Benefits of Boredom: How Being Scroll-Free Boosts your Brainpower
Are you familiar with ‘Shower Thoughts’? How great ideas can unexpectedly pop in to your head out of nowhere while in shower? Or it could be while eating breakfast, or on your way to the bus stop. Sometimes you are struck by just how creative you are without even thinking very hard!
What do these things have in common? Typically it is when you are not occupied with anything else, especially scrolling through your phone! I really hope that nobody reading this takes their phone in the shower with them!
Unfortunately more and more of these phone-free moments are vanishing; you probably pick up your phone while eating your breakfast or waiting for a bus (but hopefully not while walking to the bus stop). And this is a problem. Why? Because our brain is at its most creative when not occupied with anything else, and social media feeds are taking those amazing moments away from us.
The Power Of The Wandering Mind
It is well-documented that a calm and distraction-free mind is a creative mind. One example of this is the ancient use of a Labyrinth. Labyrinths have been used for centuries as a way of calming the mind and unlocking creativity, and can be seen in many locations around the world. They are different to mazes; a maze has multiple entrances and exits and requires some level of problem-solving.
A labyrinth on the other hand may look like a maze but only has a single path to follow. The purpose is just to give your brain something simple to do and free it of other distractions. In his book “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning”, Andy Hunt describes how this causes the ‘processing’ part of your brain to tune out and allow the higher-level problem-solving side to get creative.
Psychology professor Sandi Mann has conducted experiments to test how boredom boosts our creativity, and her results show that ‘being bored’ can indeed lead to more creativity. Her research provides some evidence that embracing boredom is a good thing, whereas finding things to occupy our attention instead can be detrimental.
Smartphones: Creativity’s Kryptonite
With the introduction of Smartphones and Social Media, especially short-form videos, Tech companies have found a way to infiltrate our opportunities for boredom and thus creativity. Short-videos are like sand - they can be poured into any size of gap in your day and with their micro-dosing of dopamine, it is easy to fall into the trap of filling up all your idle moments with a quick look at your phone.
Standing in line at a shop? Have a quick scroll. Waiting for your bus? Have a quick scroll. Waiting for your partner to get ready? Have a quick scroll.
Do you see the pattern?
While watching longer-form videos like on YouTube, or reading blog posts, take a little time and planning to make time for, the short-form entertainment of Reels, Shorts and TikTok constantly pour a convenient boredom-antedote into these small gaps in our lives. But the effect is that our brain is never having a break! If you are constantly consuming then you are not able to create. If you binge on a buffet then you will get bloated and sick, and binging on the social media buffet does the same for our brains.
Your Creative Opportunity: Be Bored
We forget that we have power over the devices in our pockets. And these small moments in our lives also present the perfect moments to practice embracing boredom. If you are waiting in a shop or at a bus stop or in your car, remind yourself that you are only waiting for a few minutes and allow yourself to be bored, idle and un-occupied. Just for a minute or two. See what happens, and assure yourself that nothing bad will happen. In fact is it likely that something good will happen.
I recently went on a 45-minute walk with my children and we promised that we would not take our phones out of our pockets. The first few minutes were a bit awkward, but by the end of the walk it was amazing how many things we had talked about and how much I found out about what they were enjoying in life.
So here are some tips:
If you are waiting for something, leave your phone in your pocket. Assure yourself that there is nothing wrong with being idle.
Do something menial like count something in your environment (white cars going past your bus stop, people wearing glasses) or find a clock and watch the hands. Give your mind something simple to do
If you are already doing a ‘boring’ task like washing dishes or folding clothes, focus on the task at hand without any distractions. Do each action carefully. This is a form of ‘being present’
Stuck on a problem? Go for a walk around the block without your phone. Walk carefully and deliberately. Maybe focus on not stepping on cracks like when you were a child. Make it like a labyrinth.
Finding it difficult to stop scrolling? Try Screen Balance’s scroll-disruption service. It injects personalised reminders into your social media feed to remind you to take a break from scrolling and spend your attention more wisely.
Let your mind be free to work its magic and do what it was designed to do. Don’t shackle it down with constant consumption. Treat it well and it will return the favour.
The Unseen Choice: what you’re really choosing when you scroll
These days, everyone has a story about how they sat down “just to relax and scroll for a few minutes”, and then they suddenly discover that an hour or more has disappeared. A glance at your screen time then reveals that, together with some optimistic scrolling earlier in the day, perhaps you’ve consigned 2 hours of your day to ‘lost in the scroll’.
The Hidden Cost
This may seem like a harmless pleasure on the surface, but what is the cost over a month? Or a year? Let’s dwell on saving an hour of lost scrolling time a day or thereabouts. That’s about 30 hours a month. If we consider we have about 8 hours of productivity time a day (based on your average working day), then in a month we have thrown away almost 4 days!
Here is the hidden cost - choosing to scroll is choosing it over something else. It says that right now I’m giving this choice the highest priority over other things I could be doing; other things that could be more beneficial to me and help me in the future. I’m choosing one version of my future self over another. Should we be doing this?
A Vote For ‘The Best You’
There are many future versions of you. Picture them as candidates in an election, and picture the one you would most like to vote for.
Is it the one who is healthy and fit? The one who enjoys walks with their family and who makes meatballs with their kids on a Sunday? The one who is confident at work because they’ve read those teamwork books? The one who knows how to play Christmas Carols on the piano at the next family Christmas? Perhaps it is the person who is ALL of the above?
Every minute or hour spent scrolling is a vote. A vote for becoming ‘The Best You’ or a vote for ‘Still The Same You’. The journey to your best self is the sum of those votes over months and years.
Meanwhile, something unseen is happening when you vote for scrolling. The Big Tech Algorithms convert your votes into revenue… for themselves. The Attention Economy knows that our attention is a finite resource and tries to mine that resource every day. They have all the tricks in the book at their disposal because they invented many of them. So time spent on your TikTok or Instagram feed is not only a lost investment in yourself, it’s another few dollars on their bottom line at your expense.
The Choice Challenge
Try this for a week.
Make a list of things you want to get done.
Then, when you find yourself scrolling, think to yourself “I have chosen this”
Next, ask yourself “Is this the choice my Best Future Self would have made?” Remind yourself of the other choices you have on your list
Now re-consider your choice. Do you want to change your choice?
Doing this re-affirms to you that you have made a choice, and it is one of many. Choosing where to spend your attention is important and it is totally within you control.
Screen Balance helps with this choice. By injecting custom-made and personalised videos into your social media feeds, you are given a chance to recognise that you have a choice and realise that your choice is within your power to change. Perhaps your chosen video is your “Best Self” from the future, reminding you of the power of your choice.
You will have thousands of these choices in your lifetime, and each one counts as a vote towards becoming who you want to be. The question is, do you want to win by a whisker or by a landslide?
5 Essential Tips to Maximize Study over Screens
Exams are stressful and study is hard. HSCs are rapidly approaching in Australia, and every family member wants the results to be good, both the students and their parents. It takes focus and dedication, and it can feel overwhelming. This feeling is only exacerbated when there is an added battle to overcome: the enticing and comforting lure of the social media feed, where 5 minutes of downtime can quickly transform into an hour of doom-scrolling.
There are plenty of posts out there about how to study better, but we want to help students avoid getting distracted by their smartphone and de-railing all the good study tips they have accumulated. Hopefully these suggestions will help you to beat the screen and study smarter (as well as harder) and get the most out of your HSC exam prep.
Don’t Cram! Study Regularly
Leaving your study late is a sure-fire recipe for extra stress, as you see the remaining days slowly diminish. Not only is smaller, regular study a more effective technique which relieves this stress, it is also an effective way of managing your screen time. Once you enter the ‘cramming zone’ leading up to the exams, the higher levels of stress will often result in seeking ways to relieve it, one of which is hopping on your phone.
Cramming also involves longer daily study periods which puts more stress on you to focus for longer. It is natural to want to take a break, but those breaks are more likely to have you reaching for your phone.
Study plans can help, and creating that plan earlier to stretch over a longer period will result in less stress as the exams approach. A plan for 20-30 minutes a day over 6 months is going to be more effective, both with the results and the temptation, than a plan for 6 hours a day in the last month.
Create a Phone-Free Zone
We all know that we are more likely to succumb to a temptation when it is easy to get to, and the most obvious reason is that it’s in our vision. You are more likely to snack on some chocolate if it is in front of you than if it is at the back of the fridge. In the same way, it is so tempting to pick up your phone if it is in sight and in easy reach.
Phones are a bigger problem however - they love to call to us and beg for attention! Often, one familiar ‘ding’ from our phone is enough to interrupt our focus and make us want to find out what just happened.
There’s an easy solution for this - while you are studying, mute your phone and put it in a different room. There are many apps which provide a ‘Focus’ or ‘Zen’ mode as well, which makes it more difficult to access your phone even if you do go an pick it up. After 10 minutes of continuous focus on your study, you will often find that you hit that ‘zone’ where you can easily do another half an hour.
Start a Study Group
Study groups come with plenty of benefits anyway, but one added bonus is that it is easier to manage phone distractions if you have a ‘study buddy’. Plan some time with a mate or two to study together, and make the joint decision to put your phones somewhere else, say in a box in the kitchen. Having your friends around will not only motivate you to all focus together and give everyone more support (by quizzing each other or asking questions), it will also create a social contract that make it harder for any one person to make a break for their phone.
Study First, Screen Later
We all know that leisure activities are enjoyable and we would rather do them than study. Most leisure activities have a natural limit however (e.g. most people go to the movies in the evening, and watching a sports match has a fixed length). Spending leisure time on a phone these days is almost limitless; social media feeds are endless and streaming services allow you to binge-watch anything. So we have to think about what limits we can put on ourselves.
Planning and committing to study first and leisure later is an effective reward strategy. Perhaps a friend or parent can help with this - commit to knocking of some study goals, or a time in the day, before they give you access to your phone. If you think this is too difficult then think of some activities to substitute for your phone if you are losing focus (go for a walk, do some push-ups, eat some fruit). They will give you something to do but they all consume a finite amount of time, allowing you to get back to study when you’ve finished.
Interrupt your Scrolling Habit
At some point, we will lapse. It might be an innocent slip-up or it might be a dip in motivation. When this happens, we need to be reminded of our goals and get some motivation. This is where Screen Balance can help. Screen Balance injects custom motivational videos into your social media feed in order to interrupt your scrolling and inspire you to make a better choice. Sometimes we just need a little nudge, and we also need to learn to exercise our self-regulation.
Screen Balance videos are highly personalized to you and your goals. You might see a video of your favourite scientist, sports team or even school-mate who speaks to you, saying “Hey Josh, have you finished your Marine Ecosystem Geography section yet? Exam’s in 3 weeks! You got this!”.
We believe that screen limits can be effective, but practicing making important choices at the right moments has greater benefits in the long-run. If you think this will help then find out more here!