"Embracing Emotions: A Guide to Boredom and Beyond

Permission to feel: Bored

I often challenge the way in which we speak about ‘mental health’ as, really, what people are often talking about is their feelings. They may say losing their job ‘affected their mental health’, but what they are likely to mean is that they felt scared, uncertain, alone, angry, inadequate, hurt and lost.

This permission to feel series helps to widen our emotional vocabulary so that we can reflect what we are feeling in the language that we use rather than medicalising it into that tiny frame of ‘my mental health’.

This is what my poems are about - this is why I use the brand ‘The Therapeutic Poet’, because I write to try and help reflect or describe the things that people are feeling.

And the emotion this week is boredom. Did that introduction to what I do do the trick? 😂

Boredom is that uncomfortable feeling that you have when your brain is ready to pay attention, but there is nothing for it to latch on to because the environment is offering nothing but mundanity.

I often feel bored whilst doing the tonnage of laundry that passes through my washing machine on a weekly basis. This may be why I have quite a few poems about laundry, like this one:

Anyway, I digress and that wasn’t the poem that I had actually intended to share about boredom. The poem I have about boredom is short and sweet, and you would be fair in chucking it back at me and saying, ‘That’s not even a poem Jacky’ What can I say? I got bored writing it...

Good nutrition and sleep

Are your best mates.

Soooo boring,

But sooooo true.

Taking care of ourselves can feel extremely boring. There are several things that we can do to help matters.

Find working out a bore? Have no appetite to meditate? Then habit stacking may help you find ways to reduce the sense of boredom. Habit stacking uses the habits that you already have in your life and uses those to create new habits. When you have one new habit stacked, then you can stack on more and before you know it you’ll have the Jenga equivalent of habits (just don’t pull out a brick).

Another option is gamification. This is used by all of those wearable devices and platforms like Oura, Strava and Audible. They offer badges, medals, awards and celebratory little pings that give a little hit to your dopamine reward system.

My final suggestion comes from the work of Esther and Jerry Hicks in the book ‘Ask and it is given’. They outline the idea that each emotion has an energetic vibrational state.

PDF of this chart can be downloaded and printed here.

They recommend reaching for the emotional state which is slightly higher than the one you find yourself in. If you are feeling bored whilst you are doing something, therefore, how can your bring some contentment in to what is boring you? This is why I write so many poems whilst doing the laundry.

Aaaaand that brings me full circle. I could go on, but, I wouldn’t want to bore you. Aah, I crack myself up sometimes, I really do.

Finally, whilst this newsletter does focus on how to deal with boredom, a little bit of boredom may not be a bad thing. In a hyper-connected world it can actually be hard to be bored nowadays, yet being bored could be the best thing for your brain health, helping your resiliency, creativity and productivity.

There is always more to the feelings when we have a good old look at them!

As ever, thank you SO much for subscribing. Let me know how you get on with dealing with boredom, or embracing it as a new way to reset.

If you have enjoyed this then please recommend it to others and share it where you can.

That’s it for now,

‘Til next time!

Jacky x