Yes, you read it right. I am asking you to be bored.
Sounds crazy, doesn’t it!
But.. if you feel stressed out, burnt out, running between meetings, running calls from morning to evening, having family time only on Sundays and you are trying to find excuses to slow down, you suffer from the un-bored syndrome.
Let’s imagine your typical day..
You get up , may be take a walk or go to gym or just start your daily chores ( if you are not the health conscious type) , then you start your office , with a day packed of meetings, emails, coworkers, calls . The evening beckons and you return home, either watching telly, playing a game on your phone, discuss with your friends and family about your day and next few days and voila it’s time for dinner, then you play with kids ( and the dog/cat) or may be read a book before the sleep beckons… so, did you notice a pattern..
You are keeping your mind and body engaged almost 24×7. Add to that our current crazy time schedule and we have the recipe of an industrial disaster in our personal life.
Why do I say this..
Let’s talk about how machine schedules work. In a factory, where the work timings are from 9 am to 5 pm, the machines are designed to work for 8 hours a day, for 300 days with a design life of 10 years. But, if the factory goes on in an extended shift, working 16 hours a day, would the same machine last as longer?
Our little supercomputer i.e. our brain is a machine in a similar way, processing billions of bytes of data per second ( some studies say from 100 TFPs to 1 exa flop) also consuming about 20W of power and getting heated up too..
So, if we keep it continuously engaged, busy in calculations, would it get time to cool down and rejuvenate for the next day?
The irony of it is we try to fill in our every awake second with some activity or other giving it no time to refresh. No wonder while our parents and grandparents were mentally and physically active way into their 70s, we are feeling fatigued in our 40s. trying to retire in our 50s…… the simple reason being an overworked brain machine.
But when we do nothing, read nothing ( aka get bored) our brain switches on to the energy saving mode ( from logical calculating left brain to more creative, right brain) and that’s where innovation happens, new ideas are generated, a new path may be found..
When we allow our brain to relax, creativity follows, new horizons are revealed.
So, did you get bored today???
