The Gift of Boredom: How Downtime Builds A Teen's Brain

What if your teen's complaint of "I'm bored" is not something to fix? It's something to encourage?

In this episode of The Conscious Classroom,  Amy Edelstein explores the  value of unstructured downtime for adolescents. Drawing on neuroscience — including Marcus Raichle's research on the brain's default mode network — Amy explains how boredom activates self-reflection, empathy, imagination, and creative problem-solving, all essential for teen identity development.

Amy shares personal reflections on rest, unpacks why over-scheduling and screen time crowd out this vital internal reflection, and offers practical contemplative practices parents can invite teens to try, from sensory awareness exercises to "sauntering" inspired by Thoreau. 

Tune in for a compelling case to protect unstructured time this summer — and give your teen the space to simply be.

Transcript

Welcome To The Conscious Classroom

Speaker 0:04

A New Look At Downtime

Speaker 0:48

Welcome to this episode of the Conscious Classroom. My name is Amy Edelstein. I'm your host, and I'm here to open up a new perspective on downtime. So I'm sitting here right now looking out my window at the trees rustling in the breeze, their branches flowing back and forth. My eyes are resting on a massive tree trunk of a beautiful pine, must be several hundred years old. And I can hear the gentle wish of the eucalyptus leaves rustling against each other. And I'm just watching. Not thinking about anything, not doing anything in particular. And much of my summer has been in this posture in one way or another. Now, how many times have you either

Why Teens Need Boredom

Speaker 2:00

had a teen in your life or heard a teen go up to an adult and say, I'm bored? And with that complaining sound, as if boredom is the worst possible sentence they could experience. And the adult reflex to immediately fill that void. That adult's well-meaning, for sure. But the problem is that boredom is part of what the teen brain needs to develop in the most nuanced and deep way. Now I remember when I was young, which may be dating myself, but you know, oftentimes our instructions during the summer were go out and play, go ride your bike, and come back when it's dinner time. There were no instructions, there was no support to entertain ourselves, and we did. And sometimes we just loafed and did nothing. As Walt Whitman would say, I lean and loaf and bite my soul. That's actually what needs to happen for the developing brain. The neuroscientist Marcus Raikle from Washington University coined the term default mode network in somewhere around 2001. And he spent a lot of his professional life looking at what happens in the brain during rest. And the parts of the brain that activate during rest are this wandering mind, the exploratory mind. And the parts that go quiet during rest are our external activities, our tasks, our to-dos, our functioning. You know, in classical contemplative terms, it would be the difference between being and doing, where the meditative mind, the contemplative mind, is all about being, about resting with what is, about allowing one's attention to be vast and not laser-focused on anything in particular, in order to allow new exploration and new sensing into, feeling into what's possible or what that life current has to tell us. And when we're doing, that retreats into the background. So what Rayquel noticed that the default mode network does is that it activates different aspects of our understanding of ourself. And these aspects are really core to teen development. In fact, they are arguably the central function or task or mission of adolescence, which is to develop one's own individuation, one's own identity, one's set of values, one's purpose, one's direction, one's likes and dislikes, one's self-expression. And the default mode network, which uh activates when our mind is just wandering, when we're at rest, when we're quote unquote bored, is that part of our brain that works on the questions, who am I, in scientific terminology, they call that self-referential thought or autobiographical memory. It's the part of the brain that ponders the future, that processes the past, that reflects and intuits what other people or beings are thinking and feeling. It's the part of our brain that activates our sense of care and empathy, of moral reasoning and values, our sense of beauty, truth, beauty, and goodness, our sense of meaning, our aesthetic appreciation. All of those things are really coming online during adolescence. And so when we allow our teens to simply be bored, we are giving them the permission and the space to develop these really important aspects of their identity. Arguably those aspects of their identity that make them deep, caring, kind, sensitive, innovative. It's so important to have that space to do nothing and be. And although I'm well beyond the period of adolescent brain development, I can tell you that these past this past summer period for me of just being, as much as I was still had periods of doing and working and writing and creating and intuiting the next stage of inner strength education's programs and everything else, my primary focus was simply on being with everything as it is, and the rejuvenation and the lightness of being and the joy and the readiness to dive into projects has filled out so much. It's almost like if you allow a cistern to fill with water before you take buckets out. That's how my being feels right now, having had this time to rest. And for teens, it's even more so because they're literally developing this capacity, this capacity for self-reflection, this capacity for moral appreciation, this capacity to reflect on who am I? What's my purpose? That's not a primary reflection of a child, of a five, six, seven, ten-year-old. But it becomes the reflection of a 13-year-old. It's a strong reflection for a 16, 17, 18-year-old. We need to encourage that time to be, not that smart watch that beeps every 15-minute increment of scheduled time.

Rest Is Not Idleness

Speaker 10:29

Where titled Rest is Not Idleness. And the study is about the implications of the brain's default mode for human development and education. I'll put it in the show notes. But I'll give you a quick back of the napkin summary here, which is really that what they're saying and what their research showed is that rest is an essential aspect of healthy life, and that it's a very important aspect of the healthy growth of an adolescent. And rest is specifically identified as constructive internal reflection. It's not just veg out downtime, where, you know, akin to staring at the television or screen for hours on end with popcorn, not thinking about anything. That type of boredom or that type of being with things as they are, that type of open awareness of that quality of vast and soft and nuanced attention that's not tight. Is how we do our daydreaming. It's how our memories that are important sink into us. That they they the lessons learned can become absorbed. It's like we metabolize them, we digest them. And in this period of rest for teens, it's also where they build their social and emotional skills. It's where that sensitivity to others, that understanding of how they feel, what their boundaries are, that they have boundaries, that they feel good when they're respected, they feel bad when they're not respected. All of those things start to form and congeal and take shape during this rest period. And over-stimulation, whether it's doom scrolling on social media or being overly structured, going from this sports practice to that sport practice to that homework assignment to that project development to that activity, to it it's it doesn't give that free activity space to just bounce around. So, you know, if if your young person, your your adolescent in your life is used to being overly structured and in some ways is afraid of that boredom, you can seed in

The Five Senses Reset

Speaker 14:00

the suggestion to do some mindfulness-based practices, which do direct the attention, but they work with the intention in a slightly different way, and they invite that free form wandering. So one of the things you can do is you can invite your adolescents to work with their senses. So in those moments of boredom, what are five different things you see? Really open your visual field. And what are five different things you see? Maybe you see texture of tree bark, maybe you see color of grass, maybe you see um movement of something in the wind. So invite them to look for five things they see and move past just the immediate objects that occupy their attention. But what are different qualities of seeing that you notice? What are four things that you sense with your your sense of touch? What are four different textures that you either feel without moving, or that you reach out and you discover? And what's the quality of those textures? What are you touching? What are you feeling? Soft or hard, fuzzy or smooth, hot or cold? And invite them to challenge themselves. How many different ways can you sense with touch? What are three things that you hear? What are qualities of different sounds? What are the personalities of different sounds? Are they boisterous and take up a lot of space? Are they soft and hide in the background? Do they carry a message? Three things that you hear, and what are the different qualities of hearing? What are two things that you taste without putting anything in your mouth? And what's that sense of taste? How do you taste from different parts of your tongue? What's one thing that you smell? And what does that smell remind you of? You can see in a sense seeing freshly reflection like this, in a in a mindful seeing freshly using our five senses. There are so many ways to open up a creative being with what is, a creative being with the information and communication that we're taking in all of the time. And it invites that slowing down, it invites that being with, it invites that sense of peacefulness, of letting the mind wander, of letting it rest on what captures it attention, and then flutter away like a butterfly, alighting on the next one with a gentle touch and then moving on. Not forced, not sticky, not confined, that free form being with what is, noticing what is, allowing what we're taking in with our senses to touch us and to communicate with us and to be with us. So this is though that's one great exercise to invite your young people to do.

Mindful Walking Without A Goal

Speaker 18:18

And another one is mindful walking with no destination. So Thoreau uh wrote his famous essay on sauntering, and he recommended it as a practice to go saunter wherever your feet would take you. For I forget what he said, something like 40 minutes a day was his prescription that allowing the feet to carry you and allowing the fields and the pastures to invite you, and to just saunter with no destination, to walk mindfully, feeling your body moving through space, feeling your feet touching the ground, kissing the ground with each step, feeling the soul lift up, feeling the body alight, feeling it descend again with each step. It's also part of this boredom of letting ourselves be unstructured, be free. And you can imagine how the goat herders and shepherds of old spent so much time just being whistling and playing flutes and watching the clouds and yes, tending to their flux, but but mostly just quietly being. And in that way, we want to invite ourselves to bring that level of contentedness back into our lives and letting that contentedness let the brain do what it does. So, in another one of these uh papers uh done by uh Christophe in 2009, there was a lot of activity around this topic in those years that was uh presented at the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed how this mind-wandering, this sauntering, this quality of letting everything be and letting our attention be light and happy, a butterfly moving here or there, not aimlessly, not scattered, not frantic, not anxious, just exploring, just being, just delighting in its movement, activates the default mode network and the executive brain functioning. So it allows our sense of autopilot to let our brains make new connections and form new ideas. Steve Jobs famously went off to India for a short period and came back. He wanted to just think freely and came back with some of his most seminal ideas. You know, it's not uncommon to hear stories or You know, the phrase, my best ideas come in the shower. You know, when when you're not doing anything, the shower is a great metaphor. You let the water, you know, flow over you, and you're just enjoying the sensation of that water touching your head or flowing down your face. You don't have to do anything particularly, and then your brain makes those connections. Your brain has the space to form new ideas. And I think that our thirst for innovation and our value of creativity and our pressure to lead with new ideas can shunt us down a passageway that forces more and more structure. And really, the brain science and our own intuition and time-honored practices of contemplation over thousands of years show us that we, as humans, to rise to our highest, to express our fullest creativity and potential, need that space to be. Need that space to be with what is in order to operate at full capacity.

Let Them Discover Who They Are

Speaker 23:51

So when your teen says, Oh, I'm bored, you can either tell them, That's great for you, it's perfect for your developing brain. Or you can just tell them, Go outside and entertain yourself, and I'll see you at dinner time. See what happens. Let your teen feel that they are enough as they are. Let your teen feel that they are complete and full, that they do not need an influencer or an entertainer or a peak performance athlete to show them how to be. Give them the room to discover their value, their worth, their unique sense of self, their vision for the future, their dreams for themselves and for the world, their affection and connection for their pets, for animals, for nature, for their community, for their home. And invite that quality of open awareness, of simply letting everything be as it is, letting everything rest in spaciousness, with the mind open, the heart open to feel those connections. And it's not just connections with ideas, it's connections with life, connections with the current of beingness. So this summer I encourage you to invite as much unscheduled, unstructured time. Let the activities be the anomaly and the open space be most of what you fill the days with. And see what comes out of that, and be aware of the teens in your life and how that allows them to settle in themselves and feel like themselves and feel connected with themselves.

Stay Connected And Closing

Speaker 26:53

And I encourage you to stay in touch with us. Join our newsletter at inner strengtheducation.org. And I wish you a wonderful rest of the summer, being with things as they are. Look forward to talking with you next episode. Stay well. Thanks for joining me on the conscious classroom. If this resonated with you, please like, subscribe, and leave a review. It really helps other people like you find the show. And thank you so much for caring about the inner lives of young people and the future of education. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein, and I look forward to seeing you next time.