Hi, this is Ray.

Let me confess something that, in 2026, feels almost countercultural. I have, on multiple occasions in the past year, just… sat on my couch. Doing nothing. No phone. No podcast. No audiobook. Not "mindfully meditating" or any other productivity-bro repackaging of doing nothing. Just actually nothing. Staring at a wall. Thinking about whether pancakes are technically a type of cake. Wondering why my cat stares at the corner of the room like she's seeing dimensions I can't access.

I used to consider this behavior a personal failing. A kind of spiritual dead weight. "I should be learning something! I should be listening to a podcast about the Roman Empire! I should at least be answering emails!" My brain had absorbed, through years of content marketing and hustle-culture propaganda, the idea that every waking moment needed to be optimized, stimulated, or producing output.

Turns out… and this is going to sound absurd, but stick with me… doing nothing is one of the most underrated learning strategies available to human beings. Boredom, the thing we've been culturally trained to swat away with our phones the moment it appears, is actually a neurological gold mine. Your brain does some of its most important learning work during the exact moments you feel the most useless.

Today I want to make the case that you should protect your boredom like you protect your sleep. Because the neuroscience is genuinely wild, and the more I've learned about it, the more I've realized how much "being productive" was actually making me worse at learning.

First, let's clear up what boredom actually is, neurologically. When you're actively focused on a task (reading, calculating, writing, listening to someone explain something) a system called the task-positive network is running. It's the "doing stuff" mode. Attention is locked on something external.

But when you stop actively focusing, when nothing demands your attention, something else kicks on: the default mode network (DMN). This is a constellation of brain regions that lights up specifically when you're NOT concentrating on anything in particular. For a long time, neuroscientists thought the DMN was just the brain's idle screensaver. Turns out it's more like the brain's secret second shift. According to recent neuroscience research, the default mode network becomes active during boredom and supports mind-wandering, reflection, and internal thought, and it functions as a state that supports both reflection and change rather than being mere idleness.

Here's the part that blew my mind. The DMN is where your brain does a huge amount of its integration work. It's where memories get connected to other memories. Where ideas from yesterday get welded to ideas from last week. Where your subconscious quietly works on the problem you've been stuck on. It's less a screensaver and more a backstage crew that only comes out when the main show takes a break. And if you never give it a break, the backstage crew never gets to do their job.

As one breakdown of this research put it, the DMN is essentially the brain's creative compost bin, turning over ideas beneath the surface, often without our conscious effort… which is why some of our best ideas come in the shower, on a walk, or while lying in bed. The shower epiphany isn't mystical. It's just the only time in your day when your brain finally gets to run its background processes. And you probably sabotage it every other hour with your phone.

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So do Codie Sanchez, Scott Galloway, Colin & Samir, Shaan Puri, and Jay Shetty. And none of them are doing it for fun. They're doing it because a list you own compounds in ways that social media never will.

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Okay, but does this actually translate to measurable performance improvements? Turns out yes, and the experiments are hilariously simple.

The most-cited study in this area is a 2014 paper by Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire. They basically weaponized tedium for science. According to ScienceDaily's coverage, Mann and Cadman had 40 participants copy numbers out of a telephone directory for 15 minutes before asking them to come up with creative uses for a pair of polystyrene cups, and the bored group significantly outperformed a control group of 40 people who went straight into the creative task without the boring warm-up. People who had just suffered through 15 minutes of the most mind-numbing task imaginable subsequently got MORE creative than people who hadn't. Let that sink in. Fifteen minutes of phonebook-copying made you smarter at generating ideas.

It gets better. A follow-up experiment tested an even MORE passive form of boredom: just READING the phone numbers instead of copying them. Less doing, more nothing. And that group performed best of all. The researchers concluded, charmingly, that more passive boring activities, like reading or perhaps attending meetings, can lead to more creativity… whereas writing, by reducing the scope for daydreaming, actually reduces the creativity-enhancing effects of boredom. The more your brain is free to drift, the more creative it gets afterward. Every person who's ever had a life-changing idea during a boring meeting has been silently proving this for decades. You are not "zoning out." You are, in fact, cognitively thriving.

This isn't just a quirky one-off study either. The connection between the default mode network and creative output has been shown at the brain-imaging level. A functional connectivity analysis found that high-creative individuals showed greater connectivity between the left inferior frontal gyrus and the entire default mode network compared to low-creative individuals, suggesting that the ability to generate creative ideas corresponds to differences in the intrinsic organization of DMN-related networks. In other words: the people who are better at creative thinking have stronger connections in the exact brain network that comes online when you're bored. Your capacity to be productively bored might literally be a cognitive muscle.

Okay, so boredom helps creativity. Cool. But I told you this newsletter was about learning. Here's the connection.

Learning isn't just acquiring information. It's integrating information. It's taking the thing you read on Monday and connecting it to the thing you read on Thursday. It's noticing that the concept from chapter 3 of your statistics book actually explains something you saw in your psychology class. It's the moment when a student says "ohhhhh THAT'S what they meant!"… and that moment almost never happens while you're actively studying. It happens later. In the shower. On a walk. While you're staring out a train window.

That integration work is DMN work. It's background processing. And if you've filled every spare moment of your day with podcasts, YouTube, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and "quick check-ins" on your phone, you have never once in your waking life given your brain the empty space it needs to do that integration. You've starved the exact cognitive system that turns "stuff I studied" into "stuff I actually understand."

I'm not being dramatic. Research on the DMN has shown that in small doses, boredom is the necessary counterbalance to the overstimulated world in which we live, offering unique benefits for our nervous system and mental health, including improvements in creativity, development of independent thinking, and breaking the loop of instant gratification. The phrase "necessary counterbalance" is doing a lot of work there. It's not "boredom is sometimes kind of okay." It's "you literally need this, and you are probably not getting enough of it."

Here's the dark side of all this. The average person checks their phone dozens of times a day, often within 90 seconds of any lull appearing. Standing in line? Phone. Waiting for coffee? Phone. Commercial break? Phone. Toilet? Phone. (We all do it. No judgment. This is a judgment-free zone. Mostly.)

Every one of those phone-checks is a little dagger to your default mode network. You never get to the "creative compost bin" state because you keep yanking your attention back to external stimulation every few seconds. It's like trying to let bread rise while you keep poking the dough to see if it's risen yet. You're interrupting the exact process you want to happen.

Children, by the way, are showing the effects of this at scale. Research on boredom and development points out that brain imaging studies show the default mode network is especially important for brain development in children, and people often come up with more original ideas after performing boring or repetitive tasks… when we don't have much external stimulation, the brain starts to generate its own ideas, forming new connections between memories, experiences and thoughts that don't normally interact when we're busy. A generation raised on endless stimulation is a generation that may never develop comfortable fluency with their own internal thoughts. That's a bigger problem than any individual newsletter can solve, but it starts with you. And me. Right now.

I've had to relearn how to be bored. That sentence would have made my 10-year-old self laugh. "Relearn boredom? Just… don't do anything?" Yes, small Ray. Turns out in 2026 this requires active practice. Here's what works for me:

The Boredom Walk. Take a 15-30 minute walk. No podcast. No audiobook. No phone in your hand. You can leave the phone at home or at least zip it into a pocket where pulling it out feels like a whole operation. Just walk. Let your mind wander. If you're anything like me, the first five minutes will feel AWFUL. Your brain will scream for stimulation like a toddler denied Goldfish crackers. Push through. Around minute 8, something shifts. Around minute 15, you'll start having ideas. Real ones. Connections to things you've been learning. This is not a coincidence. This is the DMN finally getting to do its job.

The Shower Rule. No waterproof speaker. No phone propped up on the sink. Just you, soap, and thoughts. Some of the best problem-solving I've ever done has been while trying to remember whether I already shampooed.

The "Stare at the Ceiling" Protocol. Give yourself 10 minutes a day to do literally nothing. Lie on the couch. Stare at a wall, a window, a tree, a ceiling fan. Don't plan your day. Don't "use this time productively." The point is the uselessness. The point is to practice tolerating the absence of stimulation until your brain remembers how to generate its own. This feels completely insane at first. It stops feeling insane. Then it starts feeling essential.

Boring Activities Count. Folding laundry. Washing dishes. Weeding the garden. Anything with low cognitive demand where your hands are busy but your brain is free. These are some of the best DMN-activators available, and they come with the bonus of making your home slightly less chaotic. Bilbo-coded behavior. Highly recommended.

We've spent so many newsletters talking about how to learn: how to rest before, how to space your reviews, how to recall actively, how to set up your environment. But there's one ingredient that makes all of those other strategies actually work, and it's the ingredient we're most culturally allergic to. Empty time. Unstructured space. The boredom that lets your brain do the quiet, unseen work of integration.

If you're studying hard and feeling like nothing is clicking, I'd gently suggest you try the opposite of what your instincts say. Instead of studying MORE, try studying less… and protecting some empty space in your week for your default mode network to actually do its job. Your best insights will not come while you're grinding. They'll come while you're folding laundry and half-thinking about dinner.

The shower isn't magic. The walk isn't magic. Your bored brain is the magic. You just have to let it happen.

Keep learning (and occasionally, blessedly, doing absolutely nothing),

Ray