The Brain-Healing Power of a Purposeless Moment

My brain’s default mode is to wander, aimlessly, luxuriously, into a daydream. In fact, I think this came up once or twice on an early elementary school report card: “tends to daydream”. I think I got a check instead of a plus in one of the columns because of that. Someone about that same time called me lazy, and I’ve been fighting that shame ever since. Yeah, too much daydreaming can be a problem if you are trying to learn algebra, or study for an exam, or operating heavy machinery. But I can recall gazing wistfully out of the window of a huge lecture hall at Seminary on spring days after a long winter, just before exam time….. It was hard to concentrate on the Old Testament (OT01 class) when I could see people lounging on the grass or throwing a Frisbee. It’s always been hard to be productive indoors when the sun is shining outside. Would I be lazy if I went out there among the trees and soft grass blades and shafts of sunlight and just, enjoyed being there? What if I spontaneously joined someone in tossing the Frisbee? Could the Old Testament wait just a moment?

All of us hear about the amazing advances that are being made in the study of the brain in recent years. Neuroscience is being made accessible to everyone these days, not just people with post-docs in lab coats. At the same time that we are advancing artificial intelligence, we are learning a great deal about the tremendous power and plasticity of the human, flesh and blood brain. Each of us has at least some capacity to rewire and retrain that rubbery glob of neurons and synapses we have sitting inside of our skulls. And this has the possibility of changing our behavior, our ability to learn, our spirituality, even our happiness.

While driving a long distance not long ago, trying to make use of the time, I happened upon a podcast about boredom, and, how important it is to a healthy life…. to be bored. Yeah, right!? What can I accomplish, how can I thrive and move forward, how can I make use of even a precious moment of that life, if it bores me? Furthermore, what if that moment serves no purpose? Isn’t boredom a great waste of time?

Think about it. How often do you allow yourself to do nothing? What do you fear about doing nothing? Do you even remember what it felt like to be genuinely bored? How horrifying is the thought of that? Isn’t that why you always have a smartphone or some other type of screen nearby? When was the last time you waited in a line or a reception area without a phone or a magazine or a book, or a TV screen nearby? We try so hard to take a detour around the anxious guilt we feel that we are not getting anything done for a few moments. And we work really hard at avoiding this emotional state called “boredom”. We are so afraid of being bored, we actually prefer being afraid to being bored.

But there are people, God bless them, who have studied the “brain on boredom”. And they have found it to be good! I started reading Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything, by Manoush Zomorodi. (Macmillan, London, 2017) According to scientists who have studied boredom, there are a few good things it does for us. It serves an evolutionary purpose, for if we were always excited and intrigued by every moment, we would never be compelled to find other activities that were more meaningful than what is going on in that moment…. But it also, makes us, creative! Through a series of experiments, Dr. Sandi Mann, a scientist specializing in the study of boredom found that people who are bored think more creatively than people who are not. “Boredom is the gateway to mind-wandering, which helps our brains make those new connections that can solve anything from planning dinner to a breakthrough in combating global warming.” There are actually studies, mostly within the last 10 years, on the neuroscience of mind-wandering. When our minds wander, they are in the default mode network, as opposed to the attention network, but our minds are not switched off. While somewhat at rest, they are wide open to amazing things.

Much of the book is focused on the effects of all this constant “doing” going on with our phones. We are always activated, even when we are allowed to be inactive…. And there is not room for a freely wandering mind, even as we aimlessly wander through a universe of twitter-feed or Pinterest saves…..Not allowing our brains to go into their natural, wandering default mode actually can cause detrimental changes to the brain’s ability to pay attention when it counts.

Daydreaming, and another activity, called “play”, are essentially purposeless activities. Brene Brown, in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are (Hazelden, 2010) has a chapter entitled: “Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth.” In it, she shares the work of a psychiatrist and clinical researcher into play, the founder of the Institute for Play, Dr. Stuart Brown. He outlines seven properties of play, and the first one is that it is essentially “purposeless activity”. We do it because its fun and we want just want to! Wow, what a concept…that we might do something that has no productive purpose?! His research indicates that play, itself, actually has a very important purpose. The opposite of play is not work, it’s actually depression. “Respecting our biologically programmed need for play can transform work. It can bring back excitement and newness to our job.” It can help us deal with difficulties, help us expand the possibilities, boost our creativity and promote mastery of our craft. Paying attention to our inner desires for fun and purposelessness can bring about lasting joy and satisfaction in all those other purposeful pursuits in our lives.

What if we were to allow ourselves to be apparently purposeless for at least a portion of every day? What if we were to put down our phones when that dreaded sense of restless boredom comes over us, while we wait in the carpool line, or airport terminal, or during commercials, or any of the other numerous times we worry about what needs to get done when there is nothing that can be done, and wander into our brain’s inherent default mode? Can we afford to allow ourselves, and our children, time for purposeless activity in each day?

I say, let us daydream! Let us play! Let’s make room for the healing power of purposelessness!