Boredom, often avoided in our hyper-connected world, is essential for accessing the brain's "default mode network," which facilitates introspection, meaning-making, and ultimately, greater happiness and reduced anxiety.
Mind Map
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ARTHUR BROOKS: You need to be bored.
You will have less meaning and you
will be more depressed if you never are bored.
I mean, it couldn't be clearer.
Let me give you the good side of boredom in general.
Boredom is a tendency for us to not be occupied
otherwise cognitively, which switches over our thinking
system to use a part of our brain
that's called the default mode network.
That sounds fancy.
It's really not.
The default mode network is a bunch
of structures in your brain that switch
on when you don't have anything else to think about.
So you forgot your phone and you're sitting
at a light, for example.
That's when your default mode network goes on.
We don't like it.
My colleague in the psychology department
here at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, he did experiments
where people had to sit in a room for 15
minutes with instructions to do absolutely nothing,
and there was nothing in the room to do,
except there was a button in front of them
that they could push.
And if they did, they gave themselves
a painful electric shock.
Sit there bored, or get a shock.
A big majority of the participants
gave themselves shocks instead of thinking about nothing.
We don't like boredom.
Boredom is boredom is terrible.
Why is boredom so bad?
Well, because the default mode network makes
us think about things that might be kind of uncomfortable.
When you think about nothing while your mind wanders
and thinks about, for example, big questions of meaning
in your life.
What does my life mean?
You go to uncomfortable existential questions
when you're bored.
That turns out to be incredibly important, incredibly good.
One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression
and anxiety in our society today is because people actually
don't know the meaning of their lives,
much less so in previous generations.
Tons of data show this, and furthermore, we're
not even looking.
Why not?
I'll tell you why not.
We figured out a way to eliminate boredom.
We've been able, almost completely,
to shut off the default mode network in our brains.
How?
The answer is that thing in your pocket with the screen,
which you take out even when you're standing on the street
corner waiting for the light to change,
is like, I might have to wait here for 15 seconds.
What are you doing?
You're actually trying to not be bored because the default mode
network is mildly uncomfortable, because it sends you
to the types of questions that you can't get your mind around.
You can't get your arms around.
Well, that's a big problem.
That's a doom loop of meaning.
If every time you're slightly bored pull out your phone,
it's going to get harder and harder for you to find meaning,
and that's the recipe for depression and anxiety
and a sense of hollowness, which, by the way,
are all through the roof.
I get it.
You don't want to be bored.
You need to be bored.
Be bored more.
Tomorrow, when you go to the gym in the morning
after you wake up, don't take your phone.
Can you handle it?
Not listening to a podcast while you're working out.
Just being in your head.
I promise you, you'll have your most interesting ideas
while you're working out without devices.
It's probably been a long time since you've done that.
Commute with nothing, not even the radio.
Can you do that?
Start getting better at periods that
are 15 minutes and longer of boredom,
and watch your life change.
Number one, you'll be less bored with ordinary things
in your life.
If you get better at the skill of boredom,
you'll be less bored with your job.
You'll be less bored with your relationships.
You'll be less bored with the things that
are going on around you.
But more importantly, you'll start digging
into the biggest questions in your life, purpose, meaning,
coherence, significance.
And who knows?
You might just get happier.
People ask me all the time, is the doctor
taking his own prescriptions?
And the answer is, yes.
Yes, I am.
I'm prone to the same pathologies as anybody else
because I have the same brain chemistry as everybody else.
So what do I do to fight that?
And the answer is, well, I do a number of things.
I have a no device policy after 7:00 in the afternoon.
I don't sleep with my phone.
We don't have devices when we have meals in my family.
Because we're there for each other.
We're not there for people who aren't there.
Three, I have regular social media
and screen cleanses where I don't use my device
for longer periods of time.
First, it's like children screaming in my head
because that's how dopamine is saying, get the phone,
get the phone.
That's addiction.
But it calms down and I feel better.
And I feel sort of blessed by the end.
And I pick the phone up by the end
because I have to check my emails.
And I have to be a normal, functioning, connected person
in the world.
But it does remind me that my life doesn't have to revolve
around these devices.
These protocols are really, really helpful
and I recommend them to anybody and everybody.
Don't sleep with your phone.
No phones during meals.
Regular social media fasts.
You'll get better.
People worry that if they do these things,
they're going to miss something.
There are ways that you can remedy that.
One of the things that you can do
is you can have your phone on.
You're just not looking at it, and there's
only one or two numbers that can reach you
in case of emergencies.
Phones can do that by the way.
If you don't have to do that, ask your kid.
But don't use emergencies in as an excuse.
Here's something that's not an emergency.
What's going on Twitter.
That's not an emergency answer nothing.
It doesn't matter.
The news can wait.
Seriously your grandparents didn't
what was going on every single second in Washington, DC.
You're killing yourself with this stuff.
Are you kidding me?
It's bad for you.
So let me say it straight to my kids.
Put down your phones.
You need more meaning in your life.
And so do I.
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