Short answer: Possibly, under specific conditions, but the evidence is more mixed than the popular version of this idea suggests. Some well-designed studies have found that boring tasks boost performance on creative thinking tests afterward, likely by encouraging the mind to wander. Other attempts to replicate this haven’t found the same effect, so it’s fair to call boredom a plausible, not proven, creativity booster.
The Case For Boredom Sparking Creativity
The most frequently cited study behind this idea comes from psychologists Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire. In two experiments, participants who first completed a genuinely tedious activity, such as copying numbers out of a phone directory, performed better on a subsequent creative thinking task than participants who skipped the boring activity, published in Creativity Research Journal. Interestingly, the researchers also found that passive boredom, such as reading something dull, produced a stronger creativity boost in some conditions than active boredom, like writing something dull, suggesting that the amount of idle mental space matters. The proposed mechanism is mind-wandering. When external stimulation is low, attention turns inward, and the brain starts generating its own content: memories, associations, half-formed ideas. Neuroscience research examining this “default mode network,” the set of brain regions that activate when we’re not focused on an external task, has found it becomes more active during mind-wandering and is also associated with divergent thinking, the type of open-ended, generate-many-ideas thinking that underlies creative problem-solving.
Why the Evidence Isn’t Settled
Where this story gets more complicated is in the replication attempts. A later study specifically designed to reproduce the original Mann and Cadman finding, using a larger sample, did not find the same boost in trait-level creativity from boredom, though it did find that people prone to boredom also tended to score higher on curiosity, a trait linked to creative exploration in other research. A 2024 scoping review that pulled together the available experimental and correlational research on boredom and creativity concluded that the findings run in both directions, and that a clear causal effect of boredom on creativity isn’t currently supported by the available evidence as a whole.
Some researchers who study boredom specifically have pushed back even further. National Geographic reported that a 2016 study found boredom likely does not generate creativity, and that practice does instead, with boredom sometimes impairing fluency on creative tasks rather than helping it. The philosopher interviewed for that piece, who studies boredom’s psychological function, argues that boredom’s real value may lie elsewhere: as a signal pushing people to seek out more meaningful activity, rather than as a direct creativity mechanism.
How to Read the Mixed Results
A reasonable synthesis is that boredom doesn’t reliably manufacture creativity on its own, but the conditions boredom creates, namely unstructured time and freedom from external stimulation, do seem to matter for certain kinds of creative thinking, particularly divergent, idea-generating tasks rather than tasks requiring sustained focus or refinement. The type of “boredom” also matters a great deal: a brief, mildly tedious task in a lab is a very different experience from chronic, distressing boredom, and the research doesn’t clearly support extrapolating findings from one to the other.
Ways to Put This to Practical Use
- Build in unstructured, low-stimulation time. A walk without headphones or a chore done without a podcast gives the mind room to wander, even if the creativity payoff isn’t guaranteed.
- Don’t force creative output during the boredom itself. The research points to a boost afterward, in a separate task, not necessarily during the dull activity.
- Use boredom as a signal, not just a nuisance. Some researchers argue restlessness is worth noticing as a cue to seek out more meaningful engagement, rather than something to eliminate reflexively.
- Don’t count on it for high-stakes creative work. Given the mixed replication record, deliberate techniques like brainstorming or incubation breaks have more consistent support than boredom alone.
It’s a genuinely appealing idea that staring at the ceiling might be doing your brain some good, and there’s real science behind it. Just hold it loosely, since researchers themselves are still working out how far the effect actually reaches.
