The Importance of Being Bored:

“Being bored is more important than we realise.”

When we are in constant rush hour, working hard and taking on projects every day, partying overnight, and travelling all around the world…

Getting bored allows us to pause in this constant race. As a metaphoric quote: when we get bored, it permits us “To see ourselves in a mirror”, a moment that is very important, and perhaps even essential, as some writings suggest. It gives us the chance to know more about ourselves and who we truly are..

When we never allow ourselves to get bored, the risk is that a gap can form between our inner and outer picture of ourselves.

To explain it differently, it’s like having our “ego” grow a lot without realising it. Our own picture of ourselves will be good, beautiful, powerful; But suddenly, in our context, in our world, we might realise that externally we are not as successful as we think.

When we realise the gap between these two pictures of ourselves, it can be like receiving a bucket of cold water.

It’s a moment when we can feel completely alone…

Quite lost, with difficulty loving ourselves, and then also loving other people. Feeling alone means being “Completely alone”. To give an example, it can be like being in dark space for a long period of time (Even when we have friends or family around us). The movie Passengers shows a scene where the main character goes outside a spaceship to see the stars. The movie The Fountain shows a character doing meditation/mindfulness in a parallel world. By seeing these two different scenes and movies, it helps us keep these moments in mind in case we experience depression one day.

It’s a moment when we have to find help from our doctors and family; It is very important. Because it can be very difficult to come back from this dark space, parallel world/reality alone. In the past, there was a name for depressive disorder: it was called manic depressive, meaning depression occurring again and again, with difficulty getting out of it.

Something we say, and it’s quite true, is:

“Remember, there are always people who love you nearby.”

This seems like a simple idea, but when we are in this empty dark space, as previously explained, it’s a moment in our life when we can forget it completely.

We generally think no one is loving us, as if no one were interested in us. But this is not real; It’s not possible. When we look at it multiple times, we realise it’s not reality. There are always people who love us. It’s difficult psychologically because our mind is going up and down constantly.

This impression is created because everyone is having their own busy life and problems. But it is exactly the same for us; If you think about it, when you are feeling fine and busy with your life, you are also busy with everything, and it doesn’t mean you don’t love people.

When we pass this depression period, we realise things are coming back to normal. As in the past, our relationships with family and friends globally return to normal.

When we are depressed, it’s never a problem of love between you and your friends or family; It’s mainly a communication issue. Difficulty expressing ourselves and understanding others, all disturbances caused by our mindset.

The mindset increases the difficulty of taking care of ourselves, increasing over-sensitivity. And this hypersensitivity makes things blur around us. We are not able to focus any-more, be aware, understand things, or be clear in what we do. We generally get sad after each discussion with anyone, taking things too seriously; Mainly because of this hypersensitivity, which overloads us.

Sometimes psychiatrists explain “depression” as being like having our “home” completely destroyed by an earthquake. We are not able to control anything when it occurs, and our home is completely destroyed afterwards. We have to go step by step to reconstruct it slowly; Just like our health.

Depression can also give the impression of missing something… being constantly fed up For example, we might want to change our mind by going on holiday, having a new breath, having fun, seeing friends, partying, thinking we can focus on something other than our problem.

The problem is: friends or family members can be helpful “if” they are already aware of how to react to this current mental mindset; If they have some training or knowledge regarding psychiatry and depressive disorder.

Basically, only doctors or healthcare staff are really able to help or guide us in this type of condition. Even family members sometimes can have great difficulty helping. It’s generally better to have someone external to the family or friend circle, such as doctors, psychiatrists, or psychologists, to react in this kind of situation.

Mindfulness teachers sometimes explain this “mindset” by imagining a glass full of water with “dust” on the bottom of it. If we shake the glass, the water will suddenly get completely cloudy and unclear because of the dust moving in the water.

When we are in depression, our mind can be compared to this glass of water getting completely troubled; Our mind becoming foggy, without being able to focus on anything.

People can ask anything of depressed people, but they will have great difficulty saying or doing anything. It’s not their fault.

When we are depressed, there are not many things we can do except take care of ourselves.

When someone has a health issue, depending on how long it has been occurring, we should realise it can take a long time to fully recover.

Sometimes it takes six months at least, and even sometimes years, to be able to recover completely from this issue, because you do not control anything; Your body needs to come back from this.

Since the COVID pandemic, the symptoms of COVID have made things even more difficult with long COVID symptoms. Our health is even more fragile today.

It’s a very difficult moment because we want to get better straight away, and we are generally impatient. When we are depressed, we have greater difficulty being patient, but the more we get active without taking care of ourselves, the more we shake the glass, and the more the glass gets unclear.

It can be a vicious cycle; That’s why we need doctors’ help to come back from this “Dark space”. It can be very difficult otherwise. We generally become over-sensitive to everything, “Over-judgemental” towards ourselves, in a constant cycle of “personal condemnation”, not loving ourselves, increasing difficulty with others.

In this moment, we get an over-thinking mind; Even more during the night. A good step is to have paper and pen on the side of the bed to try to remember what we were thinking during the night. (By the way, it is now possible to find digital tablets giving the ability to write ideas as if it were on a blackboard or notebook.)

Another good advice is: during the night (Whether depressed or not) we generally have dreams or sometimes nightmares. It is very good to try to keep a record of our dreams on paper. It is helpful to ourselves and psychiatrists to understand the meaning behind these dreams, because our dreams are our subconscious talking to us.

Something to remember also is: when we are having a problem with our “Ego” getting too high, “constantly ruminating” in a turning loop, we can realise our mind generally gets stuck in two categories of ideas, defined as: “Always me” or “Never me”.

Our ego is catching everything and turning it constantly for us or against us. We cannot feel well in this condition. Thinking constantly “Always me” or “Never me”; It is helpful to realise this and take distance from this turning loop and our mindset. For our body and physical health, we can also follow (Link), (Link).

There is a nice movie related to the process of constructing ourselves when we are children; It’s the movie To Be and to Have. (This movie is not directly related to the topic of depression but helps to understand how we construct ourselves during childhood.)

When we grow up, our relationship with others helps to construct ourselves. We sometimes say, “We construct ourselves through others”, but on the contrary: staying alone also helps us to know more about ourselves (Our own self).

I once heard on the radio France Inter a French political journalist and editor named Guy Birenbaum explaining his depression. He described himself as doing a lot of sports, being aware of mindfulness, and aware of the problem of depression existing everywhere. He explained being shocked by the far-right rise in Europe in recent years, and said, in his own words, that he was literally “Smashed” into a deep burnout, never thinking he would have depression like this.

I’m talking about Guy’s depression because when I heard his story, I realised depression can occur to anyone. Even if we are well educated and very knowledgeable, we can still have depression. No one is completely protected from it. We think people are fine around us, but it’s generally because we are not often seeing people suffering.

Christophe André is a psychiatrist and doctor at Saint-Anne Hospital in Paris who uses mindfulness to help people heal. In his book, he writes:

“Remember that most people around you have already been through hell more than once.“

Many reasons make us think we have to show that we are well and fine. By the way, have you noticed that when someone asks if you are feeling fine, we generally say “Yes” even if it’s not the case? We sometimes have difficulty saying we are not fine; Maybe because we don’t want to show our problems to others. We feel busy and want to be successful, and it makes us afraid to show our fragility or weakness. Men are known to have more tendency to hide their feelings from others.

It is very rare to be constantly happy and say everything is fine. Everyone has to be careful and take care of themselves. We have to keep reminding ourselves that depression can happen to anyone. Sometimes it’s even the opposite; People who appear constantly happy are the ones more at risk of depression.

That’s exactly why we must go back slowly to ourselves, to our roots, to continue to rebuild and take care of ourselves.

Getting bored is not that easy because we have to decide/choose to reduce our own speed and activities in life. Sometimes this is very difficult because we don’t want to or simply cannot reduce our activities.

Also, we might be afraid of reducing activities, commitments, or doing nothing, because our society is indirectly built on success. Doing nothing can sound socially “weak” and make us think we are not attractive anymore. We also sometimes have difficulty understanding what is occurring in our life. We need help and self-confidence, slowly building with care and rest.

Something helpful after having depression is eventually to start therapy. As we mention in the (Link), doctors can help a lot because they are part of the healthcare staff and are not related to our circle of friends and family.

Someone outside our friends and family is more helpful because, without any past emotional attachment, this person is better able to give advice in this situation.

(It is important to be aware of this. We always recommend choosing a psychiatrist outside our close relationships or family circle. A family member can help you find a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist should never have already seen or helped a family member, to avoid any misguidance. It should be someone external.)

Getting bored is a moment when we have to decide to stay alone doing nothing. When we are depressed, we are generally afraid to say no to invitations, sometimes also called “social pressure”.

Relationships and friendliness are very important for human beings. We sometimes say humans need socialising; It’s something written in our genes; we are not able to live without it. If we remove socialising from someone, the person can become completely crazy.

On the contrary, the famous writer Jean-Paul Sartre is known for having said “Hell is other people”, meaning also that socialising can destroy us. It is an “in-between”.

We also sometimes hear, “Your freedom ends where mine begins.” It was the French writer Camus who translated it like this. We can compare relationships to a sort of “Dance”, trying to find a way between liberty, politeness, respect between people, and ourselves.

Juliette Gréco said in Abd Al Malik’s song (Roméo et Juliette): “Notre besoin d’amour complique”; “Our need for love makes things complicated.”

Staying alone helps us to step down from our own personal “Empire”. (Youn Sun Nah mentions “Empire of Dirt” in the song Hurt, originally written by Johnny Cash.) We think about what we want, who we think we are, and also reflect on our past and history. It’s a kind of reflection on everything that has happened in our life.

But staying alone can also make our ego grow; And that’s the tricky part. When we are alone, we sometimes overthink and over-ruminate. That’s what makes our ego grow indirectly. The more we think, the more our ego is at risk of growing quickly. This probably means that the more we stay relaxed, the less our ego grows. Being relaxed probably doesn’t lower the ego, but at least it helps avoid making it too big.

Christophe André mentions that being thankful to everyone helps reduce our own ego. Humans need ego to live; We cannot live without it; But when our personal ego gets too big, that’s the moment it creates problems for us and others.

We just have to be aware of it and try to care for ourselves. Regarding lowering our ego, it’s generally difficult to do something straight away. Doctors are always helpful in supporting us to work towards this objective.

Christophe André proposes “Meditation” in French (mindfulness in English) as a way to help cure depression. He has written many books on this topic, and with two other friends, he decided to write a very important book in this direction.

“Matthieu Ricard, Christophe Andre, Alexandre Jolien.”
“In Search of Wisdom: A Monk, a Philosopher, and a Psychiatrist on What Matters Most“

It’s always the complexity regarding “Friendship” and “Loneliness”. Both can bring very good and very bad things.

It’s an equilibrium between helping our personal ego, finding ourselves, and socialising with others.
We have to find ourselves to know more about who we are and what we want, and at the same time keep socialising and being thankful to everyone.

An equilibrium that is even more complex to maintain if we are not living a healthy lifestyle or not having time for ourselves. Sometimes we have to go back to our own “Inner centre” to find ourselves again.

Youn Sun Nah – Hurt :

A very good book, also related to mindfulness and aimed at helping our personal health, is from one of Google’s earliest engineers and personal growth pioneers: Chade-Meng Tan — Search Inside Yourself.

“Chade-Meng Tan”
“Search Inside Yourself”