Must Discharging Boredom be Difficult?

Let me first reassure you that, terrible as boredom feels, reading this piece won’t ask of you to be bored or would make you feel terrible.

The different forms of discharge don’t all start the same way. Yes, we may cry when we are feeling sad or (better) when we act so happy that we just have to leave the old sadness behind (by crying).

But to find the proper contradiction against heavy fear took more time. It is lightness, foolishness, scorning the fear. I’m ready to die – hahahaha.

Boredom is one more form of discharge. Possibly, Harvey didn’t get to work that out completely. I stood on his shoulders and lived longer and I think that I got further.

We always assumed that boredom happens when our brain doesn’t get enough information (that makes sense) or gets too much information to make sense of.

An example of avoiding boredom: When we are alert counselors, we may get many thoughts on how to “help” our clients. However, being a counselor is not about being heard or having an impact or feeling good about ourselves. Rather, we need to let the client be the hero and add (only) to what the client already does (by agreeing) or supply something the client is overlooking. We should be humble and slow in presenting “helpful” ideas because often, after a few minutes, the client herself comes up with the idea and that works better than us interfering. But then, if we don’t say most of what we are thinking as counselor, why do we think all that and isn’t that a waste? No, it is not, because it keeps us from being bored.

Another possible example of evading being bored could be dreaming. Why do we dream and why are dreams more-or-less coherent stories? Why is the brain “at rest” not just flipping through memory flashes, a random stack of mental pictures or sound bites? Why does it need to be a movie? Well, if we don’t get a story that can be understood in some way,  we would get bored during sleep hours and not wake up refreshed but rather bored stiff.

Old Boredom

My breakthrough in thinking about boredom came one night when I woke up “from being bored.” I realized that that cannot be a sound idea. After all, before we go to sleep, we do everything to get as little new sensory information as possible, in order to work out what we have so far. We seek darkness, silence or only repetitive sounds, soft sheets and no draft. We’re supposed to get no new information. Then, how could one wake up from being too bored?

My solution was: This had to be Old Recorded Boredom.

Then I realized that my boredom was chronic. That the invisible enemy that often has kept me from being responsible was chronic boredom. That I tried to not feel the boredom by not going to sleep, not taking a rest when needed, by lying awake and not doing routine jobs. (No wonder I became an artist.)

To discharge boredom is not complicated. The only downer is that it feels absolutely terrible. Harvey called it the most painful feeling ever.

An easy way to discharge early boredom (my guess is that most boredom of grownups is early) happens when describing how bored we were once. When the discharge stops, taking a direction works wonders. For me, it is: I have a very interesting life. This is also the sentence that allows me to discharge and fall asleep when I couldn’t before. (Harvey gave the memoires that he never got to write the working title “A Very Interesting Life.” He really had.)

Yawning

Harvey discovered that yawning is a discharge that speeds up physical healing. I saw that when an eye doc put poison into peoples’ eyes to paralyze the muscle that would block his view onto the retinas, the people who yawned the most, were the fastest in clearing up the paralysis.

I knew a young adult counselor who was always yawning. He died from cancer at a young age, no doubt caused by his alternative diet which was lots of “healthy” vegetable from his own garden but sadly, he never had the soil tested and it turned out heavily contaminated with industrial waste.

Harvey also taught us that yawning was the last stage of completely cleaning up one painful incident.

Harvey also noticed that big yawns may show up when we start thinking about now territory or when we start thinking about new ideas.

Julian Weisglass once calmed his students that as a teacher he is only at ease when he sees some listeners yawning and even asleep. Then the content of his lecture is apparently reassuring and true enough that it makes people relaxed.

Harvey also told us that, in his later years, at night, he needed to alternate sleeping a couple of hours with yawning for hours.

Harvey insisted that people did not yawn out of boredom. At the end of a workday, people yawn because they’re done, start to relax and then begin yawning off their physical strain.

However, I found that also (old) boredom discharges with big yawns. It was suggested once in Present Time that that could be because of physical hurts connected to the boredom. But I would suggest that maybe all old boredom is connected to physical hurts of our brain. Otherwise, if our brains would have been doing fine, wouldn’t they have focused on more interesting things in our surroundings or in our mind not to get bored?

Harvey never did demonstrations of discharging boredom. He said that it would bore us terribly. I can tell you that my counselors are very happy to counsel me on boredom. It takes a brave client but for the counselor, it’s not so hard. My guess is that what was so terrible was a client who would hardly discharge, which I explained above as unnecessary from now on.

Get Started

Harvey did not get a chance to discharge all this physical hurt. But we now have a chance. How could we take a direction of never dying but leave all our most painful emotions undischarged?

Now we know how to easily discharge boredom (talk about how it feels or take a direction claiming that your life is interesting), why not get to it immediately? It takes longer when you don’t get started.

Crying  and trembling does not signal suffering but that you’re getting over distress. Yawning is cleaning up physical stress and boredom.

You are too much in a hurry, too impatient or too panicky to yawn? Tell yourself: Yawning is so healthy that every yawn may add a day to my life. When I yawn enough, I only win time. (I don’t know if that is true but reading that, gives me fine yawns. Harvey was once asked: What is true? He answered – which should come as no surprise – Whatever gives discharge.)