The power of doing nothing

During a brisk summer storm in mid-July the power went out at my house. Both of my children had recently arrived home from camp. My 6-year-old daughter had spent the day learning how to perform trapeze at a circus school, and my 9-year-old son had whiled the summer hours away at a wilderness camp, where he practiced building fires, purifying clay, and whittling in between hiking and swimming in a stream.

When the lights flickered off they both panicked. Not because it was dark outside—we still had hours of daylight ahead. Not because they were worried for our safety. Because the Wi-Fi was down, their screens had stopped working, and they were bored.

Many of us live, work, and are educated in a culture of busyness, my children included. “It's really unhealthy,” says Dr Katie Hurley, a child and adolescent psychotherapist in the U.S. “We feel that any time that's available needs to be spent doing something ‘productive.’ And that's a dangerous concept in a way because we need to be able to recognise that reading a book is productive, and resting is productive, and playing with LEGOs by myself is productive. So, we have to be able to see the value in all kinds of downtime activities and resetting activities.”

While my children might make the case that their screen time is in fact downtime, Indu Madhavi Iragavarapu, a manager of professional development and Advisor to Primary Schools for Nord Anglia Education's schools in India, says not all resetting activities are equal. It starts, she says, with dopamine and what she calls “a drip versus a dazzle” of it.

“Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with reward, thrill, and happiness,” she wrote to me after we had video chatted about the value of boredom. “A child left to their own devices without constant stimulation experiences a steady ‘drip’ of dopamine. This helps them tolerate boredom, encouraging them to delve into their own creativity, imagination, and resourcefulness. Such a child might take up reading, painting, dreaming, or storytelling, finding contentment in simply ‘being.’”

“In contrast,” she wrote, “a child accustomed to constant ‘dazzling’ dopamine hits from external stimuli—like video games, social media, new toys, or exciting outings—becomes averse to boredom.”

Allowing children to be bored goes against the grain of what we’ve come to think of as good parenting.

Creating a household in which it’s okay to do nothing, to contradict that culture of busyness during the school year or on holiday, is difficult, says Emily Brown, Deputy Head of Early Years and Key Stage 1 at the Kamýk campus of Prague British International School. “You have to be quite a strong individual,” she said in a video chat. “Parental pressure for parents such as ‘Oh, my child’s doing this, my child’s doing that’ has got to stop.”

Perhaps counterintuitively, piling on the activities can shut some very important doors to social connection and creativity. “I think you need to bore yourself because then you develop the skills or the ability to go and explore,” says Brown. “If you don’t get bored and you’re just given things then you don’t think for yourself.”

Dr Hurley says that “boredom opens the door to passion, and the brain is more opened up to think, to be curious, to put anything into it that you want to—you have the cognitive space to do so.”

She suggests that when children complain about boredom, that adults reframe it as an opportunity, meeting the moment not with frustration but with curiosity. Ask what they could do, given the gift of free time, or which toys they might like to play with. Present boredom in a positive light.

Valeria Buendia, a high school counsellor at Colegio Menor Samborondón, a Nord Anglia school in Ecuador, says that teenagers who have much more school work than younger children, more intense social lives, and very often phones, are in particular need of not doing anything. She tells students who feel overwhelmed to put their phone on airplane mode and take a walk, making sure to notice the details of the world around them, without texting, talking, or checking social media, and just letting their minds wander along with their feet. Then she challenges them to write journal entries about their observations.

For families who want to practice the art of doing nothing together and create more time and mental space to relax, recharge, and find pockets of creativity, Dr Hurley recommends making a big family calendar that has everyone’s commitments written on it. “Then,” she says, “stand in front of it and find one thing to cross off and stop doing.” Repeat as needed.