The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

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Last week we covered why boredom can be a good thing. As a reminder, boredom is an ancient cue that tells us to do something else. In our past, that something else was often productive. We’d hunt, gather, mend our shelters, make tools, etc. Today we have an easy, effortless escape from it. We impulsively reach for our phone, watch TV, mess around on the computer, etc. The average American now spends 12 daily hours engaged with digital media.

Our collective lack of boredom is now linked to burnout, stress, anxiety, and, as we learned last week, a creativity crisis.

Cell phones are the most obvious boredom-stealer. They’re with us 24/7. People instinctively pull out their phone whenever they feel the slightest twinge of boredom. We’ve all noticed this in public. The other day when I arrived to give my 8:30 am lecture at the university where I’m a professor, I did a quick headcount. I counted 83 students on their phone and 6 doing something else.

We all overdo our phone screen time. Hence, there are thousands of articles and tips on how to use your phone less. But these articles would be better if they included a larger point. When people use their phone less, they often just swap it for another screen. They take an hour off their phone screen time, get bored, and add an hour to their TV screen time. This is like replacing cigarettes with chewing tobacco.

I spoke to Joe Rogan about this. Here’s the clip.

So let’s deal with our boredom in a way that won’t end up driving us more crazy. Try one of these nine methods to leverage the power of boredom.

1. Do nothing. Go inward and let your mind wander. Focusing inwardly is a mental rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently. Mind wandering is critical to get shit done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

2. Take a walk and leave your cell phone at home. I mentioned this last week. The benefit: a mental reboot and more creativity, according to researchers at the University of Utah.

3. ​Spend 20 minutes sitting in nature. Research from the University of Michigan found that dose of nature most efficiently dropped peoples’ stress hormones.

4. Read a literary classic. I recently finished Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (the complexity of the name correlates with the complexity of the writing) by Marcel Proust. It was a strange and trying book. But it had enough brilliant scenes and lines that I’m glad I read it.

5. Think of your death. I covered the benefits at length in The Comfort Crisis. In short: It can alter your behavior in a way that improves your happiness.

6. Declutter. Clutter is associated with procrastination and higher levels of stress.

7. Learn a new skill. Anything. Newness forces into presence and focus. This is because we can’t anticipate what to expect and how to respond, breaking the trance that leads to life in fast-forward. It can even slow down our sense of time, which explains why time seemed slower when we were kids. Everything was new then, and we were constantly learning.

8. ​Do these three exercises. They help offset many of the tightness and movement problems we get from our modern, sedentary lives.

Things Not To Do

Boredom is neither good nor bad—how we use it makes it good or bad. Beyond mindless screen time, the most common way boredom goes wrong is when it drives us to eat mindlessly. Boredom eating is a huge driver of unintended weight gain.

Why It Matters

Steve Jobs once said, “I’m a big believer in boredom. . . . All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.” Some of our finest thinkers all believe boredom was the secret sauce that kept them sane, led them into interesting new territory, and spurred their best ideas.

The following is an excerpt from Author Michael Easter’s 2% Newsletter:

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Happy December. This month we’re investigating how certain types of psychological discomfort can lead to breakthroughs.

Let’s start with Ellis Paul Torrance, an American psychologist. In the 1950s, Torrance noticed something off-target about American classrooms.

Teachers tended to prefer the subdued, book-smart kids. They didn’t much care for the kids who had tons of energy and big ideas – kids who’d think up odd interpretations of readings, inventive excuses for why they didn’t do their homework, and morph into mad scientists every lab day.

The system deemed these kids “bad.” But Torrance felt they were misunderstood. Because if a problem comes up in the real world, all the book-smart kids look for an answer in … a book.

But what if the answer isn’t in a book? Then a person needs to get creative.

The Torrance Test

This realization led Torrance to devote his life to studying creativity and what it’s good for. In 1958 he developed the “Torrance Test.” It’s since become the gold standard for gauging creativity.

He had a large group of children in the Minnesota public school system take the exam. It includes exercises like showing a kid a toy and asking her, “how would you improve this toy to make it more fun?”

The kids who came up with more and better ideas in the initial tests were the ones who became the most accomplished adults. They were successful inventors and architects, CEOs and college presidents, authors and diplomats, etc. Torrance testing, in fact, smokes IQ testing.

A recent study of Torrance’s kids found that creativity was a threefold better predictor of much of the students’ accomplishment compared to their IQ scores.

Yet new research suggests that creativity is dropping.

The Creativity Crisis

A scientist at the University of William and Mary recently analyzed 300,000 Torrance Test scores since the 1950s. She found that creativity scores began to nosedive in 1990. She concluded that we’re now facing a “creativity crisis.” And that’s bad news – particularly when we consider that creativity is a critical skill in today’s economy, where most of us work with our brains rather than brawn.

The scientist blames our hurried, over-scheduled lives and “ever-increasing amounts of (time) interacting with electronic entertainment devices.” The average American spends more than 12 hours engaged with digital media (that’s up one hour since I published The Comfort Crisis).

How to Get Creative

Before digital media, which started with the adoption of the radio in the 1910s, people spent much more time grappling with boredom. If we got bored, we had to dream up a solution for our boredom.

But our modern media complex has essentially put boredom on the ropes. Anytime we feel the discomfort of boredom, we now have an easy, effortless, hyperstimulating escape from it. We reflexively pull out our cell phone, watch TV, listen to a podcast, or surf the internet.

But there are good evolutionary reasons why boredom can go a long way toward boosting our creativity. As humans evolved, we’d become bored anytime we were doing something with a low return on our time invested. For example, think of picking berries from a bush. It’s engaging as you gather all the big, easy-to-reach berries. But once you've picked the easy-to-reach berries, it eventually becomes harder and harder to find berries, and you have to reach deeper and deeper in the bush. Boredom kicks on because you aren’t getting as many berries for your time invested.

So boredom is a psychological discomfort that arose that tells us to do something else. And in the past, the “something else” we’d dream up was often productive. Our berry picker might decide to move to another berry bush or hunt an animal.

The Boredom and Creativity Connection

When we become bored, our attention and focus goes inward and our mind wanders. We search for a solution for our boredom. And it turns out that this mind-wandering is a crucial driver of creativity. Ideation and creativity happen when we’re inside our own head, dreaming up big ideas rather than watching or listening to someone else’s ideas through a screen or speakers.

This is why other studies have found that bored people score significantly higher on creativity tests. It’s also why people often report having their best ideas in the shower—it’s a time of pure mind wandering.

Get Bored to Get Creative—and More

And so, despite what productivity gurus will have us believe, the key to improving creativity might be to embrace the discomfort of boredom. It allows us to think and process information distinctly, in a way that delivers more original ideas.

The way we dealt with boredom before we began surrounding ourselves in constant comfort delivered benefits that are essential for our brain health, productivity, personal sanity, and sense of meaning. But there’s been a cosmic shift in our experience of boredom.

Rediscovering boredom is critical to get things done, tap into creativity, process complicated information, and more.

An easy way to flow boredom back into your life is to take a 20-minute daily walk outside. But remember: leave your cell phone at home so you don’t unbore yourself.