or how technology was designed to
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do something neurologically in their brains and then a challenge to try and change their behavior for that
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day and and then they would report back and you know at first i thought like oh i don't know like
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a couple hundred people will do this with me but we had 20 000 people sign up to do that one week
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they sort of gave us a week of their lives and um and so the book is based on what i learned from that
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week um taking what listeners told me worked what they told me didn't work tweaking it codifying it
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and then combining it with a ton more research um and interviews with cognitive psychologists
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neuroscientists marketers uh digital marketers um more stories from people uh also technologists
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and the data that we got from that week because uh irony of ironies we actually partnered with a
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couple apps that measured how much time people were spending on their phones um and so we had a ton
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of data coming in that could show you know which days were more successful than others and what the
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final results were that's awesome and we're going to get into some of the science that
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you've uncovered in some of the data that you were able to uh gather with this experiment but you
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also cool like you get philosophical with boredom right like that people don't realize that boredom
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this is something that's been a conundrum for philosophers going back a couple millennia i mean
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what's the philosophical history of boredom like what how do philosophers describe boredom there's two
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different kinds there's situational boredom where you're uh i wish that this you know play would end
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but then there's the existential kind where you're kind of like whoa what is this life that i'm living
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um so i you know i think it's what you talk a lot about on the podcast is uh this idea of looking for
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meaning and and trying to live about your best life sort of thing um so it's and it's not easy right
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it's not easy to confront um the unknown and to think through what what what you're gonna do next but
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but actually boredom can be very helpful with that right so like how have researchers today
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how have they described the feelings of boredom right because it's like we all kind of we know
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what it feels like but then i don't know how do you get more descriptive with that feeling is it like
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you'd rather be doing something else is it yes so okay so i think like for well first of all i should
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say that we are at an extremely exciting um moment in neuroscience really you know in the last 10 years
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what with fmris and the ability to sort of track how the brain and networks work it's it's really
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exciting and so they've just started to really understand what happens in our brains when our
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mind begins to wander and then it turns out like let's say you're folding laundry um and you're doing
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something super repetitive that doesn't require you to actually think about your actions or um you know
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just sitting and looking at the wall and spacing out you activate a network in your brain called
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the default mode and they now understand that in the default mode that is when we do some of our
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most creative thinking most original thinking we take disparate ideas and then push them together and
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and come up with new concepts we create a sense of self it's self french referential processing
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literally creating a coherent sense of ourselves we do something called theory of mind where we
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imagine what others are thinking we develop empathy for them and we do something that i found
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incredibly interesting called autobiographical memory and planning which is when we look back at our
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lives we sort of take note of the highs and the lows we build a personal narrative we take lessons from
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that and then we look forward we have something called perspective bias look into the future
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where we build uh what we imagine our lives could be and we set ourselves goals and we break down the
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steps that we need to take in order to reach those goals so you know incredibly important things like
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you know you could argue that this is what makes humans human um this ability to to think of who am i what
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what is my place in the world um but it's also you know being bored is why do we look at our phone so much
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because being bored kind of sucks like it it hurts at first it's difficult it is a painful process
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sometimes um but i think it it's it's getting through that initial period and this is why i was
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so insistent because i did have listeners who were like god man why do you have to use the word boredom
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couldn't you just you go straight to daydreaming use something a little more positive and i was like
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no because i think we've lost the this capacity to sort of sit through the yucky part and that yucky part
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is you can't you can't skip it like you must pass through it in order to get to the good stuff and
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so my thinking was no let's let's not vilify it in some way it is not a disease to be bored um it is
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actually something that maybe we need to name and get more of in our lives well and speaking of how
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yucky feeling boredom is you talk about the the links people will go to avoid boredom like you did
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you mentioned this research this study where people had the option to shock themselves my god
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i love this research it's yeah it's it's really um it's very famous in the psychological world which
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it was by tim wilson at the university of virginia and he asked people to come sit in a room and they
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could either just sit there and relax or they could shock themselves and you know sitting there like
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this is a very plain room like they made the room the most bored there was nothing to look at it had
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like really dull gray walls um and but rather than just sit there and be bored people um shocked
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themselves they one guy did it like 190 times like gave himself a zap rather than just sit there with
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their thoughts um so yeah so that's what that's a good one uh there's a lot of research about how just
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people and i i think it's interesting like we're starting to see what happens um why we keep our
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smartphones out on the table when we are meeting someone for coffee you know because what happens
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like the minute the conversation gets boring or somebody uh isn't quite concise uh or or or you know
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our phone buzzes it's it's great because who needs to be bored even when we're face to face with
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someone but there's another study that says um the quality of conversation goes down even if a phone
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is just within sight of two people having a conversation um it's kind of a fascinating if
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you want to get into it about how they measured that but um but yeah so this idea that the smartphone
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acts as sort of uh an interrupter of human connection right i mean because besides talking about
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how this the smartphones deprive us of boredom and boredom is what allows us to do this mind
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wandering and basically helps us create meaning in our lives you talk about how the other ways the
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smartphone disrupts us and that you talk about social connection yeah how did they figure out so
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i mean i thought that was interesting just the mere presence of a phone even if it's silent just
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like it messes conversation up it makes people feel less connected you gotta you gotta love
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scientists right that they have to prove these weird things that you and i normal people like
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sense is kind of true like i'm i mean we all know that when we go out to dinner people have their
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phones out and they're sort of looking at them and stuff but for them to prove it they literally put
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people in like cafe settings and um measured and had them have conversations and put the phone there
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and put it across the room or took it away and then had people uh sort of rank the quality of their
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conversation which is really interesting there is actually a boredom researcher dr sandy
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man at the in the uk who used paper cups to she got people extremely bored and then asked them to
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come up with different ways to use paper cups like they came up with like plant holders or you know
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sandbox toys but then when they got really really bored they started coming up with more creative ideas
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like a madonna bra or earrings or musical instruments and so yeah scientists have um wonderful
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and and wonderful ways of proving what i sometimes think we our intuition uh already knows right and
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what's what's even scarier is like what's this doing to kids right because like i think all of us who
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were alive before smartphones like we know what it feels like to be bored we know that feeling but
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like kids like my my children have been they've been exposed to ipads since they were you know two or
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three how old are your kids brett uh six and four got it yeah well you know we've all seen the kid who
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picks up a device and knows immediately how to use it right which is kind of awesome and amazing that
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how quickly they pick things up but i mean to me what you're describing so we had a number of
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classrooms across the country do the board and brilliant um project uh in together as classrooms and
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also a bunch of colleges did it um and i heard from one teenager who was like i don't know this
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feeling is really i don't recognize it feels weird i was like what like boredom um and yeah
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you're right like they if you are i don't know a teenager and you have a smartphone and you may never
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have experienced boredom which i find a little worrying and quite extraordinary and as one teacher
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told me he in florida i was like so what were the cumulative effects of like doing the project
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together of changing your smartphone habits and he's like well what i saw was actually more eye
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contact amongst the kids because i think they started to realize how much um not only are they on their
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smartphones personal smartphones but actually the classroom this day to this day and age is is mediated
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with screens you know they're on ipads in class they're looking at smart boards they are uh on
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their computers there's there is not a ton of um face-to-face interaction and so for me i think part
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of it is that younger people these days are extremely performative right they're they're doing things for
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instagram they're it's not that they're not acting they're definitely acting they're they're doing
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things for instagram or facebook or snapchat or whatever it might be but it's those subtle effects
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as as sherry talks about like the combination of um the way someone moved their hand and the way that
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they look at you or the pacing of their sentence and combining that all together and that's when you
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really understand a human being but it requires patience right sometimes people don't and sherry talked
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about this with me is that she found that her students really wanted to talk to her they preferred
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email because they could uh write their sentences make them perfect edit them before they got them to
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her and she's like no because when you talk to me and i see when you stumble or you have a hard time
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explaining something or you work your way towards uh completing a thought or an idea in person that's when
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i understand what you're going through and i understand better how i can help you um and so
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yeah i think it's this patience with human fallibility or human mistakes that kids don't
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have to have because now they take a 10 pictures or you know and i do this too i'm on instagram take
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10 different pictures choose the best one put the best filter on it find the best hashtag and
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and oh my gosh look at that look at my amazing life it's awesome you mentioned well yeah speaking of uh
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you know instagram one of the benefits of smartphones we have a great camera with us pretty much at all
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time and people take pictures all the time but you highlight research that's actually hindering our
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ability to actually be in the moment even remember this stuff we're taking pictures of yeah this is
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super interesting research um going at fairfield university and and the woman professor linda hankwell
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calls it the photo impairment effect and this is basically the idea that when we go about our day and
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taking pictures all the time um we're outsourcing our memory we're literally literally saying to our
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brain like don't you don't have to remember this my camera's got it thanks um which can be great if
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you are trying to remember like oh don't forget you parked in section d13 you know and you want to
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use that as a memory aid but let's say you're spending a day at the beach and you've outsourced all
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your memory of your day with your family to your camera and you know i i know from my listeners and
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from a lot of people we have thousands thousands and thousands of these pictures that we don't
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usually actually go back and look at she also found that one way to really not remember something
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is to put yourself in the photo because you start to look at yourself from a third person you take
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yourself out of the moment um in that you start to like let's say you're you want to take a picture
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next to a statue um if you're in the photo you're thinking of what the photo is going to look like
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instead of actually being there next to the statue in the moment but there was good news too from
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professor hengel which is that if you want to improve your memory when you're taking photos
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use uh macro basically smartphones do this really well zoom in on a very specific detail really think
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through about how you're framing something and zoom right in and that will actually help you
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remember it better so there is also the photo enhancement effect but i just find it fascinating i mean
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we're we're i'm taking photos like i just dropped my kids off after school it's like the first day of
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school and i was like oh i gotta capture the moment you know it was like um my kids were like please
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put the phone away they hate it they they're not i mean my kids are seven and ten and i wonder if this
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is a generation who's gonna be like uh stop taking photos already enough is that why taking selfies
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feels weird like i i've never like you know because you when you're in once you're in the picture like
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you look at it differently like i've i think i've taken one selfie and i haven't done it again because
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it just made me feel weird it is a weird feeling right well i think you know whenever i think of
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selfies i think of what i learned about snapchat which um and i think this speaks to the technology
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about it being designed to make really encourage the behavior of of and not to use the word addictive
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because the the jury's out on whether it's addictive clinically or not but um and do you know about
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snapchat streaks brett oh yeah i do okay so basically you start a streak with a friend and that means that
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every day you send each other um a goofy selfie and it sounds benign right except that snapchat gamifies
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it so that you collect points and uh emojis and emoji stickers and trophies and those sorts of things
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and it has also become a thing for kids where you're like don't break the streak right because
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if you break the streak like let's say you're going for 300 days that you're sending these selfies back
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and forth if you break the streak that means that like whoa you something happened and your friendship
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might be over and so you start to think about um it just sort of combines all these things that
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we've been talking about waking up taking a selfie taking yourself out of the moment when you could
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just kind of be lying in bed and and thinking about what you're going to do that day or maybe remembering
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a dream or whatever but you wake up you take a selfie you put yourself in sort of looking at yourself
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this performative aspect you're collecting points you're basing a friendship not on any sort of real
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eye contact either um i mean that's not to say that like snapchat isn't fun and and great and and you
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know as you know from the book like i am not anti-tech i love my phone i just don't think that
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the answer also is on or off i i'm not a fan of detoxes i feel like you know what we're talking about
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is self-regulation right is saying like recognizing like actually i really like that first 15 minutes of
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my day to be spent quietly or i've used my phone uh enough i'm starting to get that yucky feeling
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uh i recognize this feeling and i i need to put it away and and make some time for something else
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yeah i mean there was going on that track there you you interview some like monks of some i can't
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remember if they're zen or they were catholic um but they use social media they use smartphones
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and uh you ask them like so how can you do this you know what's going on there and they basically said
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it's just it's like a distraction like any other distraction like a distracting thought
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right and like that really convicted me because i always i put up these like crazy
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tools to make sure i don't check websites at certain time when i think like okay i should be a
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little more mindful i don't need all this stuff i just need a little self-regulation yeah and i think
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you know there's a as many people in the industry say like oh well the technology is not making you
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you know check twitter a million times a day and i kind of disagree with that i think you know right
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now the business model uh for most of these platforms and apps is our is our attention that
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phrase attention economy that we are paying um for with for these services with our eyeballs every
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day in and out and so that's why they want you to keep coming back i mean yes facebook wants to
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connect you with people you love but they also want you to spend time with them on the facebook
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platform you can't pay for facebook even if you want to um and so as they collect our behavior
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and parse it and turn it into dossiers of data that they then sell on to advertisers um i think
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we have to question you know what is our time worth i think it it it needs it and it's not your fault
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if you feel like you're coming back over and over again to the instagram these these these platforms
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are built to make you do that it is their business model but you know similar to sort of like cigarettes
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when we started to understand that um these companies were not being completely honest about
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the effects of of you know and i'm not saying all tech companies have like malicious intentions but i
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think that we have to be more honest about what the business model is and and how we are sort of
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um paying with our time and with our personal information for these things right i mean there
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are some companies that are sort of i know there's a company called dopamine i mean that's what
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it's called and like they basically yeah they help apps learn how to be more addictive so they have
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they know you know how to tweak algorithms to send updates at certain times so the app becomes more
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something that people want to want to check you know and and like as podcast listeners or makers
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rather you and i like you know what do we want people to do we want listen people to listen to our
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shows um i i told and and i have ads on my show so like this i i i'm i understand that this is an issue
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but i think we need to be more sort of um upfront about it and and explain to kids how these things
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are made and built and paid for so that they are making smarter wide-eyed open uh choices for themselves
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speaking of like you don't like detoxes i love how you highlight this summer camp where you know
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most summer camps they have like this like strict no technology rule right no devices they when you
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get there they're going to take your smartphone put it in a you know a safe for the rest of the summer
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but this one summer camp decided no let's have like anything goes you can bring your device
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etc why did they do that and what were they hoping what were they hoping to accomplish with that
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new rule oh i love this guy so it's a camp called long acre camp it's actually in western
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pennsylvania really rural and this camp has been in this guy matt smith is his name he's the camp
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director it's been in his family for 40 years and he was just sort of thinking you know what the
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purpose of the camp they call it long acre leadership camp and you know he was like what is leadership
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in this day and age it's understanding how to um to sort of set goals and and be a good example to
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other kids right and he's like so this whole what are kids mostly thinking about right now
00:25:36.940
they're mostly thinking about their smartphones whether it's games or social media or whatever
00:25:41.860
but he was seeing that taking away the smartphones like summer camp what would happen they would just
00:25:47.480
go home and then get back on their devices and nothing would change they wouldn't have learned
00:25:53.240
any better habits or ways of self-regulation it was again back to the on or off switch so he was like
00:25:59.700
you know if there's one safe place where you should be able to sort of experiment with your behavior or
00:26:05.460
try out new things um it should be summer camp so he had kids come to camp and the first week they
00:26:12.360
had to turn in their phones and they had to go like you know tech free and they all got to know each
00:26:17.880
other and you know this way that people could make friends and all those sorts of things and then he was
00:26:21.640
like okay after the first week he gave the phones back to the kids and as one girl told me you know
00:26:27.460
she must have been 14 she was like all hell broke loose people grabbed their phones they curled up in
00:26:33.740
like various like cabins and corners and she said she felt like she had fallen into like a time machine
00:26:41.660
like she completely lost track of time she went on all her social media thing um thing she was seeing
00:26:47.140
what all her other friends were doing in other places and it kind of made her feel bad um she also
00:26:52.780
like didn't talk to her friends who were there with her that she'd made at camp and and all the
00:26:58.120
kids came back together and they sort of you know he and matt i give him a lot of credit for this he
00:27:04.160
sort of let them figure out what should the rules be for themselves and um and so they sort of started
00:27:10.200
to figure it out that you started to get dirty looks if you were on your phone too much or some
00:27:15.040
people said you know i don't want my phone and gave their phones back to the camp later they were
00:27:20.940
like actually i like the way things were before um so i think the idea being that like not only at
00:27:27.300
the end of camp should you have gotten a ton of exercise and fresh air and made new friends but
00:27:31.460
if you take back new life skills that you understand your own behavior better that you know when to use
00:27:38.100
your smartphone so that it helps you that it's like a tool rather than like a taskmaster then he felt
00:27:44.180
like you know that was his job as someone who works with young people to help them to do that and and
00:27:49.740
you know i think about when i was like 13 years old there's no way that i was being asked to regulate
00:27:55.200
my own behavior like kids are today mine was like should i go for a bike ride i guess so you know maybe
00:28:01.140
we snuck some cigarettes on the golf course or something like that but these kids have incredibly
00:28:05.480
powerful tools in their hands and and parents who don't know how to use them that much better than
00:28:10.960
they do and what we're asking for is a generation to grow up a lot faster than i think we previously had
00:28:17.120
too which i guess happens every generation the difference being though that this tool is being
00:28:21.240
updated constantly and personalized to each of us all the time i think that's what makes it different
00:28:26.420
than like when cars were a thing or the radio came out or tv was a thing these tools are constantly being
00:28:33.000
updated to hijack our attention and to keep us coming back and they are personalized to us and they
00:28:38.560
know everything about us yeah that's scary when you stop and you think about you have that existential
00:28:43.400
moment that amazon and google and facebook know so much about you so if you don't recommend you know
00:28:49.140
quick cold turkey social media detox etc like what are some just brass tacks things that you found that
00:28:54.940
worked with yourself and your listeners on sort of getting a handle on their their technology use
00:29:00.720
yeah so actually we turned it into a seven step thing and what i tried to do was make it so that
00:29:06.520
um it sort of takes an aspect of all the things that we talked we've talked about and and tries
00:29:12.360
like a little tweak so for example um day three you know for is called photo free day and the idea is
00:29:20.480
like don't take any photos that day and for young people that is extremely challenging to go for a day
00:29:26.140
um without taking photos but from what we heard from them um you know it literally they were using
00:29:32.140
their eyes differently they were seeing and experiencing the world differently and and i think
00:29:36.440
anybody can try a day right you know one day is all we're asking you to do and as one professor put it
00:29:44.420
to me he's like you know i felt like my my students had been talking about this they knew that like
00:29:50.180
these things were happening to them but they didn't have the like the the permission
00:29:55.920
and the very specific structure to try um a change and so i think by saying like we've tested this
00:30:03.960
here's what here are the rules just for one day try no photos all day long and then observe your own
00:30:10.360
behavior and what we have since seen um or day three delete the app that app take the app that is
00:30:17.380
driving you bonkers bananas we all have that one app take it off your phone just for the day and like
00:30:23.080
one guy said to me this was when we he first did the project he's like actually i've taken
00:30:27.320
six apps off my phone i was like all right dude whatever you need to do he took off instagram and
00:30:33.020
snapchat and facebook and twitter and i don't know whatever else and um he got back in touch last week
00:30:38.460
actually and he was like i after that one day i decided to always keep them off my phone he didn't
00:30:44.720
you know kill his accounts he just decided that he preferred using them on a laptop because then he would
00:30:51.700
just keep track of the time that he spent there and it didn't turn into a time suck and he also
00:30:55.700
started to realize that for him he said i think he said nine times out of ten when i'm on facebook i
00:31:01.380
feel bad about my life i don't really want to feel that way i feel pretty good about it when i'm not on
00:31:06.560
there and so for for him it was a permanent change but there were other people who said like
00:31:11.120
oh actually i like not having twitter on my phone i'm gonna do it once a month just to remind
00:31:15.740
myself that i'm in charge of twitter it's not in charge of me and so i think what we're doing is just
00:31:19.860
saying like these little tweaks can actually make big changes in your life and and the neuroscience
00:31:25.780
explains why they make big changes in your life so just try it see what happens yeah what was your
00:31:32.180
app that you deleted oh my god two dots do you know that game i don't know that game i read about it but
00:31:37.180
i don't know what it is i am not a gamer this dot this this dots this dots spread this game just
00:31:45.160
became like my scotch and soda you know like i would put the kids to bed and just
00:31:51.120
play this stupid game for like three hours and i i was ashamed of myself like i'd hide it from my
00:31:58.100
husband i felt like god i could be learning like a new language no i'm connecting dots in this game
00:32:03.500
and so i actually confronted the maker of the game and i was like man you're ruining my life and he's
00:32:10.280
like well you know you have to be able to put it down and figure it out i was like yes but
00:32:15.260
but i i i can't you know and then i i tried to convince myself that i was actually increasing
00:32:21.860
my spatial awareness and getting better at other um i don't know i thought like maybe it was helping
00:32:28.320
me in some way and so i reached out to some people who are specifically studying games who were like
00:32:33.920
yeah no you're not like you're not moving through the world more efficiently you're just getting
00:32:38.860
better at connecting virtual dots on your screen that's what you're getting better at so um so i
00:32:45.420
took it off my phone um for a long time but then i uh look what a confession to make i did put it back
00:32:52.040
uh but for science brett for science for science of course so so what happened after you put it back on
00:32:58.660
well okay so here's the story is i was talking to game designer um jane mcgonigal she's at the
00:33:05.400
institute for the future she's awesome and i was telling her like um i had a flight i'm a nervous
00:33:11.720
flyer and i had a really long flight to go on and she's like well you know what you could do there are
00:33:16.380
ways of using games productively you could put two dots back on your phone i was like what really
00:33:22.700
she's like yeah like what's the alternative that like you drink your way to australia or you you know
00:33:30.220
take a sedative or like she's like we don't why why go that direction when just playing two dots
00:33:37.000
takes you out of a situation and calms you she's like i think that that's a fair use situation and
00:33:43.100
and she told me also about a lot of other research about ways that we can use games um more productively
00:33:48.860
so the research is starting to show that like if you are trying not to be um to drink or not to smoke
00:33:56.140
or compulsively eat 10 minutes playing a game you know you got to set a timer though you got to set
00:34:01.140
a timer 10 minutes is an optimum length or if you are trying to switch gears mentally and and calm
00:34:08.160
yourself down 20 minutes is an optimal length i mean it's it's all very nascent research but i think the
00:34:14.540
point is with all these things it's not good or bad or on or off it's like ways it's it's subtle it's
00:34:20.660
there are ways to use these things so that they help you they and they don't hurt you and that's
00:34:26.120
hard to do you have to be very um purposeful about your habits which is tough we're all busy you know
00:34:32.340
yeah that was the big takeaway from this book was that technology isn't bad you just have to be
00:34:35.880
mindful about it and all everything you do with yeah did you did you make any changes brett i gotta i
00:34:41.060
gotta ask have i mean well no so like i so my personal thing is i i have like these crazy setup on my
00:34:47.160
laptop i use this app called uh what's it called here find focus it's for mac and so i set it to
00:34:53.800
where i can only access like twitter and like my you know my dumb sites my like my dorking around
00:34:58.960
sites is what i call them every 45 minutes i can access them for 15 minutes and then so for 45 minutes
00:35:04.520
i can do whatever and then i have like a device on my my android called app block so it blocks me
00:35:10.440
from instagram until like four o'clock so i i i'm i'm one of those people like i i'd rather
00:35:15.900
add constraints than self-regulate because i feel like self-regulation can also exhaust you mentally
00:35:22.500
so i just don't even have to worry about it but i think that's really interesting to me because like
00:35:26.280
you are somebody who is super tech savvy you you know you put out a podcast you're in this world right
00:35:33.080
but what was surprising to me was how many people don't know the basics like how to turn off
00:35:38.820
notifications on their phones or change the settings and like the idea of somebody installing
00:35:44.740
more technology to help them deal with their technology blows some people's minds they're like
00:35:50.500
wait what so i think you know we are in the minority the majority is struggling and and has no
00:35:57.740
idea uh maybe not no idea i want to give them more credit than that but is struggling and is looking
00:36:03.200
for very simple non-tech ways to make change um right so another like just simple way that i kind
00:36:10.600
of came across and i experimented with last week was when i didn't want to use my phone i would just
00:36:14.620
turn off wi-fi and mobile data and so i could get text messages and i can call but i couldn't do
00:36:20.020
anything else and even just like going through that hassle like oh i want to check instagram okay i
00:36:25.100
turn on my mobile like even the hassle of that sort of like okay it's not even worth it so i don't do it
00:36:29.540
yeah like i set up little roadblocks for myself too or i put um apps that i shouldn't really be
00:36:36.280
using i'll put them in a folder called productivity um just to be like are you really being productive
00:36:42.280
like just little like moments where i sort of mess with myself to remind myself like actually you know
00:36:48.140
or even you know i used to think that the best use of my time was answering all my email on the ride
00:36:55.160
home but actually having written this book and done the research i am better off like staring at
00:37:01.520
people's shoes all the way home the chances of me coming up with a better idea um or solving a
00:37:07.700
problem or even just being you know more available to my children and maybe making them a dinner that
00:37:14.460
i've you know i would have like ordered pizza i came up with an idea for a healthy dinner like
00:37:18.940
that is far more productive and creative um yeah maybe i'll have more emails to answer in the
00:37:25.460
morning but like in the long i gotta we gotta play the long game right man you know it's something i
00:37:31.920
did too is like one of the things you suggest is like notice how you spend your time with your devices
00:37:36.240
and email on my phone i notice that i read it but i don't answer it and i'll wait till i get home on
00:37:43.580
my laptop and then i'll answer it and so i'm like what's the point of having email on my phone
00:37:47.580
so i'm thinking about just deleting my email app because like it doesn't do anything for me
00:37:51.600
well that would be radical i would love to hear what happens you might get a lot of people are
00:37:55.380
pissed off at you who are like man don't you read your email well i mean i i read it on my phone and
00:38:00.440
then i'll wait two hours you know when i'm back at my laptop to answer because i i don't answer i don't
00:38:05.960
for some reason like i don't like typing on the phone with my thumbs so i think that makes perfect
00:38:11.860
sense like if you want to send someone a coherent response it helps to have a keyboard absolutely
00:38:16.560
well manush what's going on with the experiment so i mean right now has it just been broken down
00:38:21.120
into steps that people take are you still doing you still running the experiment gathering data
00:38:25.460
on your listeners yeah so the latest is um in the book we lay out the i sort of took what i learned
00:38:31.820
when we did the first project with the 20 000 people in 2015 i took all that took all the feedback
00:38:36.740
added more research and interviews and turned it into sort of the seven sort of steps you can take
00:38:42.260
and one of the apps that we initially partnered with it's called moment um it's a great guy
00:38:48.880
software developer who's just did this as a side project for himself he lives in pittsburgh
00:38:53.620
he has turned uh he's created a bored and brilliant program in the app so you can um download the app
00:39:01.460
moment there's a bored and brilliant site uh within it that you can sign up for it'll guide you through
00:39:06.980
the steps while also measuring how many times a day you pick up your phone just to check it and how
00:39:12.280
many minutes a day you spend on your phone to see if it is effective for you um but i should say like
00:39:17.800
in the original project we only collectively we only shaved six minutes off our daily phone usage um
00:39:27.700
and i was really bummed i was like what everyone's telling me they're having this amazing experience
00:39:33.260
how is it possible that we only cut down six minutes but then i went back to the neuroscientists
00:39:39.580
and the cognitive psychologists and they just kind of laughed at me they were like do you know
00:39:43.920
how difficult it is to change people's behavior much less do it in one week the fact that people felt um
00:39:52.360
so um passionately that they were willing to sign up for this project for a week and that they reported
00:39:58.660
back in our survey results that 90 of them felt that they had more power over their phone um that
00:40:05.080
was an incredible feat that people felt that they had the ability to master their phone as opposed to
00:40:14.320
being um dictated to by it um and so really to me it's also the stories that are peppered throughout
00:40:20.740
the book of people's changes that they've made in their lives um some of them are you know small like
00:40:26.600
one woman told us that now she like goes up and down the subway stairs when she's waiting for the
00:40:31.920
subway to get a cardio workout instead of looking at her phone but then like another woman this woman
00:40:38.300
in wisconsin um she was going through a breakup when bored and brilliant happened um and she had to decide
00:40:44.680
whether to sell the farm or not and she decided to keep it and now once a month she opens it up to
00:40:50.900
the community in wisconsin and she has something called make time where people come to the farm
00:40:55.420
they hand over their devices they can take a nap some people bring their sewing machines other
00:41:00.700
people paint um she decided that for her not only was she going to be a farmer but that she was going
00:41:06.540
to turn it into a place where her community could come together to do some creative thinking and
00:41:10.520
problem solving so that she renamed her farm the make time farm which is kind of amazing so
00:41:15.800
lots of really interesting stories right and that story wouldn't have happened unless she was bored
00:41:21.320
right she got the idea she was bored well manush has been a great conversation besides a note to
00:41:26.640
self where else can people find out about your work in the book yeah so i'm um i'm on book tour i'm
00:41:31.920
doing we're doing a lot of other fun things with our listeners i'm at manushz.com and the podcast is
00:41:39.000
note to self radio.org come join us and check us out uh we're having a lot of fun and and rethinking
00:41:46.160
how we live in this crazy accelerating world fantastic manusha marodi thank you so much for
00:41:51.040
your time it's been a pleasure thanks brett my guest today is manusha marodi she's the author of the book
00:41:54.760
bored and brilliant it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can also check out
00:41:58.620
our podcast note to self just check it out on itunes stitcher wherever else you listen to podcasts
00:42:02.820
also check out our show notes at aom.is slash boredom where you can find links to resources
00:42:07.380
bring delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:42:22.260
for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:42:25.580
artofmanliness.com so you've got something out of it i'd appreciate if just take one quick minute to
00:42:29.720
give us a review on itunes or stitcher helps us out a lot as always thank you for your continued
00:42:33.400
support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly