You Need to be Bored

Shower thoughts are those interesting, out-of-the-box, and sometimes a little weird ideas that pop into your head when you’re (obviously) taking a shower.

Shower thoughts are credited as being the genesis of some pretty interesting ideas.

The point isn’t really that the shower is some magical portal to unique ideas, but rather that it’s a block of time in our day with no distractions.

Apart from the sound of the water, we have silence.

And that silence is essential.

You Need to be Bored

You used to come up with ideas on walks, but then you got the AirPods.

Sometimes cool ideas would come to you on the train, but now you look at Instagram.

Or even as you drove from one place to another, but now a podcast fills that gap.

We’ve filled every piece of silence with something. Be it music, a phone, social media, or whatever else you distract yourself with when nothing is going on. And in doing so, we've robbed ourselves of something valuable.

Because your brain doesn't go idle when you stop stimulating it, it gets to work.

Psychologists call it the default mode network: the mental state that switches on when you're not focused on anything in particular. It's where you make connections between unrelated things, process emotions, consolidate memories, and stumble onto ideas you couldn't have forced your way to.

Kinda like daydreaming.

The shower works because you can't scroll. The walk worked because all you had were your steps and the world around you.

So, the question isn't how to have more shower thoughts, it's why the shower is one of the only places left where you allow yourself to be bored.

Reclaiming that silence doesn't require anything dramatic. Leave the phone at home on a walk (or don’t take the headphones). Sit with your coffee before opening an app. Let the commute be quiet.

The ideas won't always come, but they definitely can't if you never give them the space to.