Somewhere around week two of the summer holidays, boredom used to properly set in. Not the mild, five-minute kind. The real thing, the sort that made you stare at a wall and genuinely not know what to do with yourself, the kind that made your own mother eventually snap "well go and find something to do then" as if that was ever going to be the solution. And then, without fail, something would happen. A camp got built, using at least one item that was absolutely not meant to be outside. A game got invented with rules nobody could explain to an adult. A stick became a sword, then a gun, then a bow before becoming a boring stick again after twenty minutes, and somehow the whole afternoon disappeared.

Nobody scheduled that. It only happened because there was nothing else going on, your mates had all gone on their summer holiday to far flung places like Southwold or Swanage, and a child left alone with nothing eventually has to make something out of it, usually something a parent would have vetoed if they'd been consulted first. I never got to apologise to my parents about the sudden disappearance of aerosol cans from the shed.

I was lucky that home then was in the leafy county of Buckinghamshire, and if no one was around you still had access to fields, rivers and woodland. I was bored, yes, but there was enough stuff to look at or for that boredom was more just being by yourself, and eventually boredom led to some creative uses of dad's hammer, some very large nails and a packed lunch of whatever radioactive food my parents left for me.

I don't think that happens much anymore, and I don't think it's really the kids' fault. Every gap has something in it now. A screen in the car. A screen at the table. A screen the second the "I'm bored" sentence starts forming, handed over before the feeling's even had time to do anything, like a doctor prescribing antibiotics for a cold that would've cleared up on its own. We've gotten remarkably good at making sure nobody, child or adult, ever has to sit in that uncomfortable, empty stretch long enough to find out what's on the other side of it. I'd argue that when your phone loses its charge or you suffer from a Lost Signal (see how I seamlessly weave in this blog's name) that is when you're free to get a bit bored.

The stuff boredom is actually for

Here's the part that surprised me looking into this properly, because I went in expecting to find nothing more scientific than my nan's opinion on the matter: boredom isn't just tolerable, it's doing something. When your mind isn't fixed on a task, it doesn't switch off, it switches to something called the default mode network, a set of brain regions that lights up specifically when you're doing nothing in particular. It's the same system active during daydreaming, during a walk where you're not really thinking about the walk, during the shower thoughts that arrive from nowhere and immediately vanish the second you reach for a towel.

A well-known set of studies, led by psychologist Sandi Mann, found that people given a genuinely boring task first, copying numbers out of a phone book, of all things, an activity I'd argue counts as a human rights concern, went on to perform better on creative problem-solving tasks afterwards than people who hadn't been bored at all. The boredom wasn't incidental. It was doing the work.

That tracks with something anyone who's ever had a good idea in the shower already knows instinctively. The idea rarely shows up while you're trying to have it. I've spent 30 odd years being paid to have ideas. I can tell you that sitting at a desk forcing ideas out is as productive as it sounds. But give me a bit of space and a toilet visit and voila, ideas. They show up once you've stopped trying, once your mind's been let off the lead for five unstructured minutes, usually with no pen anywhere nearby to write it down and a beermat that your scoring with a tooth pick. Boredom is one of the most reliable ways of getting there, not because boredom itself is magic, but because it's what happens the moment you stop feeding your attention something external to chew on.

Which is exactly the moment a phone in your pocket exists to prevent. Genuinely impressive bit of design work, when you think about it, an entire industry built around making sure that boredom never quite arrives.

The bit worth being honest about

It would be a tidy ending to say screens are quietly rewiring children's brains and leave it there, and you'll find plenty of headlines happy to say exactly that, usually written by someone who filed the piece between two doomscrolling sessions of their own. The honest version is messier, and worth sitting with rather than skipping past.

Some real research does point that way. A 2025 study tracking almost 12,000 children over two years found that more daily screen time did predict a rise in ADHD-type symptoms later on, even accounting for how a child was doing at the start. Other reviews have found the same general pattern, more unstructured screen time, more trouble with attention and hyperactivity, sleep disruption showing up as one likely link between the two. I am the same. I'm showing ADHD symptoms in later life. Did I always have them or has having a smart phone created this?

But a large, carefully controlled US study found something different: once you account for a family's income, a parent's education, and issues a child already had, the ADHD link vanished almost entirely. The same data still showed a real connection to anxiety and low mood, just not to ADHD specifically. Studies trying to isolate genuine cause from simple coincidence have mostly found the link weak, sometimes not statistically solid once properly checked, which is science's polite way of saying "we genuinely don't know yet, please stop asking."

I'd rather leave you with the uncertainty intact than round it off into something tidier than it is, mostly because I'm not a neuroscientist, I sell clothing, and I'd like to keep this post roughly within my actual area of expertise (which is a lengthy read of various studies, Googling certain words, stepping away so my brain can process WTF it all means). What I'm more confident about, because the evidence for it is a good deal less contested, is the simpler point: whatever screens are or aren't doing to attention long-term, they are very effectively removing the boring, empty minutes that used to be unavoidable. And it's specifically those minutes, the ones with nothing in them, that seem to be doing something useful.

Letting it happen again

None of this is an argument for misery. Nobody's pretending boredom feels good in the moment, it doesn't, it's meant to be a bit uncomfortable, a nudge to go and do something about the gap rather than sit in it forever. I'm not asking you to stare at a wall for the sake of it. That's a not anyone's chosen lifestyle.

But it might be worth, deliberately, letting a stretch of a day stay properly empty. Not filled with a podcast, not smoothed over with a scroll. Just empty, the way a summer afternoon used to be empty, until something, usually something you didn't plan and definitely something a parent would've vetoed, turns up to fill it instead.

If you genuinely don't know what to do with an empty afternoon anymore, which is a slightly worrying sentence to have to write to grown adults, that's fine. Your own bored brain will sort it out eventually, given long enough without a phone in its way. It got you through six weeks of summer holiday once. It can probably manage a Tuesday afternoon.