I Forced Myself to Be Bored for 30 Mins

I did a 30 minute boredom experiment… no phone, no book, nothing in my hands, nothing to listen to… just me in a chair on my back deck and i thought it would be easy.

It was not easy.  The first 10 minutes my brain did everything in its power to avoid being still… planning, brainstorming, anything but the chair. and then somewhere around minute 10 something shifted and i started noticing things i hadn’t noticed in years… the birds, the wind, the smell of the flowers, my favorite tree. and i got kind of emotional because i realized how much of my life with my daughter i’m not actually present for. not because i’m a bad mom… because my brain doesn’t know how to turn off.

This episode is about what happened in those 30 minutes, why presence is so uncomfortable we avoid it without even realizing it, and why one of the brain games inside wired is literally just a 3 minute version of this. if you can’t sit with nothing for 3 minutes, you’re probably not as present as you think you are with the people you love. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up, you guys? Welcome back to the Dophamine Diaries podcast. This is Coach Kate. I want to tell you guys about what I just finished doing. Like within 10 minutes, I just finished this. So I did a 30-minute boredom, no distraction, like just sit in a chair with nothing to listen to, nothing to watch, nothing in my hands. Effort for 30 minutes. And I'll be honest with you guys, before I decided to do this, I was like, this isn't gonna be that bad. Like I can sit in boredom for 30 minutes, surely. Like I blocked the time off on my calendar. I was like, I can do this, it'll be fine. And so I sit there and the clock is rolling. And when I tell you it was so hard for probably the first 10 minutes, my brain was just like the best way I could describe it is like you really don't know how urgent and how fast your brain is going until you challenge it, or until it is challenged to slow down, until it's no longer to no longer able to like keep getting the stimulation from things, whether that be work, scrolling, things around the house, emails, like books, whatever, right? Like you really don't know what it feels like until your brain, it's like forced to downshift. It's like it's it was like I fought it, it was so uncomfortable, it was so uncomfortable. And like I'm sitting there and I'm like, damn, like, wow, I really just had no idea how quickly my brain is moving all of the time until right now. Um and I was just like in my head, probably for the first 10 minutes, like in my thoughts, like you know, the the inner dialogue was like, okay, you can do this. It's only 30 minutes. Okay, we'll think about work. Well, why don't you start brainstorming this or whatever? And it was like my brain was doing everything it could to just avoid being there in the chair, in the boredom, in the nothing. Um, it was like doing ever like it was like cartwheels trying to avoid it. And again, I I kept challenging myself to just like it again, the best way I could describe it is like it's like suddenly everything kind of like zooms in. Um and when I say zooms in, I mean like into your body, into the moment, into like the actual presence, and like all of my senses, my hearing, what I was smelling, what the air felt like. It was like all of a sudden I started noticing those things. And I did not notice those things in the first 10 minutes. So for context, I sat on our back deck just in a chair, and I know for a fact in those first 10 minutes, I did not notice the birds, I did not notice the smells, I did not notice the wind, I did not notice the sound of the water, I did not notice my favorite tree. Like for the first 10 minutes, I was there. I was outside, but like I was in my head. I wasn't there, I wasn't present. Um, and as soon as I was present, it was like sensory overload. I like all of the things that I was smelling, like suddenly I was like picking up on every single bird noise. I was noticing things, like just I was just immersed in the moment, and I was out of my head, I was out of my thoughts, I was just immersed in the moment. And you know, I got kind of emotional probably about halfway through because I realized um with parenting, like how not present we are most of the time. And I don't think that that's really a fault of ours. I just think that that's the reality. All of us have really busy lifestyles, all of us have 8,000 things we're doing at the same time. Like we all have that, right? And so, unless we have opportunities to be immersed in the moment, have our brain really downshift, like we can say that we're present, but we're not. Our thoughts are always running in the background. And if your thoughts are always running in the background, you are not present. Like that is just the reality, man. Like, I'm I'm sitting there and I'm like, man, I've never noticed these sounds, I've never noticed the smell of all of the flowers, of all of the the trees and and the the wood of the deck. Like, like I've never noticed it. And I wonder how many things I've never noticed about my daughter. Like I wonder how much I'm like there for, but I'm in my thoughts for. You know what I mean? Like, it is not natural to turn thoughts off. If you're someone like me with an inner dialogue that is nonstop, it's really hard. And I felt myself in that 30-minute experiment going in and out and in and out and in and out of presence. I felt myself drift back into the thinking and the planning and the whatever. And I had to consciously pull myself back into okay, no, go back to the smell. Kate, find find the smell of that plant again. Like, find the wind, find the air, find that, find the birds, right? Like find the noises that you were just listening to. It's it's not natural to want to be present, I think is what I'm trying to say, and what I really want to get across. It's not natural, and it's actually very challenging in 2026, regardless of what you guys are doing, to get there. And if you're a parent, I think that again, one, it's really eye-opening to do this as a parent. Um, it's very emotional to do this as a parent. It's very, it's like a gut punch to do this because it's like I I'm not, I'm not present most of the time. I'm in my thoughts. My thoughts are running the show. My brain, my on brain, um is running the show. My planning brain is running the show. My immersive self, my like sponge self that is just soaking up everything. And again, I I the best way I can describe full presence is it's it's a full sensory attack. That's not the majority of my experiences with my daughter, and it sucks. It sucks. And I'm not saying that everybody needs to go do a 30-minute, you know, sit in silence and be bored effort. You know, it's funny because in Wired, one of the brain games um is a three-minute effort of something very similar to just like put your phone down um and for three minutes don't do anything, don't pick it up, don't like literally don't do anything, and to just kind of like dip our toes into um what that feels like to remove the impulse or like block the impulse that we have to like constantly fill the space, constantly fill the noise because it's the exact same impulse that I noticed again for the first 10 minutes, where it's like my brain just wanted to like just do all these things. My brain just wanted to be productive. It did not want to rest. It's almost like my on brain, my like urgency, you know, during the day, mom brain. It's like it's almost like that brain is so used to being on that one, it doesn't know how to turn off. But like if I imagine that part of me as a person, it almost kind of felt like that version of me that is on all of the time was really scared to meet the version of me that is not, and was like really hesitant to like, you know, stand shoulder to shoulder next to the version of me that was just there in in those 30 minutes, in the moment, you know, noticing the smells. It's like and it's like why? Like why are we why are we actually so afraid of presence? I think is the question. It's like we're we're avoiding the thing that we say we want the most um because it's uncomfortable, you know what I mean? It's like fucked, but it's true. So um, yeah, I just wanted to share that. I'm not saying everybody needs to go do a 30-minute effort, but um I will say that, man, where I can, I'm gonna try and schedule this in pretty regularly because I did really enjoy it. Um and I do feel like it has kind of like, I don't know, like like lit a fire under my ass even more to just be very like be more conscious of when my on brain is like running the show around my daughter. Um and maybe the cue is to like pull into the senses the best that I can. Um, but yeah, I uh I did a time laplapse video of it. I'll probably post it to Instagram at some point. Um, but yeah, I mean, listen, I I don't mean to sound harsh, but um if if the idea of sitting for 30 minutes with absolutely nothing to do and nothing in your hand and nothing to distract you sounds kind of miserable and you can't even do it for three minutes, I don't really think that you are as present as you think you are around the people that you love. Um, and if that's something that you care about, well, Wired starts Monday. So, okay. Bye.