...doof.

Let’s talk about how to be bored in a healthy way. 

You may have encountered confusing things about boredom before: „Nobody is bored anymore because there’s an endless stream of information and entertainment to be consumed online, and that’s really bad for your mental health!“… but also, „nobody gets enough stimulation anymore, modern life means we are all wild animals in captivity, and that’s really bad for your mental health“! 

Both of these statements feel instinctively true for many of us, we can relate to being constantly overstimulated as much as to constantly being understimulated… and yet, that feels really contradictory, doesn’t it? 

The reason why this contradiction exists is that there are actually different ways to be bored and different kinds of stimulation. 

Your brain does very much need to be exercised. Think about your body and movement. You can probably think of times you noticed you’re feeling like crap due to a lack of movement. You may have been in a long car ride before, or had to sit still during a long lecture or meeting, or had to stay in bed due to injury/illness… and it doesn’t feel good. You may get restless, antsy, irritated, down, tired etc. - the very same thing happens to your brain when there’s not enough mental „movement“. Muscles want to be used and so does your brain. 

But „using your brain“ doesn’t just mean „being busy“, and that’s where the seemingly contradictory part comes from: Many of us are busy but not engaged. 

You can be busy (and therefore not bored) all day long without actually engaging your brain in a beneficial way. We scroll through social media or short form videos, and hours pass without us ever feeling like we are „not doing anything“ because we are receiving novelty and input. 

That explains the type of boredom that can be really bad for your mental health. We can even re-use one of the body examples here: someone who has to stay on bed rest in a hospital for a longer time may be bored in a detrimental way. While they may be able to keep themselves occupied by being on TikTok all day, they are away from their loved ones (so there’s a lack of social stimulation), unable to access their usual hobbies or interests (so there’s a lack of mental stimulation), experiencing a lack of autonomy (so there’s a sense of powerlessness) and uncertainty over the future (so there’s a lack of making goals). 

All this means they can’t „work out“ their brain, and they may notice negative effects, such as increased anxiety, worse mood, shorter temper, feeling mentally „foggy“, dwelling on negative thoughts, worse sleep. The longer this hospital stay lasts, the longer these effects may linger afterwards. The patient may even develop depression (which can then become a cycle of depression feeding a lack of interest or motivation, which in turn feeds the understimulation, which feeds the depression…) 

This type of long-lasting or even chronic boredom of course doesn’t just happen in medical settings. It can happen due to other life circumstances as well, such as controlling relationships etc.- but luckily the temporary type of boredom is quite different to that. Occasional boredom that arises from temporary inactivity or monotony (such as washing the dishes and your thoughts drifting while you do it) is actually great and necessary! 

Some people feel tempted to spice any monotonous task or period of waiting up with stimulation, to avoid any boredom. but it can be beneficial to not do that. Here’s why: 

Your thoughts drifting and wandering is good for your brain. It encourages both creativity (daydreaming) and self-reflection (turning attention inwards to your goals, needs, wants, values) 

It also encourages „brain clean-up“. When your thoughts wander freely, you often subconsciously work through problems or memories you are carrying with you 

It decreases mental fatigue. Human brains are surprisingly bad at multitasking. So only doing the boring task at hand (eating, showering, doing dishes, even pooping) without background noise can be a nice break where your brain can switch back to „active mode“ rather than „reactive mode“ 

Talking about „reactive mode“: if you often keep your brain busy by passively consuming content, it may get stuck in that. That’s obviously a simplistic and not super scientific way to explain it, but the fact remains that the stimulation your brain craves is the active kind: 

actively interacting with other beings (humans, pets)

actively engaging with new or challenging tasks (this can be something like puzzles, sudoku, math problems but also reading, writing, painting, knitting but also learning a language, learning to code, learning to dance, but also traveling or visiting a new neighborhood but also… you get it) 

actively planning, structuring, making decisions (about your future, about your day or just about the next five minutes) 

actively engaging the senses (doing something with your hands/body like crafting, playing with sensory toys, exercising, or trying new foods, or really giving all your attention to a song rather than just having music on as background noise…)

Healthy boredom means having enough opportunities to actively engage the brain balanced with enough opportunities for your thoughts to wander.

With all my love, 

I once got into an argument with a rightist on here arguing that UK race riots are proof that Britain is plagued by Islamic crime, to which I responded with a graph from the Office for National Statistics showing that crime in the UK peaked in the mid-90s and has been on the decline ever since, and pointed out that, by that standard, George Floyd protests prove that the US police is institutionally racist. His response? Assert without any evidence that left-wing UK governments are doctoring statistics to hide the failure of left-wing politics and that the BLM riots were a left-wing plot.

Feelings and aesthetics over facts indeed. How do you even reason with someone like that?

I mean, the short answer is that you don't. They're not making an argument based on reason, so you'll never be able to reason them out of it.

The slightly longer answer is that you can still continue to debate, as long as you're clear that your target audience is not the person you're debating with.

This is an important question, though, so I think it's worth answering in full. Here goes.

So the question of debating someone who's clearly in conspiracy territory has two parts, how much time do you have and what do you expect to gain?

Ultimately, conspiracy theories aren't about reason or logic, those things come later and are, ultimately, just pretextual. If you knock them down, they'll just find new "reasons" or, if it's a long enough delay, just start using the discredited ones again because they're not the important part of what they're trying to say.

I literally cannot recommend The Daily Show podcast Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy enough, it's one of the best deep dives into what conspiracy theories really are and how they form. In particular, you should watch this episode with Dr. Elise Wang who really lays out exactly what a conspiracy theory is to the person who holds it.

To summarize, a conspiracy theory is, at its heart, just a story and, no matter which conspiracy they espouse, the story is the same. It's "Once upon a time we were happy and healthy and prosperous, and then THEY came. Only no one knew that they came because they hid everything and I'm the hero bravely fighting to defeat them."

And, of course, it can't be any ordinary evil, it's always over the top, blood of children type evil because, the more evil your enemy, the more heroic you are.

Once you understand conspiracy theories in that way, you can see that arguing with them using facts and logic isn't going to get you very far. To make any progress, you have to attack the emotional story but, obviously, if you're distant from the person or time limited in your interaction, there's no way to develop the rapport necessary. If that's your goal, you're best off just not engaging both for their sake, denying them the emotional narrative of "fighting", and for the sake of your own mental health which will not long survive the ordeal of beating your head against that particular wall.

But, here's the thing, that doesn't mean that debating is useless, you just have to shift how you approach the debate. Specifically, the "what do you hope to gain?" part.

There are two main types of debates or arguments, those that happen in private, where only the two people involved can see and hear what's going on, and those that happen in public, where others can observe what's happening.

In order to actually change someone's mind (on anything really, not just conspiracy stuff) you have to be talking in private. Changing your mind can be hard and people need a space where they feel safe and time to process in order to do it. Maybe it happens occasionally, but almost no one changes their mind in the course of having a public debate.

Any debate you have in a place that is visible to others, including social media posts, is a public debate and is not a conducive space for a debater to change their mind. If any minds are changed in this setting, it is the minds of the people observing the debate.

With that in mind, you should alter your expectations and, thus, your strategy, accordingly. Facts and figures are good; they won't convince your opponent, but they're the first step in convincing your audience. When your opponent denies their validity, request that they provide evidence. When they claim it's being suppressed, request evidence of that. Whatever they claim, request that evidence be provided, making clear that they don't have any.

The entire time you're doing so, point out that you have provided evidence and also point out exactly what it is they are claiming. Falsifying national crime statistics, for example, isn't something a single bureaucrat at the Home Office can do because the national statistics still have to be coherent with the collection of local statistics. Now you're not just looking at one or two people, but thousands of local officials who all have to be part of the conspiracy, all of whom have to coordinate properly, and all of whom have to keep their mouths shut.

When was the last time a group of more than hundred people kept a secret for more than a week?

Your audience, ultimately, needs to walk away understanding the things: you have provided evidence for your view, they have not, and what they are claiming is so unlikely as to be impossible.

If you have done those three things, you won't have convinced your opponent, but you will have won the debate as much as it is possible to win it.

saw this on Insta and the idea that people who are anti-AI are just using it anyway like... willing to give it up? I ACTIVELY AVOID THAT SHIT BUD! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT?

ALSO

I was surrounded by "everyone gets nervous sometimes, we all have to deal with it" and "sometimes you have to push through even though you feel anxious" and "you have to do things that scare you to overcome the fear" and even now, it's what they say: "Do it scared."

I was also reassured that "everyone feels anxious" about certain things, and "no one likes [thing]."

This affected my understanding of what it meant to "get better." When I imagined a future version of myself that was capable of enduring [The Bad Things], I didn't imagine a feeling of safety. I didn't know how to imagine it. All I could do is try to remove my feelings of dread and horror and revulsion from the scene, as though cutting a shape out of a magazine with craft scissors. But it was unclear how those feelings could be removed in life.

I think my imagination of "getting better" was something like "becoming more dissociated." Everyone felt these things I felt, and they were inevitable and unchangeable, but I felt them too much, and I needed to feel them less, so I could become more compliant.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy didn't even make me feel them less, though; it only made me less capable of acknowledging that I was feeling them, less conscious of what my feelings were.

Eliminating "anxious" cognitions did not make me "better"; when I was 20-21 and had my Big Breakdown, I was not having anxious "thoughts" except as weirdly tactile, intrusive, spewing overflowing jets of imagery and words related to [The Bad Things].

I had trained myself not to have panic attacks, but my body was constantly wound tight with tension. I was in pain a lot. I would wake up with my back hurting, tense with my sheets soaked in sweat. I almost failed a Tai Chi class because I could not make my body relax enough to do the forms.

It was very hard for me to learn that my internal experience of my body was its own reality, that it was a reality separate from my ability to comply with external expectations.

I still remember the horrible, isolating experience of trying to find something real about my experience that I could prove to an outside observer, and of trying to reach a level of distress where I was actually physically prevented from functioning. I was tormented by the fact that I was physically able to "push through" the fear; I hadn't yet reached the point where I became completely consumed with panic and lost control of my body, or collapsed or threw up on myself, and that meant I was choosing to be weak, and my torment was partially my fault, because I had not "pushed myself" to the utmost extent possible.

So I scrounged together "evidence" of how my fear was affecting me: the intrusive sensations and thoughts that seemed to be hydraulically pumped into my brain, the nightmares, the daily pain and soreness, the grinding teeth, but it still didn't feel like enough.

This "evidence-finding" took up a lot of my daily thoughts on my own condition. I was very preoccupied with clinging to bodily "evidence" of distress.

In hindsight, I realize that I did not consider my own subjective experience of suffering to be evidence that I was suffering. At least, I felt that my subjective experience of suffering was irrelevant to whether I deserved care. I felt, in a half-formed and poorly understood way, that my subjective experience could be misleading or "false."

My experiences with therapy, the various workbooks and other tools my mom bought for me, and the resources I found online and elsewhere for dealing with "anxiety" were preoccupied with "thoughts" as the form "anxiety" took. Separately, they taught me breathing exercises and other bodily "relaxation" techniques that were supposed to control the physical processes of anxiety.

I see this as a domination and control-based framework: by erasing "wrong" cognitions and replacing them with "right" ones, and by forcing your inhales and exhales to be a certain number of seconds long, you can make the process of fear in your body stop, or at least override it with the "higher" part of your consciousness. This was accompanied by repeated mantras that my anxiety was not "real," that it was "lying" to me, that it was a monster that was somehow invading and usurping my "real" self, which I could will into being by thinking the right thoughts.

This did not work, at all, ever, and my mental health descended into an incredibly deep black hole before I rejected everything I had learned before and (over several years) discovered and tried accepting some radically different principles about myself:

that my fear was a fundamentally real experience, whether externally judged as "rational" or "irrational"

that my fear was a primal survival instinct inherent to my body's functioning

that my fear's fundamental function was to protect and advocate for me, ensuring that my safety needs were met

This evolved (over several more years) into a further understanding that my fear provided information about what my safety needs were, and eventually developed in me an ability to actually examine safety and unsafety, and to feel both of those things, and to develop deeper understanding of how safety needs can be met.

It was a progression from this unhelpful idea of fear as an invading "monster." I decided to explore what would happen if I accepted that I was the monster. Instead of trying to be a human, I was going to become the wolf.

Part of that was freely exploring all the wolf's urges and instincts. I wrote down some really violent fantasies of being a wolf and biting and killing people. I used the werewolf as a kind of empowering image of a monster who would kill anything that wanted to hurt me.

At some point during this time, when I was feeling that fear in my body, I would just sit there and kind of...appreciate it, the sheer power of it. I would think about how I was feeling something absolutely ancient, an instinct that existed since the Precambrian, something that studied death for a billion years so that I could live and defended the survival of every ancestor from my mother to her mother to the most distant of creatures hundreds of millions of years ago. The havoc it was wreaking in my body was just evidence of how powerful that instinct was.

And also I did a lot of things like destroying objects by biting them, and going out in the middle of the night and running as fast as I could. I wanted to really embody and feel that ability to do those things, to flee and fight back and do all the things an organism might do to ensure its survival.

Very early in this process, my mental image of the "wolf" was...it's weird to say, but it felt like she was inside my body, like wrapped up in my ribcage, scratching and gnawing to get out.

I guess I skipped some of the steps. I told her I was sorry. I knew now that she had only been trying to protect me, and I'd locked her up and taped her jaws shut, and she'd become more and more desperate.

Over time the mental image changed. The main thing that changed was that the Wolf got bigger. Once she wasn't trapped inside me anymore, she was like a skinny dog that physically wrapped herself around me, clinging to me and guarding my body. And then she started to walk beside me, or you know, with me, and in my mind she slowly became much larger, until she felt like this giant beast as tall as my shoulder.