“Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all.”-Rollo May

I read an article in Quartz “I kicked my smartphone addiction by retraining my brain to be bored,“by Jordan Rosenfeld. In it he lists several reasons he and psychologists have found why boredom is good for our brains and creativity:

• unscheduled downtime feeds the creative process
• we come up with creative ideas when our minds are allowed to wander
• it inspires lateral thinking or coming up with creative solutions
• it can help us get in touch with our emotions when we are not distracting ourselves

Rosenfeld goes on to say “I’ve certainly noticed that when I stay away from my phone and the Internet during the day, I don’t feel as tired in the evening. That over-stimulated feeling of mental clutter goes away—and I’m itching to enter the worlds of my fictional characters again.” Mental clutter, that is a good term for it. Our brains can get so clogged up with it that we don’t have space for our creative ideas.

“Engaging creatively requires hitting the reset button, which means carving space in your day for lying around, meditating, or staring off into nothing.”-Derek Beres

The above quote is from another post “Being Busy is Killing Our Ability to Think Creatively.” We are so distracted checking our smartphones, Facebook pages, Twitter, and Blogs that our brains are fizzled away to mush. Maybe it is a great plan for mind control that we be distracted with all this constant trivia. In Beres post, he quotes another author, Cal Newport, who says we are “in danger of rewiring [our] neural patterns for distraction.” That is a scary idea and I am not sure if it is based on brain science, but I am determined to rescue my brain from all the trivial and distracting input. How about you?

One Liner Wednesday is hosted by Linda G Hill. Featured image ‘Meadow’ by atlantis0815 on Pixabay.com