The Bored Ultimatum

Posted by Ron Ball

Aug 06, 07

I saw the film, The Borne Ultimatum, yesterday. It was pure entertainment. Director Paul Greengrass put together a movie that was suspenseful, action-packed and clever, keeping the audience engaged for 111 minutes with excellent acting, hand-held camera shots and tight-editing. Visually, it zipped along with action sequences peppered with quick-cut screen images and dramatic music. Your senses were bombarded so you certainly couldn’t be bored stiff, bored silly or bored to tears. And that’s the topic of this post. Do we need to continually be stimulated to keep from being bored? Can we be comfortable with stillness? Either we find ways to release boredom, using methods like EFT, or we succumb to requiring ever increasing ways to keep ourselves stimulated, losing touch with what’s happening in the moment, the now.

“The brain is always adjusting to new stimuli,” says Augustin de la Peña, a psychophysiologist who has studied boredom for 30 years. “Once the brain has seen something new a few times,it no longer finds it interesting. The brain’s ante for stimulation is always being upped, just as a drug addict needs larger and larger doses to get high.”

If this is true, it would be valuable to have a tool for exploring boredom instead of needing to be stimulated to avoid it. EFT Master Practitioner, Dr. Patricia Carrington, Ph.D, developer of the popular “Choices Method” has just written an article, EFT for Boredom and Loneliness. Don’t miss it. It’s excellent and offers some very creative ways to use EFT for boredom. One of the things she says is that as children, the excitement and anticipation of the “new” filled our days with adventure. We have lost the ability to feel the pleasure that the uniqueness of each single moment can bring. 

Here are some gems of wisdom on boredom:

“Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
— Dorothy Parker

“Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life. Don’t let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.”
— R. I. Fitzhenry

Instead of avoiding boredom, what if you simply noticed it and and did no-thing with it? What if you let boredom “speak” to you? I challenge you to find ways you can play with EFT and boredom to unfold discoveries.