The Relationship Between Boredom Tolerance And Creative Output

Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman's study (2014, published in Creativity Research Journal) produced findings that ran against the prevailing cultural assumption that stimulation produces creativity.

Participants were divided into conditions with varying levels of boredom induction. The most boring condition: copying phone numbers from a phone book. Following this, participants were asked to come up with as many uses as possible for two plastic cups — a standard divergent thinking task.

The boring-task group generated significantly more uses, and more creative uses, than the control group. A subsequent experiment added a condition where participants read (less boring than copying, but still not stimulating). The reading group outperformed controls but underperformed the phone-book-copying group.

Mann's interpretation: boredom induces a state of low arousal combined with a desire for stimulation. The mind seeks stimulation internally when it's not available externally — which means daydreaming. Daydreaming draws on the default mode network, which is associated with autobiographical memory, future simulation, and — crucially — associative thinking that connects distant concepts.

The creative insight is usually a connection between things not previously connected. The default mode network is particularly active in generating this kind of associative processing. The phone-book-copiers had activated their default mode networks through boredom, and they were drawing on that for creative output.

The implication: constant stimulation suppresses default mode network activity. You're always receiving input; the brain never has to generate it. You're training yourself out of the associative, generative mental state that underlies much creative thinking.

Graham Wallas's 1926 model remains the most useful map of the creative process, and identifying where boredom lives within it explains a great deal about why boredom tolerance matters.

Phase 1: Preparation

This is the domain acquisition phase — reading, researching, practicing, exploring. The preparation phase builds the raw material from which creative combinations can be made. Koestler argued that creativity is fundamentally about bisociation — connecting matrices of thought that normally exist separately. To have matrices worth connecting, you need deep exposure to multiple domains.

The preparation phase is often boring. The jazz musician runs the same scales for years before they can improvise fluidly. The novelist reads thousands of books, most of them mediocre, before developing a sufficiently refined sense of what good prose does. The scientist reads the literature in their field — most of which is slow and technical — before understanding the landscape well enough to see the gaps.

Boredom intolerance truncates preparation. You skim instead of reading deeply. You skip the boring foundational work and try to operate on intuition alone — which means operating without well-developed raw material. Creative output then suffers not because the ideas didn't come but because there wasn't enough prepared material to combine.

Phase 2: Incubation

This is the phase where unconscious processing continues while conscious attention is elsewhere. The experimental evidence for incubation is solid. Dijksterhuis and Meurs (2006) showed that unconscious thought — induced by distraction — produced better decisions on complex problems than deliberate conscious thought. Sio and Ormerod's meta-analysis (2009) confirmed incubation effects across a range of creative tasks.

The mechanism appears to involve spreading activation: during incubation, activation spreads along associative pathways without the constraint of working memory's limited capacity. Connections get made that conscious deliberate thought would screen out. When you return to the problem, some of these associations are accessible as insights or hunches.

For incubation to work, you need genuine idle or low-demand periods. Not naps per se, though sleep does facilitate consolidation. Just time when the problem is not being actively worked. Going for a walk, doing dishes, staring out a window.

The boredom intolerance problem: if you fill every idle moment with content consumption — podcasts, social media, short video — you block the incubation process. Your working memory and attentional resources are occupied. The problem doesn't get to spread activation unconstrained because your brain is processing inputs, not generating connections from prepared material.

This is why many creative people report their best ideas coming in the shower, on walks, while driving. These are the last remaining genuinely idle periods in most people's lives — situations where you can't easily reach for a screen.

Phase 3: Illumination

The insight arrives. This is the only phase that feels creative. It's also typically the briefest. The eureka moment, the sudden connection, the idea that seems to come from nowhere. It's the most romanticized part of the process and the smallest part of the actual work.

Boredom tolerance doesn't directly affect this phase — you can't manufacture illumination by being bored. But illumination depends on preparation and incubation having happened. Without them, there's nothing to illuminate.

Phase 4: Verification

The idea now has to be developed, tested, refined, and executed into a finished form. For writers, this is everything after the first draft. For scientists, this is the experimental work. For musicians, it's the arrangement and recording. For designers, it's the iteration from sketch to polished system.

Verification is where most creative projects die. The initial insight is exciting. The work of developing it is often tedious. The first draft is usually bad. The first version usually doesn't work. The refinement process is long and unglamorous and requires sustained effort through stretches that feel unproductive.

Boredom intolerance kills projects at this phase by making the unglamorous middle feel unbearable. You abandon the project at 70% completion because the excitement of the initial idea has faded and the refinement work is boring. You start the next thing, get the dopamine hit of new beginnings, hit the boring middle again, and repeat.

The creative output of a boredom-intolerant person: many abandoned projects, few completed ones.

The default mode network (DMN) — identified by Raichle and colleagues in 2001 — is active when the brain is not focused on an external task. It includes medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, angular gyrus, and hippocampus.

Initially the DMN was understood primarily as a "task-negative" network — it was deactivated during focused external tasks. But subsequent research has revealed its positive role: it's deeply involved in autobiographical memory retrieval, future simulation, perspective-taking, and self-referential thought. And — critically for creativity — it's associated with the generation of novel associations and spontaneous thought.

Beaty and colleagues (2016) found that highly creative people show greater functional connectivity between the DMN and the executive control network (which normally suppresses DMN activity during tasks). Essentially, creative people can maintain some DMN activity even during focused tasks — they keep one foot in the generative, associative state while the other is in focused execution.

But this connectivity develops from use. If you suppress your DMN continuously — through constant external stimulation that requires attentional resources — you don't develop this productive relationship between wandering-mind and focused-mind.

The boredom state, as Mann's research suggests, activates the DMN in a way that produces useful associative output. It's not that boredom is intrinsically creative — it's that boredom allows DMN activity, and DMN activity (when prepared material is available) generates creative connections.

The attention economy has made genuine idleness rare and uncomfortable. The design of most digital platforms maximizes engagement — which means minimizing idle time. Every moment of potential boredom is converted into content consumption. This is economically rational for platforms and creatively costly for users.

The specific creative toll:

Disrupted incubation. No idle time means no incubation windows. The problem never gets to marinate because something is always competing for cognitive resources.

Truncated preparation. Short-form content optimized for engagement doesn't build the deep domain knowledge that preparation requires. You're getting broad, shallow exposure rather than the deep familiarity that feeds creative combinations.

Diminished tolerance for the boring middle. Constant novelty and stimulation raises the baseline for what feels engaging. The sustained effort of developing an idea, which has always been relatively unglamorous, becomes harder to sit with against a background of always-available stimulation.

Reduced capacity for boredom-induced reflection. The automatic relief of boredom means you rarely experience the kind of productive introspective wandering that generates self-insight and novel connection.

The effect isn't uniform — some people have maintained strong creative output despite living within the attention economy. But the mechanisms suggest that they're doing so by deliberately protecting periods of idleness against the pull of constant stimulation.

Boredom tolerance is partly dispositional — people differ in their baseline sensitivity to boredom and their distress response to it. But it's also trainable.

The research on boredom as a trait (Farmer and Sundberg's Boredom Proneness Scale) distinguishes between external boredom susceptibility (needing constant external stimulation) and internal boredom susceptibility (difficulty generating internal stimulation). Both dimensions respond to deliberate exposure practice.

The training mechanism is straightforward: gradually extend exposure to genuinely idle states without relief. This is essentially exposure therapy for the discomfort of boredom. You build tolerance the same way you build tolerance for any discomfort: by repeatedly encountering it at manageable doses, not escaping, and discovering that it's survivable.

What this looks like practically: - Scheduled disconnection: Defined periods each day with no incoming stimulation. Start with 10 minutes, extend over weeks and months. - Protecting incubation periods: Deliberately not reaching for a screen during walks, meals, transit. Letting the mind wander without directing it. - Finishing things: Committing to completing creative projects through the boring verification phase before beginning new ones. This is partly a capacity-for-boredom exercise and partly an exercise in recognizing what completed work actually requires. - Reducing the options ceiling: Having fewer entertainment options available makes the threshold for boredom higher and the tolerance for mild understimulation greater.

The most productive creative people across domains share a capacity to work through long stretches that produce nothing visible. Darwin worked for decades before publishing. Flaubert spent years on a single novel. Ramanujan filled notebooks that seemed like dead ends before the productive results appeared. Beethoven revised obsessively through dozens of drafts.

This isn't romantic suffering. It's a description of a capacity to stay with a problem, a project, a domain through the phases that feel like nothing is happening — because the experienced practitioner knows that something usually is.

What boredom tolerance buys you specifically: the ability to finish long projects, to do deep preparation, to give problems incubation time, to refine output past the first draft. All of these are bottlenecks for creative output. Remove them and you remove most of the ceiling on what you can produce.

The creative imagination needs silence to generate. Silence feels like boredom. Boredom is uncomfortable. The discomfort is not the enemy — it's the condition.