Our cultural attachment to our phones, she says, is paradoxically both destroying our ability to be bored, and preventing us from ever being truly entertained.
“We’re trying to swipe and scroll the boredom away, but in doing that, we’re actually making ourselves more prone to boredom, because every time we get our phone out we’re not allowing our mind to wander and to solve our own boredom problems,” Mann says, adding that people can become addicted to the constant dopamine hit of new and novel content that phones provide. “Our tolerance for boredom just changes completely, and we need more and more to stop being bored.”
A quote from Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. as well as the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good.
Although a relatively older article, I’m always looking for insights from credible sources that effectively back up what my kids have been hearing from me for years.