The Art of Being Boring: How a dopamine reset unlocked my creativity.
Or, how I stopped believing the Pet Shop Boys and started being boring.
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Six years ago, just before the global Covid lockdown, I found myself hovering at the edges of my own life. Life was busy, with two primary-age children, and I was allegedly living my dream… teaching, running an educational consultancy, managing freelancers, and patriotically waving the flag for the 5am club.
Determined to have it all, there were intense HIIT workouts squeezed in alongside housework before anyone else woke up, weeknights out with the school mums leading to groggy mornings, weekends ferrying children to early-morning activities or noisy birthday parties, and evenings with friends where I finally got to relax.
Phew, I feel exhausted writing about it.
Then what still sounds like a silly thing to be upset about, so silly I can barely even mention it, happened. I wasn’t invited to something. Something that took months to plan and happened once in a lifetime. Though I’m sure no one involved will read this, or even has any idea how wounded I was, I won’t go into detail, but I will explain why it floored me.
I’d thought I was an integral part of a group of friends I saw a few times a week and always made time for in my life. Then it dawned on me: there must be another WhatsApp group I wasn’t in. They didn’t see me as close a friend as I saw them.
That hit hard.
Here I was, pushed for time and energy, no time to breathe let alone think about my own needs, yet I’d been pouring energy into relationships that didn’t truly value me. By the time I was invited, months after I found out about it, I declined.
I was already too deep in the painful process of severing my nose to spite my face.
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Pride and embarrassment stopped me from asking why, but even though the thought of it still stings every time I see them, I’m glad it happened. It was the catalyst for me starting the slow process of reflecting on my life, on my purpose, on what truly made me happy.
And once I started, I couldn’t stop.
Unlike many, the Covid months didn’t bring me any let-up from my responsibilities. As a teacher, I worked all the way through, as did my partner, and coupled with the attempt at home education (which was no easier despite my profession), I emerged a burnt-out wreck.
But within that, a new rhythm began to form. Quiet evenings and weekends at home. Time with family without the pressures of the modern world. No commuting across London.
A pruning back of life.
Almost every friendship group I had been in, some decades old, changed. It seemed that others were feeling the same shift in their lives. Some of this rebalancing felt like a natural evolution to me, while part felt like being pushed out of friendships I didn’t want to lose.
This time, I built it into my self-reflection. Being busy hadn’t brought me the happiness it had promised. Without the noise and the buzz of constant stimulation, with those endless dopamine hits from striving, socialising and scrolling, a more authentic version of me emerged.
Suddenly, I didn’t find any enjoyment in binge watching TV and being out late in the evening multiple times a week felt like a chore. As I stopped trying to be interesting, my social life dwindled, and I waited for the promised thing that is for me to arrive to fill the empty space.
I’m a teacher, educational consultant and novelist with an academic background in English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. Read about the lessons I’ve learnt from twelve months of writing online.
Long walks, bike rides and weight-lifting replaced the cortisol-inducing exercise I’d been cramming into my life. Cups of tea and staring at the garden replaced the urge to be productive every minute of the day. I even gave in to the you really should try yoga advice from my well-intentioned sisters and found that something I couldn’t practice previously, because I couldn’t calm my mind, became an integral part of my healing.
It is only now that I realise I had followed a path through a kind of dopamine reset, into a stillness that helped my soul recover. Although the dopamine detox trend has been debunked, there are still many benefits to reducing constant novelty, like social media, multitasking, and busyness.
By slowing down, cutting overstimulation, and letting myself feel boredom again, I unknowingly gave my brain the chance to rebalance.
Through slow living, and by resisting the urge to fill my days with quick fixes and false urgency, I brought myself to the edge of something unexpected: my midlife creativity.
So how did this end up in a novel?
Instead of avoiding discomfort I leant into it, as something to be experienced, processed, and moved through. I pulled my soul friends, those who had joined me in different decades of my life and melded to my heart, and family closer.
I let myself read as much as I wanted, as I had before the responsibilities of life took over. I met a group of local women whose holistic yoga practice helped me to heal. New friendships developed on what I had thought was a solitary path.
I walked more, lifted weights, and listened to silence.
Once I moved all devices out of the bedroom, I started journalling as soon as I woke up instead of letting the world in. A few months later, that turned into a scene, which evolved into a chapter, and suddenly, a story emerged.
It turns out that overstimulation doesn’t make you happier or more fulfilled. It steals your enjoyment of the natural and the simple. It dulls your own voice, stifles your thoughts and stills the creativity waiting to grow inside.
And in the space that boredom left behind, creativity emerged.
Maybe becoming boring was exactly what I needed to become myself again.
Have you gone through your own version of a dopamine reset? A moment where slowing down or being boring brought something unexpected into your life?
I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments. What did stillness give you? What did you rediscover in your own reinvention?
Do any of these lessons resonate with you? I love hearing from my readers.
Photo Credits:
Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
Joyce G by Unsplash
What did stillness give you? What did you rediscover in your own reinvention? Do any of these lessons resonate with you?
I fully agree with the switch from "efficiency & performance" to "inner peace". However, I think that for every personality the journey is a bit different, so there is a possibility that the new setup will be seen by other people as ready-made, although it is not! It's so complicated. One needs to really know themselves well to drop all that doesn't work and keep the important things, and then experiment on top of it.
I honestly think it's the life work, to find the life that is fitting. And as world keeps changing, so will our setups and routines. Then again, the body changes, and this will impact it, too.
I am very active intelectually, but I hate sweating at sports. So I always did yoga and swimming — non-competitive, quiet, just being the one with water. However, at 40, every massage therapist I've met was pushing me to do weights. And I hate it in many ways, but now it's a routine and I can live with it. The paradox is that not everything that feels good is actually good, and vice versa. It's all so confusing.
When people say Tiktok kills their attention, I understand. But I live alone, and during dark, long mornings half an hour of people speaking in my room allows me to come back to the world of living. So it's not only about tools for me, but if we can use them for our good. Probably still being used by them of course, but that's not the main focus for me.
Or, nature. For many people recharging, for me, deeply overwhelming: colors, sounds, textures, lights. I need a long sleep after a day in the nature to come back to my slow self. So it's very individual, and we spend so much time managing the setup to keep it optimal 😩 no cookie-cutter solutions unfortunately.
I also think a lot about these things.