Life should never be boring! There is a lasting cure for boredom, which is, after all, an awful state of mind. You suddenly lack interest in your surroundings and just cannot concentrate on anything. Boredom usually happens in three typical situations. First, you are prevented from doing something you want to do. Second, you are compelled to do a particular job. And third, you just cannot find anything interesting to do. Your mind recognizes the situation and triggers the boredom emotion. Emotions program your behavior. In the primeval world, emotion signals mechanically modified the behavior of animals to enable their survival.
Boredom is an animal instinct, designed to focus the activities of an animal away from trivialities to immediate survival tasks. That instinct has lost its relevance in a modern world, where every task requires patience.
Boredom affects your health and wellbeing.
Buddhist monks sit quietly for hours, while most people find even a few minutes without activity unbearable.
Even the most important jobs in the world require patience and the completion of repetitive and tedious tasks.
When you switch TV channels with nothing to do, remember that your disquiet comes from an emotion, which manipulates you.
Nature has programmed emotions to manipulate your behavior. Your physical wellbeing, your memories and the contexts of your thoughts are controlled by the emotion.
Each emotion takes over your mind without your conscious awareness.
RI, the real you, is free from boredom. Self awareness empowers RI. Awareness of the symptoms of boredom will kill the boredom emotion.
Permanent freedom from boredom has immense benefits.
Whir.... Click Anger makes an animal fight and fear causes it to flee. Boredom makes it abandon unprofitable efforts andsearch for more urgent survival tasks. Emotions generated programmed responses for a primitive world. But now, events move at a slower pace. The immediate demands of life are not so compellingly urgent. Today, being calm and composed is useful and patience is a necessary virtue. But sadly, primitive animal emotions still work their ancient logic. They impose harmful behavioral patterns.
Boredom dumps you into an awful level of consciousness. It creates anxiety about not doing anything. Boredom poses greater risks of developing depression, and drug or alcohol addiction. Bored people display anger, aggressive behavior and exhibit weak interpersonal skills. They do poorly at work and at school. The permanent cure for boredom begins from an awareness that you can be comfortable with longer periods of stillness. Know that boredom is a manipulative action by the primitive part of your mind and self awareness can be used to just switch it off!
Waiting in A Queue You have joined one of those long tiresome queues. Usually, people bring along something to read, play Nintendo, or watch others, to avoid boredom. But, you don't need such crutches. It is possible to avoid feeling bored altogether. Imagine Buddhist monks, who sit quietly for hours while they meditate. The have found a cure for boredom. In the stillness of your RI mind, there is actually no space for boredom!
A Tiresome Task Mental fatigue can be caused by the repetitive tasks. Boredom in such a situation is understandable. But, to feel that a task is too hard, or too easy is only an excuse. In the real world, there is no task, which is not substantially repetitive and tiresome. An accountant for a multinational corporation repeats many procedures over the years. A software architect pores over an infinity of details. Even the President of a country sits for hours, listening to monotonous speeches and reports. In every field, there are people, who cope successfully with such situations. If you feel weary about such situations, remember, there is a cure for boredom.
Nothing To Do There are times, when a news item, or a movie scene grabs your attention and keeps you absorbed. But, have you not kept switching channels on TV, to find nothing interesting? Even the replay of a favorite movie feels boring and uninteresting. It is important to realize that you are being manipulated by your nervous system. The restlessness and lack of interest are the effects of programmed emotional signals. Once you have learned the simple cure for boredom, your mind will find so many interesting things to attend to.
It is Not The Situation, But The Emotion There are people who enjoy even the most repetitive assembly line work and others, who maintain a steadily depressed attitude to life and complain bitterly of monotony even on the most varied work. It is the attitude and not the work, which makes the difference. The first cure for boredom is the realization that it is not the situation, but an emotion, which is acting up within you.
The Power Of Emotions An emotion envelops you in its level of consciousness. Your nervous system has succeeded over millions of years by routinely focusing all available resources on a single objective. All the knowledge available is dedicated to achieving that goal. To enable this, your intuition inhibits all “unsuitable data.”
If you are angry, the system excludes all pleasant thoughts about your opponent, so that you can mercilessly crush her. If you are fearful, you fail to remember all the times you succeeded. Fear compels you to escape, without being tempted to stay back and fight. So, also, when you are bored, the system inhibits pleasant memories and colors the situation bleak. The system is manipulating you.
A Cure For Boredom - A Sudden Change Of Viewpoint In its intuitive decision making process, your mind switches its viewpoints within milliseconds. Such decisions operate within your nervous system, outside your control. As Paul Eckman said, "We become aware a quarter, or half second after the emotion begins. I do not choose to have an emotion, to become afraid, or to become angry. I am suddenly angry. I can usually figure out later what someone did that caused the emotion." In most of the things you do in life, it may only take a moment for you to become bored. Self awareness is the key to stilling boredom, when it overtakes you.
A Cure For Boredom - The Power Of RI Your mind contains RI, a rational prefrontal intelligence, which views any situation with equanimity. It evaluates the world without emotions. Imagine a computer printout of your boring situation. You are waiting in queue, doing a repetitive task, or trying to find something to do. It is just another thing you do in life. It can be viewed as a situation in life, not a tiresome situation. A neutral view is the view of RI. The self awareness practiced in mindfulness meditation can activate RI and your viewpoint will instantly change. You will immediately feel that it is perfectly OK to be doing nothing.
Take Over The Decision Making Process You are in a darkened lecture hall. You cannot focus on the slides and the drone of voices. You suddenly become bored - impatient and restless. The words appears meaningless and negative emotions dominate you. Escape from the emotion is the most powerful cure for boredom.
Peace of mind and joy in your work are not available off the shelf. After all, you are merely a troubled spectator, watching the habitual thought patterns of your neural processor. Its inherited circuits apply animal instincts and accrued experience to cope with your life. Mere words cannot convey to it the contentment of a tranquil mind, or the joy of exciting work. The machine has to visualize and desire those goals. Your mind alone can provide the cure for boredom.
Take Effective Control Of Your Mind The Mind Control Tips in this website suggest ways of accepting life as it comes and stilling negative emotions. A few mechanical routines can enable the complex machine to grasp its goals and accept its limitations. Those steps can tune out the noisome turmoil. RI will become aware of the physical symptom of engulfing boredom and the emotion itself will get disconnected. It will vanish. When equilibrium comes, RI, your common sense, will take control. You will reach a stage, where a quiet peace surrounds you. That is the lasting cure for boredom.
Mindfulness courses have improved the performance of novice meditators on tasks of sustained attention and working memory. They were less depressed than those who did not receive such training. The pattern sensing logic of the mind works to still boredom and change attitudes. It does take a little practice to become so self aware. But, imagine the benefits of being free of boredom for the rest of your life!
The Benefits of Being Free of Boredom Philosophers have written that the very existence of boredom is an indication that nature has not served its purpose of making life worth living. But, they did not realize that boredom is an emotion designed by nature to keep animals focused on profitable efforts. But, with your RI level of consciousness, you have no need to be so manipulated by your nervous system.
When boredom has been overcome, RI will also find many ways to keep your mind occupied. Reduced reported levels of boredom were considered reliable indicators of whether treated drug addicts would stay clean. Long distance drivers, who reported little boredom, played mental games, such as counting of passing objects. They were also safer drivers. Just self awareness can set you free. A freed RI can develop new skills and hobbies. Freed from boredom, your own patterns sensing mechanisms will find joy in the beauty of the world around you.
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The Power Of Emotions
