ACTualized Living W/ Erik

What's going on, Cadre family? I'm out here in the Arizona mountains, coming to you live on this wonderful Wednesday morning. Just out for a quick run here. Surprisingly chilly. Coming from Minnesota, I was anticipating a little bit warmer weather, but now that the wonderful sun's coming up, we've got some beautiful weather coming in here. As I go live today, I wanted to talk about something that's really prevalent in our society today and just the world in general, which is boredom, and more particularly, the avoidance of boredom.

Often we find any excuse, to, myself included, hop on our phones if there's a dull moment in the day. Go check Instagram, go check Facebook, play a video game, do something to occupy our mind and attention. And very rarely do we get the opportunity to stop and question, like what? What the real consequence of that is. And not necessarily in the negative connotation, but consequence in terms of what does this chain of decisions lead to? Boredom, it turns out. And there's been some research done on, you know, what the role of boredom is in the human mind.

I like to think about it as a time of awake rest. If you're like me, you've had opportunity, I shouldn't say opportunities, times in your life where maybe you're going to bed, it's been a long, stressful day, and you find yourself just laying there, restless, mind racing, anxious thoughts, maybe going all over the place. And, you know, there can be a number of reasons for that happening. You know, maybe just the typical stress of the day. But one thing that I'm curious about, and I wonder how much we lose out on that quick ability to fall asleep, to turn our mind off, to let things go to the next day, is the fact that we've taken up all of our space for boredom and put something into it, right?

We put something that's taken our attention. What I want you to do is think back to a time when you've been truly bored. Maybe on a walk, maybe sitting at home cleaning, doing something that your mind just doesn't have to be fully engaged and be conscious of where your mind goes. We're quick to judge that experience as without value. But often what we find is that our mind goes to these places where we're actually able to process through these things that have happened throughout our day, these stresses, anxieties, things we're worried about.

If we miss those slivers throughout our day to be bored, well, those all come up at our rest time, the time when we finally shut things down, right? When we're trying to go to sleep when we're trying to give ourselves a break. Consistency, right? Being consistent with our phone use, being consistent with these opportunities to be bored. And so I guess the main poll from today is that boredom is incredibly valuable. And especially if you're someone who struggles with shutting those thoughts off, struggles with going to bed at night and minds racing.

Try something out, maybe try when you get an opportunity you recognize you're just doom scrolling on your phone. Set the phone down and do something that elicits boredom and see how your mind processes what might be going on internally and see if that has an impact on the end of the day when you're winding down, when you're trying to shut your mind off. So that's my, that's my live here today from the desert of Arizona. Thank you all who got to join me. I'm going to be here next week as well, so I hope to find another cool place to go live from.

But once again, just encourage you this week, find some boredom, give your mind some awake rest to process these things so they don't have to do it when you're trying to go to sleep or focus your mind elsewhere. All right. Take care, Cadre family. I hope your new year is going well so far and look forward to.