Boredom: A Practice in Attention, Focus and Mindset

Bored?

Trouble sticking with something long enough before you become bored and quit or change?

Boredom itself isn’t the problem.

In fact, boredom is a good thing to experience here and there.

It’s in and through boredom that a number of positive things arise.

Humans are creatures of habit.

For anyone to say they don’t like or don’t have routine I call BS.

What they more likely mean is that their routines may be different, not otherwise considered ‘normal, unhealthy...  Still, if those behaviors and habits are healthy or not, most of us have some sort of routine. Something you do on any sort of consistent basis - daily, weekly, weekends, monthly,… We eat similar foods at similar places, wake up and go go be at similar times, even our thoughts become cyclical, etc. All this said, the routine we live out can be either good for us or not.

So, back to the boredom piece.

The good of boredom:

• Creativity

• Thinking outside of the box

• Mindfulness

• Being present

• Quality form and technique

Each of these are practices that are able to be cultivated through boredom. When children are bored, encouraged to get outside, to play, they develop creativity.  When someone has downtime and allows themselves to sit and be they cultivate mindfulness and intuition. When you tune into your form and execution of exercises you can create a mind-muscle connection during your workouts and increase the effectiveness of your sessions.

How to beat boredom:

In the gym:

• play with tempo, rep and rom schemes

• Form and technique

On the water, endurance sports, timely tasks:

• break it down

• take pauses

• Pace yourself

• Focus on form and technique, use cues or words/phrases to help you focus on execution rather than the big picture or how much more you have to go

• Create a mind-body connection, mind-muscle connection during exercises is one example

• Tune into your breathe

• Mindfulness, pay attention to your senses, surroundings environment

In the kitchen:

• Practice mindfulness

• Savor, use your senses, not only taste and flavor, but smell, texture, appearance

• Slow down and take pauses

• Play around with tweaking cooking methods, food combinations, and seasonings

What else would you add? How do you approach boredom? Do you find this read insightful?