Boredom & Restlessness — the practice hiding in the empty moment

The phones did it. With a distraction always in our pocket, we rarely have to sit through an unfilled moment, so the ability to tolerate one has quietly atrophied. Cort frames the device as an escape hatch we reach for the instant a gap opens.

Richie's point is sharper. Boredom isn't just empty time. It's the moment the mind has nothing to occupy it and turns back on itself.

00:00 – 00:33 · 02:31 – 03:00

Because when there's nothing to do, you're left alone with your own mind, and that is the one thing you can't put down. Richie notes that people will reach for drugs or anything else to dull it.

For many people the contents of an unoccupied mind are chaotic, and meeting that chaos directly is what we are actually avoiding when we grab the phone.

03:09 – 04:13

He was an outlier on the easily-bored end of the curve. He describes summer afternoons spent phoning around for anyone to hang out with, nothing worth watching on TV, and a feeling of literally crawling out of his skin.

A smartphone, he admits, is exactly the thing his younger self would have done anything to have.

01:21 – 02:16

He says he now feels close to immune to boredom. The same unfilled moments that once felt unbearable have become workable, even interesting.

The rest of the conversation is the how behind that shift.

02:16 – 02:31

It switches into what Richie calls the default mode, the network that comes online whenever you are not engaged in a task that demands your mental resources.

Its signature activity is self-referential thought: the running narrative about who you are and everything attached to it.

04:13 – 04:51

Because the narrative is often noisier and more chaotic than we realize, and an idle moment is when it gets loud.

We don't dislike empty time for its own sake. We dislike being delivered, unfiltered, to the voice in our head.

04:51 – 05:01 · 05:46 – 05:59

Richie's read: they are cognitively demanding leisure that serves no purpose other than to transiently block the default mode. They occupy the parts of the mind that would otherwise run the self-referential story.

People genuinely enjoy them, and part of that enjoyment is the quiet they buy from the background narrative.

05:59 – 06:52

It looks backwards, but the data from the Healthy Minds program shows it. Richie's interpretation is that the anxiety was already there.

A week of simply cultivating awareness lets people notice what their mind has been doing all along, and the first thing many of them see is how chaotic it is.

05:01 – 05:35

No. They are not generating new anxiety. They are perceiving it accurately for the first time. The higher score isn't more suffering, it's a more honest reading.

Seeing the mind clearly is the necessary first step, even when the first look is unflattering.

05:35 – 05:46

Not in his thoughts. Looking back, he was oblivious to the mental activity. What he remembers is physical: a charge of restless energy with nowhere to go, the whole body a ball of energy with no outlet.

For young people especially, Richie notes, boredom shows up first in the body.

06:52 – 07:50 · 11:49 – 12:15

Through the body's two-way line to the brain. Brain activity gets expressed through the autonomic nervous system and through skeletal muscle, and one reliable sign of anxiety is increased muscle tension.

You can record it directly with electromyography, the muscle equivalent of putting EEG sensors on the scalp.

09:26 – 10:44

Because nothing is competing for our attention. With no task pulling the mind, awareness drifts to wherever the signal is strongest, and there is often a lot of signal in the body.

The tension was likely there all along. Boredom just removes everything that was drowning it out.

10:44 – 11:06

He got on his bike. Growing up in Brooklyn, the bicycle was liberating. He would ride over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan before he was even allowed on the subway alone, parents unaware of where he was.

The somatic restlessness was real, but he had a physical channel for it, and it became a lifelong habit.

08:36 – 09:26

Richie finds it almost designed to fail. Expecting children to sit still for hours runs against their developmental stage and their need to move.

As Cort puts it, it is nearly a system built to manufacture restlessness. The body's charge needs somewhere to go.

11:06 – 11:49

He treats them as practice. Waiting in line for coffee, waiting on his wife, he feels the familiar urge to pull out the phone, notices the urge, and chooses to leave it in his pocket.

Instead he sits, feels the air, and rests in a couple of minutes of plain awareness. It happens several times a day, and landing it feels like a small win.

14:37 – 16:23

Remove the option before the urge arrives. Knowing the times he tends to reach for it, like first thing in the morning or last thing at night, he simply leaves the phone in another room.

When the pull comes, the phone isn't in his orbit, and he is not about to get up and hunt for it. The urge passes on its own.

16:23 – 18:01

Breathe. Cort's longest-running support is mindful breathing. A few deep breaths into the restless energy tend to settle the mind on their own.

It is the low-effort default before any of the subtler moves.

18:01 – 18:30

Cort maps it precisely. There is a buzzing energy and a movement impulse, the premotor cortex firing, the body mobilizing as if to move. But there is nowhere to go.

The discomfort is the mismatch: the impulse to move with no situation that calls for it.

18:30 – 19:48

Apparently yes. When Cort attends closely, the feeling of boredom is still there, but the mind has become interested in it. We tend to think the two are opposites, one being the absence of the other.

In direct experience they can sit together, the residue of boredom wrapped in fascination.

19:48 – 20:21

It tends to vanish. Richie and Cort both turn the same question on it: who is the one feeling this? The moment you look directly, the boredom that felt so solid often becomes ethereal and simply dissolves.

There one moment, gone the next, without any effort to fix it or get rid of it.

20:21 – 21:11 · 21:11 – 21:39

It does, and the hosts flag a full episode on it. Sleepiness, like boredom, is painful only while you are fighting it.

Met with curiosity, asking what it actually is and who is sleepy, it loses its grip and shifts on its own. Turning toward the thing you were avoiding is the whole maneuver.

21:39 – 22:18