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During long periods of solitude, many people struggle to keep their minds busy. But people with creative minds often relish the freedom of being in their own mental universe.
Creative People Experience Less Boredom
U.S. psychologists surveyed more than 2,000 volunteers to see how creativity shows up when people have nothing to do. They found that people who think creatively are less likely to feel bored when left alone with their thoughts.
That may not be surprising, but it highlights how our minds differ between active and idle states. That difference could affect research that compares brain scans during rest.
It also points to ways to help people appreciate downtime. You don’t have to fill every moment with chores, work tasks, or side hustles. As cognitive neurobiologist Jessica Andrews-Hanna, who led the study, points out, understanding how people think during downtime could lead to promising steps for improving health and well-being.
Creative Thinking Expands the Boundaries of Isolation
The global pandemic showed that prolonged isolation is unpleasant for most people. There are many ways people cope with loneliness, and not all of them are healthy.
However, for some, social distancing became an opportunity to dive into their own consciousness. These people filled long hours of solitude with journeys through their thoughts and imagined stories.
As Ms. Andrews-Hanna says, in today’s fast-paced, digital world, finding time to be alone with your thoughts without distractions is rare. People who think divergently have an advantage: they are almost unfamiliar with boredom.
An Experiment on Creative Thinking in Isolation
To study divergent thinking during rest, researchers invited 90 volunteers to sit alone in a room without digital distractions for 10 minutes and say whatever came to mind.
The divergent thinking task gave researchers data on each participant’s tendency to come up with unconventional solutions to quirky prompts like, “How would you make money with 100 rubber bands?” Analyzing chains of spoken ideas revealed how some participants thought outside the box.
Psychologist Quentin Raffali observed that many participants jumped between seemingly unrelated thoughts. Creative participants showed more associative thinking. They also spoke more, reflecting a freer flow of ideas, and rated themselves as feeling less bored while alone.
In a second study, the team analyzed responses from 2,612 people in an online creativity survey. The self-assessments confirmed the earlier results: creative people reported less boredom during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“Dead Time” Can Be Productive
Studies suggest that even when people rush to fill their “dead time,” zoning out is not as unproductive as we might think. Learning to embrace inner creativity can make those moments worthwhile.
As Ms. Andrews-Hanna tells Sciencealert, people are increasingly overwhelmed, overloaded, and dependent on digital devices. She believes it’s essential to improve how we work at home, in workplaces, and in schools, and to carve out time simply to let our brains rest.
