Is Boredom Good for You? The Surprising Upside

Boredom has a bad reputation. It’s the feeling everyone tries to avoid, the thing phones exist to interrupt within seconds of it showing up, the emotion parents apologize for and workplaces try to eliminate entirely, often without stopping to ask whether eliminating it is actually the right move. But a growing body of psychology research has spent the last decade asking a more interesting question: what if boredom is actually doing something useful, and we’ve just been too quick to make it go away to ever notice?

The answer turns out to be more nuanced than either “boredom is bad and should be avoided” or “boredom is secretly a productivity hack in disguise.” Here’s what the actual research says, where it disagrees with itself, and what that means for how you might want to treat your next bored moment instead of automatically reaching for a screen to make it disappear.

So, Is Boredom Actually Good for You?

The Short Answer

Mostly, yes, with a real caveat worth taking seriously. Several studies have found that people who go through a boring task perform better on creative and problem-solving tasks immediately afterward, suggesting boredom pushes the brain to seek out stimulation it isn’t currently getting elsewhere. But more recent research has complicated that picture considerably, finding that boredom itself doesn’t reliably produce creativity, and that what actually matters most is how a person responds to it once it shows up. Boredom seems to function less like a creativity switch you can flip on demand and more like an opening, a gap in the usual stream of stimulation, and what you do with that gap is what ends up counting.

What the Research Actually Shows

The Case for Boredom Boosting Creativity

The most cited research in this space comes from Dr. Sandi Mann, a psychology researcher at the University of Central Lancashire who has spent years studying suppressed emotions, including boredom, in workplace and academic settings. In one well-known study, participants who spent time on a genuinely tedious task, sorting a bowl of beans by color, one by one, went on to generate more and better ideas on a creative task afterward than participants who’d done something more engaging first, according to reporting in Time. The bored group’s ideas weren’t just more numerous, outside judges also rated them as more original than the ideas produced by the group that hadn’t been bored first.

A separate study published in the Academy of Management Discoveries found a similar pattern using different tasks entirely: boredom appeared to function as what researchers called a “variety-driving emotion,” one that pushes people toward novelty and unusual solutions specifically because routine, predictable responses no longer feel satisfying once boredom sets in and the usual patterns stop delivering enough stimulation to hold attention.

The theory behind both studies is fairly intuitive once you sit with it. Boredom is, at its core, your brain searching for stimulation it isn’t currently getting. When there’s nothing external available to supply that stimulation, your mind starts generating its own, through daydreaming, mental wandering, and the kind of loose, unstructured thinking that rarely happens when you’re absorbed in a task, a conversation, or a screen.

The Pushback: It’s Not That Simple

Not every study agrees, and it’s genuinely worth taking the disagreement seriously rather than only citing the flattering result that supports the popular narrative. A widely cited 2016 study found that boredom doesn’t reliably generate creativity on its own, and in some cases actually made people worse at creative fluency tasks, according to National Geographic’s reporting on the research. Some researchers now argue that the “boredom equals creativity” idea popularized by earlier studies has been oversimplified along the way. Boredom may open a door, but walking through it in a genuinely creative direction seems to depend heavily on the individual person, the specific situation, and what they choose to do next, none of which boredom guarantees automatically just by showing up.

The honest summary sits somewhere between the two camps: boredom appears to create the conditions where creativity becomes more possible, mostly by clearing away competing noise and mental clutter that would otherwise crowd it out. It doesn’t manufacture creativity by itself, and treating it as a guaranteed shortcut oversells what the research actually supports, but dismissing it entirely oversells the counterargument just as much.

Why Boredom Might Still Be Worth Having

It Forces Your Mind to Wander

Even setting the creativity debate aside, boredom does something most of modern life is specifically designed to prevent: it gives your brain nothing to do, which forces it to default to mind-wandering and daydreaming instead. That kind of unstructured mental activity has been linked to processing emotions, working through problems in the background without consciously focusing on them, and a general sense of mental restoration that constant stimulation simply doesn’t allow room for.

Psychologists sometimes call this “positive-constructive daydreaming,” a playful, low-stakes form of mental drifting that lets your imagination explore possibilities without any pressure to produce a specific outcome or solve a specific problem. It’s the same mental process behind why good ideas so often show up in the shower, on a walk, or right before falling asleep, moments where nothing is actively demanding your attention and your mind is finally free to wander somewhere unplanned, unsupervised, and occasionally genuinely useful.

It Resets an Overloaded Attention Span

Most days involve near-constant input, notifications, tabs, conversations, feeds, all competing for attention at once, often several of them arriving simultaneously and demanding some kind of response. Boredom is one of the few remaining states where that input drops to nearly zero, even if only for a few minutes at a time. That reset isn’t glamorous and it doesn’t feel productive in the moment, but it’s a genuine break for an attention system that rarely gets one anymore, similar in function to why boredom feels different at night, when the usual sources of stimulation are also largely absent and the mind is left with considerably more room to wander on its own.

How to Get the Benefits Without Just Suffering Through It

If the research is right that response matters more than the boredom itself, the goal isn’t to force yourself into tedious situations and hope creativity shows up on command. It’s closer to occasionally letting boredom happen instead of reaching for a screen the instant it starts, giving your mind the room to wander somewhere useful instead of immediately filling the space back up the way most people do dozens of times a day without really noticing.

That doesn’t mean every bored moment needs to turn into a productivity exercise, and treating it that way somewhat misses the point entirely. Sometimes the goal is simply to sit with it for a few minutes before deciding what to do next, whether that’s something screen-free, a quiet logic puzzle, or genuinely nothing at all for a little while, no notebook, no goal, just letting the mind wander wherever it wants to go. Understanding why boredom happens in the first place makes it considerably easier to treat it as useful information about your brain rather than a problem to eliminate on sight the moment it appears.