The lost skill of leisure: embracing stillness and boredom

While watching a popular TV show last week, one of the characters playfully teased another, saying, "You don't know how to leisure." In other words, she didn't know how to spend her free time in a restful, nourishing way, doing nothing of importance or productivity. In the scene, as a servant, she felt restless and kept searching for work around the house in which she was currently staying as a guest.

In our modern lives, difficulty with leisure often seems connected to three overlapping areas:

• productivity: the constant sense that we’re not doing enough, falling behind, or failing our own standards
• overthinking: rumination, worry, and the inability to mentally switch off
• overstimulation: excessive scrolling, gaming, snacking, or streaming

Together, these can show up as an inability to tolerate boredom or to engage in slower, low-stimulating activities; the kinds that require patience and offer quieter, less immediate rewards.

A culture of constant stimulation

It can feel as though we’ve grown used to action, action, action – always something happening. We gravitate toward inputs that are fast, intense, colourful, and highly engaging. When something doesn’t meet that level of stimulation, we quickly lose interest and look for the next thing that will.

In doing so, our threshold for engagement shifts. Activities that carry depth and value, such as reading, playing, creating art, and even resting, may begin to feel too slow and dull, even if they used to come naturally and bring joy and excitement.

I hear people say they can’t focus on books or longer articles anymore, or they watch films while also scrolling. Walks come with headphones, falling asleep comes with a podcast. It seems as if silence itself has become too uncomfortable to bear.

Building the new instead of fighting the old

I’ve written about overcoming the urge to scroll and possible strategies for quitting or decreasing it. Here, I’d like to shift the focus to building the new rather than removing the old.

I believe that at the centre of all this is boredom. More precisely, our inability to allow ourselves to feel and remain bored. Whenever we do so, we seem to interpret it as a signal that something is wrong, so we quickly reach out for the “cheap” and readily-available entertainment.

I’m not writing about this as someone who has it all figured out, but as someone trying to relearn how to slow down. My reflections come both from personal experience and from the ongoing process of trying to change my own relationship with stillness.

There’s a part of me that wants to get back to simple things: watching the sky change, sitting in nature without music or podcasts, reading books that take effort, or watching films that unfold slowly, without the rush to keep my attention every few seconds.

Some practices that many people, myself included, find helpful are:

• Meditation or mindful breathing: noticing thoughts come and go without needing to follow them.
• Deliberate boredom: allowing moments of “nothing much happening” and observing the urge to escape them.
• Staying in silence: letting the nervous system settle without constant inputs. (This is not necessarily boring!)
• Using screens more intentionally: picking up a device with a clear purpose, then putting it down once that purpose is completed.

How therapy can help

Therapy can offer a space to explore your relationship with rest, stimulation, and productivity with curiosity rather than judgment. You can begin to understand the patterns, productivity beliefs, anxiety, and habits of distraction, and figure out what a more balanced relationship with time and attention might look like for you.

Change in this area tends to be gradual. It involves learning to sit with discomfort, redefining what “doing enough” means, and reconnecting with activities that nourish rather than merely distract.

I’ve also found that it’s not always an uphill battle. Our bodies adapt, even on a neurophysiological level, and there can come a point when we begin to crave stillness and silence rather than resist them. It takes time, but many people find it to be deeply rewarding and worthwhile.

References

Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Penguin.

Struk, A. A., Scholer, A. A., Danckert, J., & Seli, P. (2020). Rich environments, dull experiences: How environment can exacerbate the effect of constraint on the experience of boredom. Cognition and Emotion, 34(7), 1517-1523.

Thatcher, A., Wretschko, G., & Fridjhon, P. (2008). Online flow experiences, problematic Internet use and Internet procrastination. Computers in Human Behavior, 24(5), 2236-2254.

Watkins, M., & Bond, C. (2007). Ways of experiencing leisure. Leisure sciences, 29(3), 287-307.