Do you remember doing nothing since the advent of Smartphones. I don’t. And doing nothing include staring at a wall, or the clock, or anything which requires minimum brain effort use for an elongated period.

Through Smartphones, you can talk to anyone anytime and from anywhere, can order food online, can book a cab, can learn something online yet there are two faces of a coin and we now need to understand about the dark side of these ‘smartphones’ to use them in the most productive way.

Things which promote boredom:

The list is endless. Google -‘Getting bored the right way’

It is our primal habit to keep our brain active. From the days of the earliest humans ,this trait is observed as they always used to look for ways to survive by looking for prey and predators. We get very uncomfortable when we are not using our brains too much and this trait has been leveraged by engineers of the different social-media platforms to increase traffic.

This primal instinct of shifting our focus is helpful to social-media apps as they keep on engaging us with new content to focus on and we keep on shifting our focus making it a hard habit to move away from..

Neuroscientists throughout the world condemn multi-tasking. What people think is that while multitasking, they are doing multiple things at once. But in reality, they are just rapidly shifting their focus from one place to another and depleting their neuro-resources, which is not available in abundance, by-the-way.

According to one study, our attention span at work has depleted by about 4 times in the last one decade. Now, don’t panic. The harsh truth has been spoken and now is the time to bring back the creativity but:

Then you won’t be able to work even for 2 hours a day. Who is going to manage your business then.Keep a check on your health.

Exercising everyday has a number of benefits including:

Even though, this state of boredom is agonising, it has its own benefits like our mind looks for ways to concentrate on things which are easily available.

In an experiment, people were divided into two groups. Group A was asked to copy the entries from a phonebook onto a page.

Group B wasn’t given any task. After this boring task, members of both the groups were asked to give ideas as to what can be done with cups. In any situation, The people of Group A performed much better and gave more ideas than Group B.!

Boredom researcher Dr Sandi Mann says, “Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to really wander, you start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious, little bit into the subconscious which allows, sort of, different connections to take place.”

Basically, doing mundane tasks makes our mind wander and switch into its ‘Default Mode Network’.

It is the state of our mind when we think about things without actually being intentional of the subject on which we are pondering. While in this default mode, our brain basically performs these tasks:

While our mind is in this default mode, we usually get the time to think about what we are doing,how we are doing, how can we improve our efficiency, and even of our goals and the ways to achieve them. This is important as we start thinking of how long life is and we understand how doing things with micro results in focus is not worth it and the effect of others opinions on our results fade away.

It is doing things for the society while being selfless. In a way, even hurting yourself to be good towards the society becomes an option. Blood donation is a prime example. Most people who donate blood are away from the Smartphones. And since they don’t have anything better to do, the idea of donating blood takes over. Charity also works the same way.

Adrian Savage, an editor at the online life coach site, www.lifehack.org. states, "Boredom is nearly always essential to creativity. It isn't true that creativity is mostly sparked by having a specific problem to be solved. It's far more likely to arise because the person is bored with the way something has been done a thousand times before and wants to try something new. Boredom stimulates the search for better ways to do things like nothing else does." That Million dollar idea which you haven’t received from the Divine source yet is waiting for you to get bored. Try it for a Million dollars, people.

When we are bored, we tend to wander in our thoughts, towards the things our mind thinks are important. If you have had a bad fight with your girlfriend and it is in the back of the mind then when you are bored, like while going to bed, your brain starts to focus on what to do in this relationship. Whether you want to be with your significant other or not (bonus tip: pick this one). How you can improve your emotional spillage? And it even helps us to make decisions relating to our job, career, kids, food, movies etc. It makes us think intensely on important things. When we get bored, we do the real thinking. We doubt our decisions and it is very important as most of our decisions are bad. Really Bad.

Now that we have already bought ourselves time by using YourHour application, why not use it judiciously to get bored?

Smartphones have decreased our creativity as we are spending more time scrolling through feed than we spend getting bored and, maybe, we need to look back and relax a bit and start watching the clock tick for an hour. And if someone asks you, “What are you doing?’, you can say, “I am getting bored.”, and share this article with them.

When was the last time you were bored? Comment down below.Till the next blog. Enjoy your Time. Cheers!