stimulation is killing us

the utilization of time

image from pinterest

What is boredom? Is boredom a bad thing?

This question has continuously roamed my mind, weaving in and out in various moments. Moments where I’m bored, moments where I’m content, and moments where I’m overstimulated.

Society has evolved into an uber-stimulated crowd of people that cannot live without some sort of distractor for the mind. TikTok while procrastinating homework. Music on long car rides. Netflix while eating.

While I’m guilty of all of these, and don’t necessarily think that’s there’s something drastically wrong with it, I have been considering and observing these events in my daily life. Why am I unable to let my thoughts be by themselves? Why do I keep trying to suppress the wandering of the mind?

Somewhere along the way, it ties back to convenience. With the limited amount of time we all inevitably have, we’re all seeking ways to make our daily tasks go by faster, so we have more time to do things we actually want. This has actually begun to interestingly counteract itself, as I often find myself doomscrolling for hours on end before I finally turn on the show that I was supposed to be watching for fun. Heck, I couldn’t name the last time I truly watched an hour long episode in one sitting. Two years ago, maybe.

With trying to move faster through life, our brains started seeking shorter bursts of dopamine to keep us going. This is where social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram come in. The reels suck us in, literally, forcing us to keep swiping with our thumbs even as the time ticks by uselessly, exactly the opposite of what we wanted.

Just this morning, I stayed in bed for an extra 30 minutes scrolling before peeling myself away from my phone and getting ready for the day. Once I actually do mundane, “boring” tasks, I realize how much more enjoyable it is than doomscrolling on my phone. The thing is, I know this, and am still unable to get myself to stop.

When things get too quiet for our brains, it craves stimulation. Useless content that you won’t remember by the next swipe, mind numbing information that won’t mean anything later on. Sitting still and thinking just seems so useless that we can’t stand the silence and try to fill it.

But the more I toy with this idea of boredom and convenience with the idea of stimulation, the more I wonder why our minds have come to think this way.

We think of social media and doomscrolling as a reward, especially if we just spent a long time studying or doing necessary work. Then we get caught up “compensating” for that hard work with a “relaxing” social media scroll that we deserve.

Once upon a time, reading used to be my reward after a tedious task. Reading, watching a show, any type of long form content is still a reward. The happiness just doesn’t hit right away like with hilarious reels, so we get perturbed and started to stray away from them.

We call them reading slumps, or just say we can’t find any good shows to watch these days. In reality, we are just denying the fact that we are impatient. We want convenience, and taking time to consume long form content feels restless and useless.

But it’s not. The real uselessness is the reels, the TikToks, the snippets of other peoples’ lives that really don’t mean anything in the end. Sure, it connects people from around the world, but there’s a point between actually connecting and just aimlessly consuming.

I get sad sometimes thinking about the person I’ve become, unable to peel myself away from my phone, constantly checking it for new notifications and messages to open. It makes me feel important and useful, a trick I used to justify the doomscrolling.

So I’m in it with you. As I sit here trying to scrap up words for the next sentence, my legs bounce restlessly and my mind urges me to reach for my phone to take a break until the words come to me. I have over 100 notifications on my phone that my fingers are itching to check.

But for the first time in a while, I feel soothed. I have no direct obligation to check my messages, and after a couple of minutes of staring outside my window in thought, I come up with cautious new words that I type out, and end up liking.

We are and always will be stimulated. It’s a natural desire of the brain that isn’t necessary to get rid of. It’s the matter of how we’re stimulating ourselves, and how we utilize our finite time in life that matters.

There’s millions of articles talking about the same thing that I am, urging you to do the same thing. But we can fix this.

It won’t happen overnight, and will take a lot of patience and willpower. However, over time, if we slowly transition back to long form content, we can discover the long term happiness that it can bring us. No more guilt from hours of doomscrolling. Instead, just pure enjoyment of the content that we are taking in.

So put down the phone. Read something. Take a walk outside. Stare at the ceiling. Maybe you’ll discover something about yourself that you weren’t allowing yourself to think about.

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this is a different sort of piece that i wanna start publishing more of. lemme know what you guys think! kudos to you if you were able to read this entire article in one sitting lol

with love,

hannah