Boredom in the Age of Information Overload
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This is The Pulse, stories about the people and places at the heart of health and science. I'm Maiken Scott. When do you find yourself getting bored? After a long day of work, I get home and then I just say, what's next? And then I sit on my couch and I'm like, now what? Like right now? I fall asleep during a meeting. I find myself bored when I'm stuck in traffic. I think when you're doing mundane things.

Tasks. Like when I'm working on the computer right here, working on one screen, working on the other screen. I find myself being bored when I'm out of my routine. Usually when I have nothing else left to do.

Boredom researcher James Dankert can relate. The times that I get most bored is when there is a short period of time for me to occupy, but not a lot meaningful or purposeful to occupy it with. He likes the definition of boredom that comes from Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. The desire for desires.

I like that definition because it's simple, right? So it basically says that when we're bored, we want something to do that matters to us, but we can't figure out what that something is. And that's why it's restless. That's why it's uncomfortable. That's why we don't like it because we know we feel fairly acutely that desire, but it's a desire for something that we can't put our finger on.

But these days, when that strange, agitated feeling creeps up inside of you, when you're waiting in line or sitting in a long meeting, there's a whole universe of distraction right at your fingertips. Who needs to feel bored when there is an endless stream of content? I'd grab my phone, I'd watch YouTube videos, play video games, I'd watch TV.

or TikTok for like three hours. When I find myself being bored, I start looking at other stuff, either my phone, my tablet, my phone.

But even with all of these options, it seems like we're more easily bored than ever. For example, I find myself double-screening a lot, where I'm watching a show, but I'm also scrolling on Instagram. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke puts it this way. I think that there's very little in the world that you will like...

as long as you're bombarding your brain with these kinds of highly reinforcing digital media. Anna and many other researchers are worried that the constant media input is changing us and changing our brains.

For example, our ability to be creative. Well, I really think that boredom is the midwife of creativity. I don't think it's possible for us to have original thoughts if we're constantly reacting to external stimuli.

But this idea that being bored will make you more creative, not everybody agrees with that. On this episode, why do we feel bored and what can we do with that sensation? Can we learn to be more at ease without all of the distractions? To get started, let's look at the relationship between consuming so much content, boredom and the impact on our brains.

Many of us reach for our phones or other devices the moment when there is even a tiny window of downtime. And there's a whole world of options right there. You know what it is? It's like you go from one thing to the next to the next and it's like, ooh, a cat video. Ooh, here's like a trashy story about somebody's divorce and like, oh, here's like a nice recipe. I don't even have a chance to think. It's just I go from one thing to the next to the next. That's right.

That's Liz Tang, one of our reporters. So I've known for a while that I have a huge problem spending way too much time listening to podcasts, watching TV, YouTube, but especially spending lots of time on Reddit to the point that it was sort of taking over my life. Pulse reporter Grant Hill also felt like he was online way too much, especially on Twitter and Instagram. Very.

That and also podcasts. I just listen to them all the time. I take it into the shower. And every so often I'll see myself doing that and I'm like, wow, this has gotten a little out of hand. I don't know if this is okay.

So do both of you feel like you are constantly getting some kind of information into your brain? There is never a moment when you're not looking at something, listening to something, doing something like that. Oh, my gosh. Constantly. That's why I knew that I had a problem is because, like, I would get it from my computer.

To do something, I'd be like, oh, I got to put on my headphones and listen to a podcast. And then, you know, I would like start cooking. I'm like, oh, I got to put on a TV show. It's like I had this like pathological fear of being bored or being alone with my thoughts. And I think it's when my husband started mocking me that I realized, oh, maybe this isn't like quite so normal. How about you, Grant? Yeah, it was also my girlfriend was like, wow, you're looking at your phone all the time. And I'm just thinking, no, I'm not. This is how a normal person looks at their phone.

And then I realized I was probably in denial. Many scientists argue that when we're checking our phones, seeing that screen light up, getting notifications, small amounts of dopamine are released.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a big role in the reward center of our brains. And they are concerned that we become addicted to that steady drip of dopamine. Enter a trend called dopamine fasting or dopamine detox. Recently, I did what I call a dopamine detox. And

Dopamine detox is really just a hard reset. Okay, so that shouldn't be something that you're doing for, you know, months and months and months. What are your thoughts on dopamine detoxing? Is that legit? Does it work? Dopamine fasting is where people try to cut themselves off from technology, from their favorite online activities, to try to reset their brains.

Now, full disclosure, this is controversial and some people take this to extremes where they try to cut themselves off from all pleasure, even food and social interactions. But the more basic version is about limiting your activity on various devices.

And that's what Liz and Grant wanted to try. To get their experiment started, they reached out to Anna Lemke. She's a psychiatrist at Stanford University, and she has a book on the topic. It's called Dopamination. So the first thing we learned talking to Anna is that we are not alone. She said this is a really common problem. She sees it in her students. She sees it in her patients.

She says, for example, students tell her they find their classes boring, that they need to actually change their majors because they don't like it. I think that we need to explore your sense of not liking that thing, because in the face of all of the highly reinforcing activities you're doing, like Reddit, podcasts, Netflix,

I think that there's very little in the world that you will like as long as you're bombarding your brain with these kinds of highly reinforcing digital media. Anna told us that dopamine isn't just tied to pleasure and reward. It's also tied to motivation. Dopamine is a neurochemical that says pay attention, approach, and

investigate, which means that dopamine can even be released in response to highly aversive stimuli, which is why people can, for example, get addicted to the news or why we have things like doom scrolling. So every time I check my phone, I get a little ping of dopamine and it's to the point where I'm getting pings of dopamine like every 30 seconds. Anna says these constant pings can actually change your brain.

And so in response, our brain has to try to compensate or adapt to that sudden influx of dopamine by actually down-regulating dopamine receptors, down-regulating dopamine transmission, and not to baseline, but actually below baseline, such that with repeated exposure, we essentially can go into a kind of chronic dopamine deficit state, which is very akin to clinical depression or clinical anxiety.

And once we enter that state, we're now approximating the addicted brain. Where now we need more of that drug over time in ever more potent forms, not to get high, but just to get back to baseline and feel normal. And that's where the dopamine fast is incredibly useful.

Again, the idea with a dopamine fast is to quit whatever it is you're using compulsively, like Twitter, Reddit or podcasts, so that eventually you're not constantly craving that stimulation. Anna suggested that Liz and Grant should give it a shot.

In my case, I decided to not only quit Reddit, but she said there's a danger of then going over to your next biggest addiction. So I was like, yeah, I'm going to quit Reddit. I'm going to like not watch anything, no Netflix, no YouTube, and I'm going to stop listening to podcasts. So just like whole hog cold turkey.

And you, Grant? So for my part, I deleted Twitter. I deleted Instagram. All for my phone. I set limits on my laptop so that I couldn't access these sites. And I even stopped listening to podcasts in the shower and generally.

And what did she say how long you should do this? So we were initially talking about doing it for one week and we're like, oh, this will be like a fun little experiment. And then she told us to really rewire our brains, we need to do it for at least four weeks.

And there was like a little bit of trepidation. We kind of like looked at each other, but we were so excited by the idea of like becoming human again that we were like, yeah, like, let's do it. Did she warn you? Did she say like, oh, this is going to be hard or here's what you can expect? No.

Yeah, she said we were going to be very bored and that there might be actually physical sensations associated with – Withdrawal. She said there might be shaking and like temperature changes. To which we were thrilled. Yeah.

But no, but we were excited. I was at least excited to kind of see how – see the reaction that my body, my mind had to not interacting with these media. Okay. So here you were. You were going to do this for four weeks. Yes.

What happened? On the first day, I woke up late and I had to take a lift into work. And I was looking out the window because I couldn't be on Reddit. And I like passed by this bridge and somebody had spray painted awake on it. And I was like, yes, I am awake for the first time in so long.

Here's Liz eating her first meal without looking at her phone or listening to anything. I'm eating baby carrots and man, the sound of chewing these carrots is so loud in my own head.

So day one went mostly OK, but... The second day I woke up and I was going to ride my bike and I was like, I'm so tired and it's so boring to ride my bike. So I like almost immediately went back to podcasts and TV and YouTube. But I did manage to stay off Reddit the whole time, which I was very, it was like the first time in years that I haven't been on Reddit every day.

How about you, Grant? How did you do? For the first week, I actually did pretty well. I was enjoying not looking at my phone. I was regularly setting those limits on my laptop for Twitter and for Instagram. No podcast either. So I was really enjoying my quiet showers. But then I had to do some traveling and I found myself in the airport.

surrounded by everybody else, like hunched over their phones or talking with their family. And I was there alone and I was just feeling, man, I was itching for scrolling. You know what I mean? You recorded yourself at that low point. Right now I'm at a airport bar and I'm about a beer and a half in and I find myself wanting to download Twitter.

Kind of like one would want to have a cigarette after a beer, which is an interesting thing. Grant ended up caving during his trip. I was in Europe and I, you know, I didn't speak the language. And he put Twitter and Instagram back on his phone. I just kind of used it to get by, like, on those awkward trips.

train rides. I mean, it didn't have to be awkward. I guess maybe I'm using it as an excuse. I'm definitely using it as an excuse.

But when he got back to the U.S., he continued with the experiment. He deleted the abs and he started to see some positive effects. I was definitely less anxious. I definitely spent more time in the moment, had some awkward eye contact with people in elevators. But I enjoyed the – it made me feel human again, I think.

And I also got a lot better sleep before I would fall asleep listening to a podcast. And I think not having that play for an hour, you know, throughout the night let my brain actually get some rest. So obviously I had all of this free time, like Anna said I would. And I started doing things that I haven't done regularly in years. So I started like reading books and like reading long form articles.

So it's day 10 and as you can hear, I have rediscovered music. And this is like literally one of the first times in years that I have listened to music on purpose. And I'm remembering like how much I love it. I was doing things that were more rewarding that I hadn't done in a long time. And the biggest change I noticed is that I realized when I'm on Reddit all the time,

It's like my brain is there's like a little white mouse running around a track at breakneck speed all the time. And once I stopped being on Reddit, it was like the mouse just like stopped and like sat down in the middle of the track.

You know, I didn't have like all of these inputs, all of this content, videos, voices in my head. And so I kind of got a chance to become reacquainted with myself and my mind a little bit. And it wasn't as horrible as I thought it would be. And how about you, Grant? How did you do without the Twitter thing?

Noise. I'm going to use Liz's metaphor here with the white mouse. If I was a white mouse, I wasn't running around a track when I was looking at Twitter and Instagram, but I was just constantly looking at like into a mirror. Like I just felt like I was constantly seeing.

Seeing myself and where I measured up to all these people on Twitter or on Instagram, but I wasn't really conscious that I was doing that. But once I took Twitter and Instagram away, I just realized that so much of my habits with those apps were based around like –

I was just so wrapped up in like, oh, this tweet. Do I agree with this tweet? Where do I stand on this tweet? And then taking the tweet away, I was like, why am I even asking myself this question? Why?

I don't care about the tweet. No one cares what I think about the tweet. Why am I spending so much time wrapped up and preoccupied with where I land on this tweet? And you know what? If I scroll up, there's another one. Did you have any of the kind of physical symptoms that Anna said sometimes happen with people that you get shaky or twitchy or, you know, you just wanted that phone?

So I, on the first few days, I noticed that I had like a twitchy thumb. Like I would pick up my phone and I would just automatically start like swiping, trying to navigate to my Reddit app. And then I was like, oh, it's not there. And so that was kind of the extent of the physical response. But definitely,

Yeah.

And I'd be like, I just want to like land someplace and be comfortable. And there's nowhere for me to land now. How about boredom? You know, a lot of times we say that we reach for our phones because we're bored. We're listening to a podcast because we're bored. It's always like I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored. I need some kind of stimulus. So did you feel incredibly bored? Yeah.

I think I felt more uncomfortable with not having something to fixate on. I don't know if that's different from boredom, but something about that feels a little different. Grant says he found himself looking to his phone for comfort, staring at his photos or even financial apps. Liz says she wasn't bored a lot. She was still reading the news, but it didn't feel quite the same as Reddit.

So it wasn't so much boredom. It was more just this sense of like discomfort or restlessness. What about creativity? So that's another thing we hear a lot is that if we give our brain space to be, quote, bored or to have a little rest, then we'll be more creative. Did that happen for you? I do not feel like I had any real breakthroughs in that department. No.

But, you know, I definitely think being less anxious would help with that. But I didn't experience any like complete boost of creativity. It did make me think more about how I'm spending my free time. And I was like, I'm going to start woodworking. And I'm like, I'm going to go to a kickboxing class. Whether or not I actually follow through on those things is, you know, a question mark. But at least I got to kickboxing.

the point of thinking those thoughts. Liz did notice toward the end of the experiment that she felt more content, more at ease with being in her own head. So I'm at the beach in Seattle. It smells salty. You saw little anemones hiding under, like on the edges of rocks. And if you like touch their tentacles, they kind of like recoil.

But I was just realizing that I've just been like completely immersed in the moment of being here. I'm not really thinking about anything except looking for nice flat rocks. And it's just really nice.

So you made it through the four weeks. Now what? Is Twitter back on your phone? I'm happy to say that it is not and neither is Instagram. And I really am confident that it's going to stay that way. I think I have come to a realization that it truly was a waste of time.

And I am not no longer itching to scroll as much as I was before. How about you Liz? You're back on Reddit. So full confession about an hour before we came into the studio, I was like, just see what's going on on Reddit.

And before I knew it, like 45 minutes had gone and I couldn't even tell you what I looked at. So based on that experience, I don't think I can do Reddit in moderation. I think the best thing for me, if I can manage it, is to stay off it completely. All right. So no more Reddit, no more Twitter, no more Instagram. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks, Megan.

We're talking about boredom, content consumption, and the impact on our brains. Coming up, what extremes will people go to to avoid being bored? And it turned out that people would actually administer the electric shock rather than do nothing. That's next on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about boredom, endless content consumption, and what it all means for our brains.

You know the quote, only boring people get bored? I'm not sure that's true. Here's something the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote over 2,000 years ago, capturing a certain sense of dread he was feeling. How long the same things? Surely I will yawn, I will sleep, I will eat, I will be thirsty, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end?

But do all things go in a circle? Night overcomes day. Day, night. Summer gives way to autumn. Winter presses on autumn, which is checked by spring. All things past that they may return. I do nothing new. I see nothing new. Sometimes this makes me seasick. There are many who judge living not painful but empty.

Boredom is a restless feeling, an unidentified desire. We want something to do that matters to us, but we can't figure out what that something is. But why and when do we feel it?

James Dankert is a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the co-author of Out of My Skull, The Psychology of Boredom. What makes me bored is not the same as what might make you bored. And certainly it's true, too, that what helps me get out of my boredom is not going to be the same for me than it is for you.

James directs a boredom lab at the University of Waterloo where one of the jobs is to make people bored. We often have our participants watch a three-minute video of two guys hanging laundry. You know, it works really well to make people bored. See, I would enjoy that. Would you? I think so. Well, and so maybe that wouldn't work for you.

James asks participants how bored they are before and after an activity. And he also records their behavior, like how well they perform and pay attention to a task after induced boredom. And he looks for changes in brain activity. Where in the brain does boredom show up? Is there a region or is it just all over?

It's a great question, but one that we need a lot more research on. So we're in the early days of trying to understand what is the brain signature, the neural signature of being bored. Having said that, we're very interested in a network of the brain known as the salience network. This is a collection of brain areas that together represent things in your environment that are important for you for some behavioral reason, right? Almost as if this circuit is telling you

Look over here or listen to this or pay attention to that because it's important. You need to pay attention to it.

And what we and others have found is that when you're trying to extract yourself from being bored, that network of brain areas is upregulated. It shows more activity. So it's trying, casting about, seeking something that might be relevant, salient for you to do. When I make you bored, so we did this by, again, having people watch the video of two guys hanging laundry while we scanned their brains, that part of the brain tends to downregulate or turn off.

And that's because while you're in the midst of that boredom episode, there really isn't anything salient. There isn't anything relevant to you in the world. And that's why you're bored. And so we see that salience network sort of switch off. James also built on the research of another scientist, Timothy Wilson. He did a study in 2014 where people would spend up to 15 minutes in a room with just their thoughts.

They could sit there and do absolutely nothing, or they could give themselves small electric shocks. And it turned out that people would actually administer the electric shock rather than do nothing.

One participant in their study shocked himself 196 times in 15 minutes, which is kind of extreme. James wondered, did they shock themselves just because the option was there? It was something to do? He decided to study how bored people would get in a room with no distractions, as opposed to a room where there were options like Legos, a puzzle, an open laptop. But we tell you, you can look, but you can't touch.

That room should be more boring than a completely empty room where you can't see options for engagement. You can't see things that you could do. And that's exactly what we found. When we asked people to rate their experiences, the empty room was considered to be less boring than the room with all of these things that they couldn't engage with despite being able to see them right there in front of them. So I think in our interpretation of those results, we suggest that that represents what we would call opportunity costs. That is that...

You see these things that you could do, but you're not able to engage with them. And that is seen as a lost opportunity. You should be able to do that, but we have prevented you from doing so. And that feels boring and perhaps frustrating as well. But 15 minutes is such a short time. Like I can't possibly imagine that I would give myself electrical shocks in like

15 minutes is like just enough time to take a deep breath. You know, so it's like surprising that people would find that to be such a long time. Well, so importantly, if you go back to that Timothy Wilson study,

Not everybody gave themselves a shock. And in fact, about one third of their participants said they quite enjoyed the experience of just being alone for 15 minutes with their thoughts. So it's not the case that everybody hates that experience and everybody gives themselves an electric shock. That's not true at all. It's just a some percentage of people. And so we didn't have the electric shocks in our study.

But what was consistent is that most people reported the room where they could look but not touch as being more boring, as though there were these lost opportunities for them. What do we know about the propensity to be bored? You know, like what people's tolerances for boredom and how that correlates with other personality traits. So to what extent are you susceptible to experiencing boredom?

And what others have shown is that people who are highly prone to boredom tend to experience the state of boredom more frequently. And when they experience it, they experience it more intensely. And the third thing that is true of people who are boredom prone is that they tend to rate their experiences and their life more generally as being a little bit devoid of meaning. So things just don't seem to matter as much to them or they don't mean as much to them as people who don't experience boredom. In terms of

boredom proneness is also associated with. We and others have shown that people who tend to be low in self-control, so people who struggle to marshal their thoughts and their actions and emotions in the pursuit of goals, people who struggle with that tend to also have higher levels of boredom proneness. And so I think that the

The experience of boredom proneness kind of reflects this struggle of regulating your emotions and regulating your behavior. You want something, but you can't figure out what it is or you can't launch into something that's going to satisfy that desire. People who become bored more easily are also susceptible to issues with executive functioning, anger and depression, and also problematic smartphone use.

And I think the thing that's interesting to me about things like smartphone use and that kind of social media use that becomes problematic is that these are ways of passively occupying our minds. And you can kind of mindlessly zone out. You can let the stimuli come to you and, you know, it's a fairly monotonous kind of behavior, but it is occupying your mind. It's just occupying it in a very passive way. And that

in the short term solves your boredom, but not in the long term because you're not engaging actively with the world. You're not choosing goals that are meaningful in any particular way. And I think sometimes that could be true about the way we engage with social media and our smartphones as well.

I've often heard that boredom can lead to creativity. You know, that when we're bored, we start sort of like just rummaging around our head and looking for new stuff and finding ways to engage ourselves. Is there any truth to that? People love that idea that boredom will make you creative. And there's any number of

sort of famous people who we know are creative, who feed into that idea. There's a quote from Jimi Hendrix when somebody was amazed by his guitar playing and asked him after the show, where have you been hiding? Jimi Hendrix says, well, I've been playing the Chitlin circuit. And this was a circuit in America that was

just prior to the civil rights movement where black performers could perform safely. But it was a circuit that had a certain style of music that Hendrix didn't like playing. So he'd say, I was playing the Chitlin circuit and I was bored. So I decided to play differently, right?

The logic here is just a little bit off. I don't think that we can tell people that boredom will make you creative. That's not going to happen. Hendrix was creative because he spent hours upon hours on his craft. He played guitar as much as he could every day that he could, and he honed his skills and got better at them, right? So I think the logic should go a little bit like this, that if you have creative outlets...

And if you have fostered those creative outlets, you've practiced, you've learned from others, you've expanded the kind of experiences you have with that creative domain. If you've done all of that, then you can turn to that creative outlet when you're bored and it will do a fantastic job of eliminating your boredom. And I think that's the proper logic there. But I don't think very good evidence at all to suggest that boredom will make you creative.

James did a recent study where he made people bored and then he asked them to list different ways to use a brick creatively. The more bored people were, the less creative ideas they had. I wonder if when we say boredom, what we mean is more like a rest in terms of the stimuli we receive. You know, it's the kind of argument that

parents will make to get their kids off the phone and off the devices, right? And I think it appeals to us perhaps as a way to think like when you're not constantly bombarding your brain with endless stimuli, you know, me sitting in front of the TV watching a show while also watching Instagram. I'm wondering if we're really talking more about

cognitive rest or just like a moment to digest. You're a thousand percent correct. I would absolutely agree with that, that there is going to be value. And again, I think we probably need to do the work on this to back up this hypothesis, this claim. But I think there's going to be demonstrable benefits from disconnecting and from downtime. So those experiences may well

allow you to free up your cognitive resources, make associations that you can't make as easily when you're in the thrust and parry of everyday life. But I really do like your point that when we talk about this myth of boredom making you creative, what we're saying is we need to free up our minds in order to make creative connections. And sometimes people mistake that freeing up of your mind as a boredom episode. It's not. Boredom is restless, agitated desire for something that you can't satisfy.

And that's nothing like just trying to defrag, right? Overall, James says that boredom has served an important function in our evolution and the desire to try new things. It pushes us to explore our environment for something better to engage with. And that might be, you know, hunt together a day, better resources to eat, or it might be for, you know, better places to put down for the night. Anyway,

any number of sorts of things in our evolutionary past that were better. Now we need better things to engage our minds and our cognitive resources. So it sort of like pushes us to look for the next thing. Absolutely. It's a call to action. And this is why people who are prone to boredom struggle with it so much because they fail to launch into action. And that's precisely what the boredom signal is telling them to do, that they must launch into something

It's different than whatever you're doing right now because clearly what you're doing right now is not engaging enough. James Dankert is a professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He's the co-author of Out of My Skull, The Psychology of Boredom. You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

We're talking about boredom and the impact of consuming so much content.

So far, we heard a couple of different definitions of boredom. The desire for desire, a vague sense of discomfort that has us feeling restless or sad. Linguist Justin McDaniel has another take on boredom, one that focuses on the first part of the word, bore. It means to put a hole in something, right? To bore a hole in something. Meaning that like...

You are pierced. You're rendered useless. But for Justin, this is not a bad thing. It's an invitation to be still. Boredom is something that you can see as productive. It's like a beginning, right? It's a beginning. These days, Justin is a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. But when he was younger, he spent a lot of time exploring boredom in some extreme situations.

Alan Hinnitch has this story. When Justin McDaniel was in his 20s, he traveled to Thailand to teach English as a volunteer. Soon after, he became a monk in a remote Buddhist monastery.

A monk in any situation is a type of prison in many ways, right? Like you have exactly the same clothes, exactly the same haircut. You have a series of rules. In my monastery, it's 243 rules, right? Everything from the way you speak to how you go to the bathroom to how you walk, every movement you make, right? That you're celibate. You can't take intoxicants. You eat only once a day. Your days are so heavily regulated, right?

It was a simple life with very few choices and a lot of chores that had to be done every day. Sweep,

clean, and then do it all over again. Tomorrow, you know, you have to sweep the path again. It's going to be have leaves falling on it again. You know, tomorrow there's going to be dust on the Buddha statue. You got to polish it again. Like, it just seems endless. But for Justin, there was a lot of beauty in those simple tasks. And in many ways, when choice is taken away, it is incredibly liberating. Doing these series of tasks allows me to concentrate and breathe, pay hyper attention to what you're doing.

Justin adjusted well to monastic life. He wasn't bothered by the routines, the strict rules, or how little food they usually ate. Just about 800 calories a day. So eventually, he decided to try something more extreme. It was dangerous, and I shouldn't have done it, but I was kind of a hothead. I just like challenges. Seven days of fasting in complete solitude. You're placed in this box. It's a wooden box in the middle of the jungle.

And, you know, there's no light. You only can fit sitting in it. Like, you can't put your head up straight. You can't stretch your legs out. You're kind of in a half-lotus position and caught in this box and it's locked. And you get...

Water a couple times a day through a straw in the box. Justin remembers being really uncomfortable. It was hot and his hunger was brutal. After three days, he started hallucinating. There was a benefit, at least for the first three days, of really feeling your body. Eventually, he fell out of the box and the other monks brought him back to the monastery. ♪

The lessons from his time as a monk stuck with him, and he brings them into the classroom. For 22 years, he's been teaching a radical course called Living Deliberately. It's a course on comparative monasticism. Students have to take a vow of silence for a month. So no internet, no phone, no speaking. He also teaches a course called Existential Despair, which I took when I was in college. And that is students come together at four to midnight and...

and they read a book cover to cover. We read authors like William Burroughs and Yukio Mishima, people who grappled with life often on the fringes of society. As you can imagine, reading a book cover to cover late into the night requires a lot of concentration. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't get bored or zone out here and there.

But I think that was part of the point. I want my students to, just like I did as a monk, learn to appreciate the task that's in front of them, the words that are in front of them, the desk that's in front of them, and the person that is sitting next to them. Slow down and pay attention to the room.

We're encouraged, like if you want to be creative, well, take this pill or take a class or do yoga or do SoulCycle or talk to a therapist, which are all fine things. These are great things. But these are just adding, adding, adding, adding. If you look at what monks and nuns do, they don't add more. They do less, right? They simply do less. Less speaking, less choice of clothing, less choice of food.

less choice of activities. A monk's day is very boring to most people, you know? And however, it makes you reevaluate your every day and see that it is not boring.

Justin wants students to learn how to feel at ease with boredom, with the lack of input, silence, and to just exist in your body. Our job is simply to learn how to be comfortable with ourselves, even if it's just a few moments a day.

Learning how to read a novel for just the sake of reading it. Learning how to read a poem for just the sake of reading it. Learning how to walk for the sake of walking. Wait for the sake of waiting. Play music for the sake of music. Not for being good at it, not for practicing, not for showing off.

but for stopping yourself, for freezing yourself, for putting a hole in yourself. It's interesting how our brains do crave nothingness. Our brains do crave non-productivity. And we do this all the time. We go to listen to music or we go to a museum. But we try to act if it's about learning or productivity when it's really about our brains needing a pause.

His point here is that we need to embrace boredom and apathy because they're much needed resting states of our being. Boredom, in a sense, makes us attentive to the presence in the room. The everyday is so spectacular. The everyday is just the wonder of it all.

It's amazing. The variety of sounds we hear just outside. Right now in my room, I have a lot of books in here. Who cares what's in these books? Just the variety of colors of the covers are kind of amazing. And just like, wow, that's a lot of color. And I think that if you can be comfortable with not knowing, if you can be comfortable with lack of productivity, if you can be comfortable...

in the sense with the wonder of the everyday around you, you're going to be more empathetic to the person next to you of that they're part of that wonderment. For The Pulse, I'm Alan Hynich.

Coming up, a game many call boring got a makeover to move more quickly. But some fans are not happy. For me, the problem with baseball has never been that it's too slow. It's always been that it's too fast. And there's so many decisions being made in such compressed amounts of time. And there's so much drama folded into the game. That's next on The Pulse. The Pulse.

This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about boredom and our constant desire for more and more input. It's April, and for Major League Baseball fans, that means it's finally time to return to the ballpark after the winter.

It's always a long wait from the last game in the fall to the first one in the spring, but fans don't seem to really sweat it since waiting is at the heart of the game. It's a slow game with a lot of pauses, and some people call it boring. But last season, baseball got a makeover meant to speed things up a little to create some faster-paced action. Marcus Biddle has more.

I'm a baseball fan now, but growing up in the 90s, it might have been my least favorite sport. Of course, we were spoiled by high-flying, fast-paced, show-stopping basketball. There was Charles Barkley, Shaq, and who could forget about Michael Jordan. Chicago with the lead!

But my favorite player was Allen Iverson. By comparison, baseball seemed mundane. Homer Simpson probably said it best. I never realized how boring this game is.

And sure, I'll say it, baseball can be boring. I get that. It's a game without a time limit. It's hard to enjoy something that never seems to end. But when you settle into the experience and tune into everything that unfolds right before your eyes, even during slow moments, the game is packed with tension and action. Hits one in the air, left center field, back it goes! Harper, the swing of his life!

My first baseball game was in 2008. I fell in love with the atmosphere right away. It kind of felt like going to a state fair on a Friday spring afternoon. The Phillies played the Toronto Blue Jays that day, and we won. By the way, 2008 was also a great year to become a Phillies fan. The Philadelphia Phillies are 2008 World Champions of Baseball!

Winning championships is never guaranteed, but baseball is bigger than winning and losing. In some ways, its slow pace is what makes it special. The very activity of playing baseball or being a fan of baseball requires a kind of

That's Alvin Noe. He's a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and a baseball enthusiast. He's a Mets fan. I won't hold that against him. He says in our fast-paced world, baseball is an outlier. It's counter to the habitual way we live to not be doing anything.

to not be active. You could be watching a game where the score is 0-0 through nine innings. So Alvis says it's no accident that at every baseball stadium, the walk-up music, the visuals, and sing-alongs are a big component of the experience. They give you just distractions to save you from the potential value of being uncomfortable for a minute. There's something valuable about

to being ejected from organized time and thrown back on unstructured time.

He says that unstructured time is kind of good for us. For example, it's why people like art exhibits. When you're looking at a work of art, there are no rules about how you're supposed to respond to it, what you're supposed to like in it or not like in it. You're just simply, you literally have nothing other than the object in your response. And like art, baseball, Alva says, can provide a similar space for people. There are rules and there is such a thing as understanding the game correctly or missing the game or not understanding it.

But the game is an opportunity. It's an opportunity for you to develop your attention. It's a learning experience. It's also fun, but it definitely requires a kind of cultivation. You can learn to really tune into everything that's happening on the field. Before every home run, Alva says, there's a chessboard battle. It's the interaction between one pitcher and one batter.

It's this very complicated encounter between these two individuals. There's a game within a game between each pitch, he says. And it starts with the batter. He's looking at the third base coach. He's thinking about the base runners. He's collecting himself to face a 100-mile-an-hour pitch or maybe a 75-mile-an-hour pitch. He doesn't know which it's going to be. People always complain about the batter stepping out of the batter's box and adjusting his batter's glove.

But that's thinking time. Then there's the pitcher. He's trying to throw a pitch that's both good and unhittable. The pitcher knows what he's got left in his tank, what he's capable of doing, and is trying to make decisions. So those moments while the clock is ticking now...

are busy moments. They're not just wasting time. Alva says giving the pitcher and batter time to make those decisions is what determines the pace of the game. For me, the problem with baseball has never been that it's too slow. It's always been that it's too fast. And there's so many decisions being made in such compressed amounts of time, and there's so much drama folded into the game. But last season, Major League Baseball instituted the pitch clock. Now the pitcher only has 15 seconds in between pitches.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred explained the move by saying that fans want games with better pace, more action, and more athleticism from the players. In 2023, MLB gained over 6 million more fans compared to its previous year. The average time of a 9-inning baseball game was just over 2 hours and 39 minutes.

Almost 30 minutes shorter than the average MLB game since a season before. I got home from a Tuesday night baseball game. I left the park at 9.30 instead of 11, and that felt awesome to me. That's Addie Baird, a baseball journalist in Washington, D.C. And even though she loves getting home early, she admits that constraining baseball to a clock is a bit tricky. Baseball is supposed to be a sport that is taken out of time and...

just free-flowing, the only thing that determines ends and beginnings is the game itself rather than a ticking clock. The whole point is to be willing to just like sit and wonder and think and ask questions and be surprised and watch humans make mistakes. When I've tapped into it on that level,

It's bliss. It's the best game in the world. She's cautiously in favor of the pitch clock, and it's adding one special wrinkle to the game. Usually, we get action because somebody makes a mistake. And the pitch clock has this little added element of forcing a mistake. And that's when I can find it really engaging and really interesting. But Alvin Noe is not a fan. I just thought...

The pitch clock is going to be a way of essentially diminishing the game, adding something that has nothing to do with the game's logic and in a way...

kind of expresses a certain dislike of the game, as if the problem is that there's too much of it or that we need less of it. Now with the pitch clock, it's hard to catch those special moments that he savors in the game. I go and get a drink from the fridge and I come back and too much has happened. It's not, the pacing is for me not right. But true to form as a philosophy professor, Alva is finding a way to frame his distaste for the changes. This change in baseball is

And I always notice that I resist the change. I don't want changes to the rules. I like the way it was. But without change, there's no life. Life is change. For The Pulse, I'm Marcus Biddle.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland Family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu, Liz Tong, and Grant Hill. Marcus Biddle is our health equity fellow. Jaden George is our intern.

Our engineer is Charlie Kyer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.