How to Overcome Boredom and Transmute the Pain of “the Void”

Throughout the vast span of time, human beings have devised ways to overcome their existential condition.

Creating games of various kinds, indulging in various vices, and even outright procrastination are some ways to dodge the blessing and the curse of having advanced levels of consciousness.

In this article, you’re going to learn why embracing boredom is such a boon and avoiding it is a massive mistake. You’ll also learn how overcoming boredom can be used to fuel your productive endeavors.

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What is Boredom? – The Existential Roots of Boredom

When you are “bored”, you aren’t just “bored”.

Is that a new revelation to you? It shouldn’t be. It’s something you should get acquainted with if you want to get on the road to overcoming boredom.

Here’s what it breaks down to:

Every reaction is a response to a stimulus in our inner or outer environment.

In this scenario, boredom is a response to the stimulus of “empty space”.

Empty space is the gap in between activities when there is no one to face but yourself and your consciousness.

Empty space reveals your insecurities, your inadequacies, your pain. It reveals everything that’s weak about you.

It is inherently painful. As creatures who are motivated by the promise of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, we will do anything (and I mean anything) to avoid pain.

Such is the rise of smartphone culture, social media addiction, couch potato-ism, and all sorts of things where we avoid doing what we know we need to do.

Better yet, this empty space is where your inner voice arises and instructs you on things you should or shouldn’t do.

It is the root of self-awareness.

When you do not learn how to overcome boredom and laziness, you are stifling this inner voice and you become deaf to its calling.

Why Overcoming Boredom is Necessary For Thriving

These days, we have many distractions to distract from the fact that we just aren’t really… living.

In times past, these distractions were nonexistent, so the people of the day used it for creative or exploratory purposes.

Embracing boredom is the reason why we have vast amounts of literature, the discoveries of science, the musings of philosophy.

Embracing boredom is the reason why I myself read books and engage in self-development.

Paradoxically, the more you embrace boredom and learn how to deal with it, the easier overcoming boredom becomes and the more exciting your life becomes as well.

You develop a resilience that others lack and you start to develop yourself and build the structure of your life in profound ways.

The obstacle in the way becomes the way.

This is a key part in learning how to manage your mind.

How to Overcome Boredom and Embrace Its Challenges

This is where the trench work starts. This is how you get on the road to becoming some who is über productive.

Learn to do hard things

In his modern classic Deep Work, Cal Newport espouses this philosophy of embracing boredom wholeheartedly. In his worldview, it is the only way to guarantee results in a rapidly changing world.

Even more, he follows up embracing boredom with using the space in between the silence in order to overcome boredom itself:

By forcing you to resist distraction and return your attention repeatedly to a well-defined problem, it helps strengthen your distraction-resisting muscles, and by forcing you to push your focus deeper and deeper on a single problem, it sharpens your concentration.

This quote is not exclusively about doing hard things, but rather it’s a form of what he calls “productive meditation” – a way to plumb the deeper depths of your mind for more bandwidth.

The ability to sit down at a desk and work at a project for hours at a time is a rare skill in our society and if you develop it, you will be at a massive advantage.

Anyone can just start doing a certain activity. It’s when it isn’t fun anymore is when the pain starts. This is when you need to embrace boredom even more and lean into it.

Overcoming boredom isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it.

Fall in love with results

There’s really two types of boredom: the boredom that comes from “empty space” and the boredom that comes from drudgery.

The latter boredom is the type that comes when you’re in the middle of doing the hard thing.

It’s the type of boredom that comes from repeating a guitar lick over and over.

It’s the type of boredom that comes from learning to implement a new piece of code.

It’s the type of boredom that comes from sitting at your computer hammering out articles like this one.

This is the boredom that will separate the average from the extraordinary.

These are the people that put in the reps and establish a foundation for mastery.

Mastery and elite performance is not an accident. It comes from performing a skill over a long period of time with consistency after the luster has faded.

It comes from overcoming boredom and embracing it for all it’s worth.

Embrace isolation

If you truly are serious about overcoming boredom, you should make it a practice to embrace isolation.

During isolation, you use the time to get to know yourself at a deeper level and strengthen your internal resolves towards overcoming boredom.

You can do this through a variety of ways, some of which are:

• Going on a solo vacation
• Spending long periods of time in meditation
• Monk mode
• Moving to a town/city where you know almost no one

Make it a point of duty to create purposeful separation between you and the outside world in your quest of overcoming boredom.

To learn more about how to embrace isolation, check out Tapping Into the Power of Isolation (and How It Will Help You Level Up).

Resist the siren song of excuses

There are a thousand excuses for failure, but never a good reason. – Mark Twain

Excuses are those things that arise when you “give it your all” but still encounter catastrophic failure.

Failure will happen to all of us. That is inevitable. What is not inevitable is what happens in between the time when you start to the time when you fail/finish.

Were you really doing all that you could be doing to prevent failure? Or were you just hoping things went your way?

Everyone is guilty of this at some point in their lives. The next point illustrates this.

Conclusion (A Story of a Friend)

I knew a person who spent a majority of the hours in his day chomping at the bit to start his own venture. This thing would be his and his alone.

He never found a good time to quit and he always kept pushing back the date of when he’d quit to some arbitrary date in the future.

About a year or so later, his company merged with another company, his position was deemed “redundant” and he was soon laid off – with severance and everything.

He got laid off right at the end of the month which meant he was able to start a new month as a newly minted “unemployed job seeker”.

This was his chance! This was his chance to start his venture and get going on what was important to him!

What happened?

The next day he slept in. No biggie, the days and weeks stretched out before him. He had a large financial runway of cash to burn and he could just chill on it. He would start tomorrow.

Tomorrow came. He didn’t really get that much momentum going, but he tried a little.

As the days turned into weeks, he was getting some wood on the fire so to speak on his business but nothing substantial. Nothing to replace his lost income.

When he really got down to work, he saw how boring it was. He saw how much drudgery and monotony there was in starting your own business. It was not exciting at all.

When he eventually got his first fat wad of cash from a product/service sale, he immediately went to Europe with a fling and partied for 2 weeks. He spent about 8k in that span of time and he returned to the states back at square one.

The hours in his days came and went. He spent them idly. He was bored out of his skull.

About a year and some change into his unemployment (because that’s what it was), he was deeply in the red and his business went belly up. He had to close up shop and sell all his merchandise at a loss.

He was then forced to look for another job, a grinding process that took another 4 or so months.

He was employed once again, his dreams of self-employment shattered and grounded.

There were many things he did wrong in that span of time.

• He spent money he didn’t have.
• He spent valuable time on idleness or reverie.
• He did not spend his days making sales calls to potential clients.
• He did not have the “sales hunter” mentality.

And of course – he did not overcome boredom and the pain it takes to start a new venture.

This cost him valuable time that he will not be getting back, but hopefully he learned a lesson.

“We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” – Jim Rohn

How has overcoming boredom and dealing with its resultant pain helped you in your life? Let me know in the comments.