When I was a lad, the summer holidays seemed to last forever.

Six long weeks with nothing much to do…

And I got bored.

REALLY BORED.

I’d lie on my bed and stare up at the swirls in the Artex ceiling until they turned into faces or maps of forgotten continents….

I’d watch raindrops race down the windowpane…

I’d build dens at the bottom of the garden and invent secret missions and characters with complicated backstories.

None of this was particularly productive – not on the surface of it, anyway.

But some of the richest hours of my whole childhood were spent in exactly that state of glorious boredom.

And there’s evidence that this sort of boredom is actually vital for a child’s development.

It’s where the imagination gets its exercise.

Where a young mind learns to entertain itself, invent ideas and speculate about the future.

Many years later, when my own kids were young, they’d complain during the summer about being bored.

And I’d trot out the classic line: “Only boring people get bored.”

To the point where they accused ME of being boring for saying it.

The thing is, it genuinely is important to experience boredom, even as adults.

Yet a lot of us fear it…

The Terror of Nothingness

The moment there’s a lull in the proceedings of daily life, and we find ourselves momentarily unsure of what to do next, most of us panic.

Out comes the phone and we begin to scroll…

Or we drift to the fridge to look for snacks and drinks…

Or we switch on the TV.

Anything to plug that gap.

We instinctively treat boredom like something that needs quickly fixed.

But rather than fill the gap…

We should sit in the gap, let it unfold, and allow our minds to wander.

Because that’s when amazing things can happen.

You can suddenly get ideas, creative inspiration and solutions to problems that have been niggling you for weeks.

And even if you don’t…

You’ll find that when you return to a task, for instance in your job, hobby, or home business, you’ll do much better at it, having cleared your mind.

There’s some fascinating research on this.

A few years ago, Dr Sandi Mann and her colleague Rebekah Cadman, psychologists at the University of Central Lancashire, ran a cruel experiment.

They sat one group of people down and made them copy numbers out of a telephone directory for fifteen minutes.

Which is about as dull a task as you could imagine!

Then they handed everyone a creativity test.

Each person had to come up with as many different uses as you could for a couple of plastic cups.

The bored who’d suffered through the phone book task came up with noticeably more, and more inventive, ideas than everyone else.

It seems that when your brain has nothing to focus on, it starts to roam, making new connections and seeking fresh inspiration from the archives of your mind.

It’s a bit like the way farmers allow a field to go fallow.

This period of rest, without interference, lets the soil recover, so it can grow better crops the following year.

Your mind also needs the occasional fallow afternoon.

But we don’t usually allow ourselves this.

We instead seek out podcasts, watch videos, scroll through headlines or head to the kitchen to look for snacks.

Boredom’s Bad Reputation

Of course, long-term boredom isn’t good either.

We can start to drift into laziness and bad habits if it stretches for days… then weeks…

That’s when we start to comfort-eat… spend 12 hours glued to a video game… and binge watch every series of Mad Men or Game of Thrones.

At its worst, relentless, unrelieved boredom can leave people feeling flat, low and unmotivated.

But what I am talking about is allowing yourself short periods of boredom to refresh your brain.

For example, there’s a marketing expert called Mark Schaefer whose newsletter I rate very highly.

He had an epiphany about boredom one year when he took the summer off from most of his work and public speaking commitments.

The aim was to recover from a few health issues and slow down his life a bit.

But very quickly he started to feel psychologically terrible.

“Am I wasting my life?” he wondered.

But soon he realised that his feeling of guilt was because he had forgotten how to be bored.

“It was literally a shock to my system,” he writes. “My default mode is perpetual motion: write a book, launch a project, book a flight, repeat. Slowing down felt like driving a Ferrari in first gear. “

Then something surprising happened…

“The moment I dipped into boredom,” he says, “I launched into a creative frenzy. All these new ideas just came flowing out. And I wrote a book. Not kidding. Three weeks.”

A book in three weeks!

That’s some result from being bored, isn’t it?

Is this Where Your Breakthrough Idea Is Hiding?

If you want to make money from home, you need ideas and inspiration.

There’s no getting around it.

Even if you follow a course or blueprint, you still need to find a niche, or come up with a product name or create advertising.

So ideas are your most valuable asset, and they don’t come from cramming more information into your head.

They come from giving your head some space.

I speak from experience here.

Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had for this very newsletter didn’t arrive at my desk while staring at a blank screen.

They turned up on a dog walk…. in the bath… standing at the sink with my hands in the washing-up…

More often than not, that’s when your brain will decide to activate itself.

So give yourself permission to be bored!

Go for a walk with no earphones in your ears.

Sit outside in the sun without a book or phone.

Do the household chores with the radio off.

It’ll feel strange at first but that’s normal.

But stick with it, and you’ll be surprised at what floats up.