What the data actually shows
There is direct experimental evidence that boredom can boost creativity. A 2014 study by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman found that people who first did a boring task — copying out numbers from a phone book — subsequently generated more, and more creative, ideas on a divergent-thinking task than those who had not been bored first. The proposed mechanism is that boredom prompts the mind to wander and search for stimulation, which can surface novel associations.
That fits a broader picture from neuroscience. When the mind is not focused on an external task, the brain's 'default mode network' becomes active, and this kind of mind-wandering is associated with memory consolidation, future planning, and creative idea generation. Low-stimulation, undemanding time appears to be when some of this background work happens — which is part of why ideas so often arrive in the shower or on a walk rather than at the desk.
Researchers who study boredom directly, such as John Eastwood and Andreas Elpidorou, describe it less as emptiness than as a functional signal. On this view boredom flags that your current situation is failing to engage you and motivates you to do something about it — to seek meaning, novelty, or a different activity. It is uncomfortable by design, in the way hunger or restlessness is, because discomfort is what makes a signal effective.
Why this feels different from how it actually is
Boredom feels purely negative because the experience is genuinely aversive — the whole point of the signal is that you want it to stop. So the natural instinct is to treat it as a problem to be solved immediately rather than a state with any value, and modern life makes that solution available in seconds.
We now carry an infinite, frictionless source of stimulation in our pockets, so the gap between feeling a flicker of boredom and escaping it has collapsed to almost nothing. A queue, a lift, a few quiet minutes — moments that used to be low-stimulation time become filled reflexively. We rarely sit in boredom long enough to reach the mind-wandering or the prompting-to-act that gives it its function.
There is also a cultural framing that any unstimulated moment is wasted, which makes boredom feel like failure rather than a normal trough. That framing is worth questioning, because the evidence suggests some of the mind's more useful background activity depends precisely on those undemanding stretches we have learned to eliminate.
What the research says to do about it
The practical implication of this research is not to seek out boredom but to stop reflexively escaping it. Allowing low-stimulation time — a walk without a podcast, a queue without a screen, a stretch of undemanding activity — gives the mind-wandering and default-mode processing associated with creativity and reflection room to happen.
Mann and Cadman's findings suggest that a bout of boredom before a task requiring fresh thinking may actually help, which reframes 'unproductive' downtime as part of the creative process rather than the enemy of it. Some people deliberately schedule undemanding, screen-free activity — dishes, walking, showering — as thinking time for exactly this reason.
It also helps to read your own boredom as information. If boredom is a signal that a situation is not engaging you, recurring boredom in a particular part of your life may be pointing at something worth changing — a need for more challenge, more meaning, or more novelty — rather than something to simply numb.
What the research says does not help
Instantly filling every dull moment with your phone is the behaviour most directly at odds with the research. It reliably ends the discomfort, but it also short-circuits the mind-wandering and the prompting-to-act that appear to give boredom its value, so you get relief without the benefit.
Treating all boredom as a sign that something is wrong with you tends not to help either. Occasional boredom is a normal state, not a personal failing or necessarily a symptom — most people feel it regularly, and the right response is usually curiosity about what it is signalling rather than self-criticism.
On the other side, romanticising boredom and assuming more of it is automatically good is not supported. Chronic, unrelieved boredom is genuinely unpleasant and is linked in research to lower wellbeing and worse outcomes. The useful version is occasional and acted upon, not constant and endured.
Real numbers in context
The clearest single finding is experimental: in Mann and Cadman's 2014 work, people made deliberately bored before a creativity task outperformed those who were not, supporting the idea that boredom can prime creative thinking. It is one set of studies rather than a vast literature, so it is best held as suggestive evidence for a plausible mechanism rather than a settled law.
The supporting picture — default-mode-network activity during mind-wandering, and boredom as a functional motivational signal — comes from separate strands of neuroscience and psychology that point in the same direction: undemanding, low-stimulation time is not simply wasted. What the data does not support is the idea that boredom is either purely bad or purely good. It is uncomfortable, it is normal, and its value depends on whether you let it run and act on what it tells you.