Can’t Sit Still Without Distraction? (Train Your Brain With THIS Daily Practice & Embrace Boredom!)

2%. That's a number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. On Michael Easter, and on my podcast 2%, I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern worry. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side, a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.

Listen to 2%, that's TWO% on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcasts. I'm Stephanie Young, host of Love Trapped, the story of former bachelor star Clayton Eckerd, caught in a pregnancy hoax.

“You doctor this particular test twice in silence, correct?”

I doctor the test once. As the season continues,

Laura O'Wins finally faces consequences.

Breaking news at America, Pekania's Laura O'Wins has been indicted on fraud charges. Open your free iHeart Radio app, search Love Trapped, and start listening now. Hi everyone, I'm Cheryl Strade, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers

to discuss the inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Listen to Mind Over Mountain, every Thursday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Jay, and today I want to talk to you about how to be bored.

Maybe there's a lot of you out there who don't know how to be bored anymore.

You always distracted, you always running to the next thing, you always trying to fill your gaps

be busy, maybe you struggle with dealing with the thoughts in your head when you actually slow down

“and pause. If you want to know how boredom can be powerful for your brain, this episode is for you,”

and if you want to know how you can change your life and actually use it to your advantage, don't skip this episode. In 1654, the French mathematician and philosopher blaze Pascal wrote a sentence that I think might be the most underrated, most urgent, most terrifying truth ever put on paper. He wrote, all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Think about that, this was 1654, no smartphones, no television,

no radio, no newspapers delivered to your door, no telegraph, the most sophisticated entertainment technology available was a harpsichord and a good candle, and Pascal looked at the people around him,

the richest, most educated, most powerful people in France, and concluded that the root cause of

war, corruption, cruelty, recklessness, and misery was that nobody could just sit still. They hunted,

“they gambled, they threw lavish parties, they picked fights with neighbouring kingdoms, they pursued”

scandal and intrigue at court. Not Pascal argued because they actually wanted those things, but because the alternative, being alone with their own thoughts, was too unbearable to face. Now, I want you to pick up your phone. You're probably already, but don't actually do it, just imagine the moment. You know the moment I mean you're standing in line at the coffee shop, you're weighing for the elevator, you're sitting on the toilet, you're in the first 10 seconds of

an ad and you can't skip yet, and your hand moves almost before you've made a decision to the phone, to scroll to the feed to anything that fills the gap. What are you running from? Pascal knew. He was watching people run from it in 1654. This doesn't make you weak, you're not wrong, you're not a bad person. The thing you're running from doesn't have a name in polite conversation. We call it border like it's a minor inconvenience, like being slightly cold or having a headache,

something to be treated, something to be eliminated, something that signals there's a problem to be fixed, but what if border isn't the problem? What if border is the solution? And someone has been very carefully, very profitably, taking it away from you. Welcome to something I call the sacred void. Now, before we dive in, I want to talk about what border actually is. Scientists got this wrong for 100 years, so here's the truth. I need to start by rehabilitating

border's reputation, because it has been absolutely destroyed. For most of the 20th century psychologists treated border as a deficiency state, a signal that something was missing,

well-adjusted person shouldn't experience border. If you were bored, something was wrong with you. You lack discipline or ambition or the right attitude. Teachers told students to stop being bored. Parents loaded children's schedules to prevent boredom from ever arising. The entire architecture of modern productivity culture was built on the premise that idle time is wasted time. This was one of the great intellectual errors of the modern era. In the last 20 years,

a small group of researchers, most of them working in obscurity, many of them initially laughed at by their colleagues began to look at boredom with fresh eyes. And what they found

completely inverted everything we thought we knew. The first revelation was definitional.

What is boredom actually? Psychologist Sandy Man at the University of Central Lancashire spent years researching this and arrived at a definition that stopped me cold when I read it. She found that boredom is not the absence of stimulation. It is actually a state of wanting stimulation, but being unable to find anything satisfying. It's a kind of restless searching state. And it's without a scratch. And here's where it gets interesting. When Man and

our colleagues actually studied what that restless searching produces, they discovered something nobody expected. They ran an experiment where one group of participants was given a classic

“creativity test. The kind where you have to think of as many uses for a common object as possible,”

like a plastic cup. They listed their ideas, average results. Then they ran another group

through a boring task first, copying numbers out of a phone book by hand for 20 minutes,

just copying numbers. The most tedious activity they could construct. Then they did the same creativity test. The bored group wasn't slightly better. They would dramatically better. More ideas, more original ideas, more unusual ideas. The boredom had done something to their thinking. Man did a second version. This time she made the boring task even more passive, just reading numbers from a phone book rather than copying them. Even more boring. The creativity scores went up

even further. boredom wasn't the enemy of creative thought. It was the precondition for it.

“But why? Why would sitting with empty frustrated restlessness make you more creative?”

The answer lives in the most important brain system you might have never heard of. And I need to

spend some real time here because once you understand this, you will never look and idle moment the same way again. The default mode network. This is the most important brain system that no one tells us about. For most of neuroscience history, research has studied the brain by giving people tasks to do and watching which regions activated. Solver puzzle, this area lights up. Process language, that area, recognize a face, this region. The operating assumption was that the interesting action

happened when the brain was working. Well, nobody thought to ask was, what is the brain doing when it's not working? In the 1990s, neuroscientists Marcus Reichel at Washington University in St. Louis was doing exactly this kind of task-based brain imaging. And he kept noticing something strange. There was a network of regions that consistently deactivated when people were given tasks to focus on. They weren't quiet during direct detention. And when the task ended,

when the person was just resting, just letting their mind wander, this network came roaring back online. Reichel called it the default mode network, the DMN. The brain's default setting. For years, the DMN was dismissed as background noise, idling like a car engine at a red light, wasted energy, the brain burning glucose for nothing. Then, in one of the great slow-burn reveals, in science history, research has started actually studying the DMN. And they found that

“it was not idling at all. It was doing the most sophisticated, most important, most deeply human,”

cognitive work of your entire mental life. Here is what the default mode network is responsible for. I want you to listen to this list carefully. The DMN is the system that generates your sense of self.

When you lie awake and think about your life, that's the DMN. When you feel the particular

“ache of regret or the particular warmth of gratitude, the DMN is assembling those experiences.”

The DMN is where you process other people's minds. When you try to understand why someone acted the way they did, to imagine their innate experience, to feel empathy, that requires the DMN. It's the system that makes you socially intelligent, that makes you capable of compassion rather than just reaction. The DMN is where you simulate the future. When you imagine a difficult conversation before it happens or envision what a decision might mean for your life five years from now,

that is DMN activity. It's your brain's flight simulator, your rehearsal space, and critically, the DMN is where creative insight happens. Not the grinding effortful part of creativity,

not the application of rules, the breakthrough moment, the sudden connection between

two things that seem uncorrelated, the solution that arrives apparently from nowhere in the shower. That is the default mode network firing. And in fact, some researchers now believe that the highest levels of human creativity are not primarily a function of the focused, task-oriented brain at all. There are a function of how well your DMN operates and how often you give it the space to do so.

“And here's the thing that I want you to write down right now about DMN. It cannot activate”

when you are consuming. Listen to that again. Your DMN can't activate when you're consuming. The default mode network, your self-reflection system, your empathy system, your creativity system,

your future simulation system, your meaning-making system, it cannot run while you're taking

in external stimulation. When you're scrolling, the DMN is suppressed. When you're watching, the DMN is suppressed. When you're listening to a podcast, yes, including this one, when you're engaged with external input, the DMN is offline. It only comes online in the gaps and the pauses in the waiting in the boredom. Now, I want you to think about how many gaps you have left in your day. Mom was the last time you stood in a queue without your phone. The last time

you waited for a meal at a restaurant without your phone. The last time you sat in a waiting room for a doctor or a dentist, I'm just sat. The last time you took a walk without headphones. The last time you lay in bed in the morning without immediately reaching for a screen. If you're like most people in the modern world, those moments are nearly gone. Eliminated with remarkable thoroughness, and with them, quietly and visibly, something as sensuous been disappearing from your in a life.

“When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on? Biggie. You put on biggie when you feel uncomfortable?”

So I want to get confident. This is DJ Heaster Prince music is therapy. A new podcast from me, a DJ, and licensed therapist, 12 months, 12 areas of your life. Money, love, career, confidence. This isn't just a podcast. It's unconventional therapy for your entire year. Listen to DJ Heaster Prince music is therapy. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, I'm Cheryl Strade, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share

that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventures, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. I also bring a bit of advice into the mix, so we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside.

We come into this world, fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside. We're there to support and celebrate each other. And not like a your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yep, yep, exactly. And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the spirit dotter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish travel is said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible talk with men.

and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements and Aquarius,

like our misunderstood, a son and Venus in Aquarius, in her seventh house, spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has told me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms on different houses in different places, but just an embracing of the isnness of it. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the spirit dotter podcast,

starting on February 24th, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Researchers at the University of Virginia ran a study that I find

opinion. They asked participants to sit alone in a room with their thoughts for 15 minutes. No phone,

“no book, no music, trust sitting. The only thing in the room was a button that if pressed would”

deliver a mild electric shock. 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. One man shocked himself for 100 and 90 times, 190 times. Pascal was right in 1654. We just now have the neuroscience to understand exactly why, and we have something he couldn't have imagined, an industry that has spent billions of dollars

making the avoidance of your own mind not just easy, but irresistible. Now I want to talk to you

about how the attention economy surgically removed boredom from your life. I want to be really precise here because I don't think this is an accident. I don't think that you feeling bored and feeling like it's a weakness or the need for constant stimulation is your fault. I don't believe

“this is something that you did to yourself. I think it is a designed outcome and the people who”

designed it knew somewhat what they were doing. In 2017, Tristan Harris, a former designer at the sister Google began speaking publicly about something he'd witnessed from the inside. He described how the technology industry doesn't simply make products. It makes persuasion machines, systems explicitly engineered to capture and hold human nature for as long as possible, using the same psychological techniques developed for slot machines and gambling. Harris called

it the Race to the Botan of the Brainstem. Not a race to make you smarter or more connected or more fulfilled, a race to find the lowest, most ancient, most reflexive part of your neurological architecture. The part that responds to novelty, to social approval, to potential threat,

“to pattern and reward and plug directly into it. The core mechanism is intermittent variable”

reward. The same mechanism that makes slot machines, the most addictive gambling devices ever invented. You pull the lever, you scroll down and sometimes you get something rewarding. A funny video, a surprising piece of news, a notification that someone liked what you posted. And sometimes you get nothing interesting. The randomness is not a flaw. The randomness is the feature. It's what makes you keep pulling the lever. Keep scrolling. Keep checking.

Your dopamine system was not designed for this. It evolved to motivate you to pursue food, warmth, safety and connection. scarce resources in a world where effort was required to find them. It was not designed to interface with a system that provides infinite, instant, algorithmically optimized stimulation calibrated specifically to the profile of your individual psychology. And so, you find yourself as most people do. Checking your phone somewhere between

96 and 150 times per day. Not because you decided to. Not because you want to, but because the system smarter than your conscious mind has learned exactly which lever to pull, exactly when to pull it, and exactly how to keep you coming back. Stop scrolling. I need you to understand this about notifications. Every notification is an interruption. Every interruption breaks your focus and researchers that the University of California Irvine have found that after

an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to the same level of deep focus you were at before. 23 minutes for a single notification glance. Most of us receive dozens of

reach the depth of focus and the depth of mind-wondering necessary for their default mode network

“to do its best work. But here's the thing about your attention being stolen. You can reclaim”

what was taken. And this is where we go back way back to the people who understood the value of empty moments. More clearly than almost anything has in history. I want to talk to you about the ancient art of doing nothing. What the wisest humans who ever lived knew about the sacred gap. The stoic philosopher Seneca, writing 2000 years ago in ancient Rome, was surrounded by precisely the same problem Pascal would observe 16 centuries later. Rome was a city of spectacle.

gladiator games, theatrical performances, political intrigue, constant noise and crowd and stimulation. Seneca watched his fellow citizens' lurch from entertainment to entertainment, from party to party, and he wrote something that reads like it was composed yesterday. Seneca wrote, "It is not that I am brave enough to be bored. It is that I know what boredom is for.

“He called it, Otyam, often translated as leisure. But that translation loses something crucial.”

For Seneca, Otyam was not relaxation. It was not passive rest. It was purposeful emptiness. deliberately cultivated spaciousness. Time not organized around doing or consuming, but around being, around allowing the mind to roam to integrate, to discover what it actually contains. Seneca believed that the quality of a person's Otyam to term in the quality of their thinking, not their reading, not their study, their Otyam, the time when the books were closed and they

just sat. He wrote letters in that state. He had his deepest philosophical insights in that state. He believed that you could not genuinely know yourself without regular intentional time spent in silence with your own mind. So what I want to share with you is the practice of how to be bored. I want to give you something real, not a manifesto, not a list of things to feel guilty about,

a practice. First, understand what you're actually doing when you reach for the phone.

You're not making a decision, you're executing a reflex. A reflex that has been installed and strengthened over years of training. The first step is simply to notice it. To put a tiny gap between the stimulus, boredom, and the response, scroll. You don't have to resist it, just notice. Oh, I'm bored. I'm a hand-moved. That noticing over time is everything. You cannot change a reflex or not aware of. Second, practice what I call the three minute hold. When you

feel bored and arriving, that restless uncomfortable age, make it deal with yourself. Three minutes. You're going to hold still for three minutes. No phone, no book, no music. You're just going to let the discomfort be there. Look at the wall. Look at the sky. Look at your hands. For the first minute, it will feel terrible. Your mind will ping pong. It will tell you this is a waste of time.

“It will generate a small flood of anxious mundane thoughts. Things you need to do. Things you said.”

Things you'll worry about. This is all normal. Sit with it. In the second minute, something usually shifts. The chatter doesn't stop, but it changes character. It becomes slightly less urgent. Your gaze, if you let it, will start to drift and soften. Your breathing will slow

without you telling it to. In the third minute, something opens. Not always, not dramatically,

but a quietness begins together. And sometimes, sometimes, something arrives from below. I thought you didn't expect a memory you hadn't planned to have, a connection between two things in your life that you suddenly see clearly, a feeling that it'd been waiting patiently behind all the noise. That's your default mode network coming online. That is OTM. Third, every day, do one thing that allows you to be bored. Walk without headphones. Eat breakfast without your phone. Sit

outside for 10 minutes after work doing nothing. Lying bed for five minutes after you wake before checking your phone. Watch your dishes without any distraction. These are not sacrifices. These are investments. Each boring ritual is a deposit in the account of your inner life. Each one is

bit of time to run. The remarkable thing is how quickly it compounds. People who begin simple boredom practices, just like these, often report within two or three weeks that they feel more creative, more emotionally present, more able to access their own feelings, more interesting to themselves. Not because they've learned anything new, because they've given the knowledge they

already have space to breathe. Number four, and this is the most important one,

get bored on purpose before your hardest problems. Before a difficult creative challenge,

“before a decision that matters, before a hard conversation you need to have, take 10 minutes”

and do something mindlessly mundane. Watch the dishes. Fold laundry. Take a short walk. You're not procrastinating. You're activating your most sophisticated cognitive machinery. You're greasing the right wheels. What seems like wasted time is often the thing that makes everything that follows work. I want to come back to Pascal. He wrote his sentence in 1654. Long before slot

machines, long before television, long before the algorithm that knows you better than your friends

do that is map the exact controls of your restlessness and as a piece of content already selected, already cured, already waiting for the precise moment your attention starts to drift. Pascal looked at kings and philosophers and soldiers. People with every resource, every advantage, every stimulation their world could offer and he saw them running. We are all running. Running from a person, running from a place, running from silence, running from ourselves.

I'm not judging you. I'm grieving what you're missing out on. I want you to know that the most

important things, the things that make life worth living, that make humans capable of wisdom

and love and genuine creativity, those things could only be found in one place nobody wanted to go. The quiet stonus, the peaceful room, the empty moment, the uncomfortable awkward silence. That's where it all is. That void is not empty. It only looks empty from the outside, from the inside, if you can hold still long enough to get there, it is the most populated, most alive, most genuinely yours place you will ever stand. Your self is in there, your best

ideas are in there, your deepest relationships being shaped in there by the quality of the attention you're developing, all destroying right now today in every idle moment. The technology is not going anywhere. The algorithm is not going to develop a conscience. Nobody is going to give you your boredom back. You have to take it. One uncomfortable minute at a time. Now you know go be bored. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it,

“you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies”

for unlocking your hidden potential. I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I think envy is the thief of joy. I think social comparison is invaluable. Hello gorgeous, it's Lala Kent. Post of untraditionally Lala. My days of filling up cups it's there may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley. Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes. But over here, on my podcast untraditionally Lala, I'm still that Lala,

you either love or love to hate. It's unruly, it's un Afraid, it's untraditionally Lala. Listen to untraditionally Lala on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Hey it's Nora Jones and my podcast playing along is back with more of my favorite musicians. Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin. I was definitely the Phantom of that. Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

About astrology, natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today, I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams.

“It can change you in the best way possible, dance with the change, dance with the breakdowns,”

the embodiment of Pisces intuition, with Capricorn power moves. Just so I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to this pure dotter podcast,

This is an eye-hard podcast. Guarantee human.