The year is 1665 and Isaac Newton is looking out his window at an apple tree standing tall in his orchard in Lincolnshire, England. All of a sudden, a ripe and lonely apple falls from the tree and makes its way to the ground. While most people would consider this a mundane event, Newton followed its trajectory with great interest. What young Isaac didn't know at the time was that this apple would become the most famous piece of fruit in human history, as its natural attraction to the ground would spark a moment of genius, leading him to create the laws of motion that revolutionized modern physics.

Newton wasn't conducting an experiment when he discovered the laws of gravity. He wasn't overloading his brain with information trying to figure it out. He was simply looking aimlessly outside his window. He was bored.

But that was in the 17th century. Times have changed a lot since then. These days, we hardly ever allow ourselves to just stare out a window or sit in our backyards doing nothing but staring at the sky. We never pause for a moment and just let our minds wander into deep, unexplored territories.

Turns out that diving deep into our own thoughts is something that we don't really like to do. We find it boring and will do anything to alleviate boredom, even if it means subjecting ourselves to self-inflicted electric shocks. This, sadly, is not an exaggeration.

In a study conducted at the University of Virginia, a social psychologist named Timothy Wilson recruited hundreds of student volunteers to take part in what he called "thinking periods." Individuals were placed in small rooms with blank walls and no personal belongings. They were asked to entertain themselves with nothing but their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes. When asked to rate their experience afterwards, about 50% of the volunteers did not like being alone with their thoughts, citing it was boring.

Then researchers left the volunteers in the room for another 15 minutes. This time though, they introduced a button that participants could press to shock themselves if they wanted to. Around 67% of men and 25% of women chose to voluntarily inflict pain on themselves rather than just sit and do nothing.

This research suggests that, sadly, a lot of us would rather experience physical pain than sit in our own thoughts. When left with nothing else to do, most of us immediately grab our phones, switching from one app to the other as the algorithms of the internet feed us with the exact content that'll keep us from being bored. What we fail to realize is that for these algorithms to understand what makes us tick, they take so much of our information. Companies then sell that information—things like your name, phone number, and home address—to data brokers who sell them to other companies. What's worse is that sometimes these data brokers are involved in data breaches, where all the information they have about you is stolen by nefarious actors.

A few months ago, my friend got this message from Google telling him that some of his passwords were found in a data breach from a company that he'd never heard of before. And right after, he started getting personalized email ads from scam companies. This is how scammers are able to figure out your personal information.

Back to our story.

In the spring and summer of 1665, an outbreak of Bubonic plague spread through London and by July had claimed more than 17,000 lives. Almost at once, people throughout the city began fleeing to the countryside, isolating themselves in fear for their lives. Among those who fled was none other than Sir Isaac Newton. Of course, at that time, Newton had not yet been knighted. In fact, he had not yet even witnessed the famous apple falling. Interestingly though, his two years spent in isolation, away from the bells, whistles, and distractions of the city, was the time when Newton's genius came to life, and he was able to invent calculus, create the science of motion, and develop a framework for gravity. These two years spent in quarantine were Newton's own 15 minutes isolated in a room with nothing to do. Newton, however, didn't seek external stimuli to prevent his mind from wandering. Instead, he welcomed the boredom that often comes with deep thinking and stared out the window, which has without a doubt paid dividends for all of humanity.

During this isolation in the countryside, Newton also invented calculus. Throughout his life, he also made major discoveries in optics, proposing that white light is actually a combination of light from all of the color spectrum. Most famously, following his apple incident, he developed the three laws of motion.

In all fairness, attributing Newton's greatest accomplishments to him being quarantined in the countryside is a bit misleading. The truth is, the incident of the apple falling wasn't an isolated moment of genius. Newton's various contributions to science were the product of years of hard work and dedication, tediously working towards these moments of revelation. However, it is still helpful to recognize the importance of solitude and boredom in creating that particular Eureka moment.

According to psychologist Dr. Sandy Mann of the University of Central Lancashire, once we start daydreaming and allow our brains to wander, like Newton did when he looked out the window, we start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious, which allows for all sorts of connections to take place. This is called the default mode. When you're bored or performing mundane tasks, like doing the dishes or folding the laundry, your body may be on autopilot, but your brain is actually pretty busy. When in the default mode, your mind gets the chance to connect to different ideas, try and solve some of your most pressing problems, and even create personal narratives or set goals. This is why programmers often tell you that they've figured out their problem with their code just as they were jumping into bed ready to get some shut-eye, or while you feel like your best ideas come when you jump in the shower.

The problem is that today, those are the very rare moments that we allow ourselves to be bored. Every other time, we almost always choose the electric shock method. Living in a society where we have the entire world of entertainment at our fingertips has led to our immediate dissatisfaction with even seconds of boredom. The more we fill our world with fast-moving, high-intensity stimulation, the more we get used to it and the less of a tolerance we have for boredom.

On average, Americans reach for their phones 344 times a day. That's once every four minutes. From quick email checks to diving down the rabbit hole of reels and memes, Americans spend an average of 2 hours and 54 minutes on their phone each day, with some people clocking up to 10 hours a day on their phones.

Without a doubt, technology has definitely made the world a better place, but this unhealthy, dependent relationship we have with our phones is robbing us of our most creative selves. German psychologist Theodore Lipps proposed one of the first definitions of boredom in 1903, saying: "Boredom is a feeling of displeasure arising out of conflict between a need for intense mental activity and lack of excitement to it, or inability to be incited." In other words, it's an underwhelming state where none of the options available to us seem appealing. Instead of letting this feeling run its course, we overstimulate our brain and prevent it from taking advantage of the true power of this downtime.

Our first instinct when we experience boredom is to just endlessly scroll through feeds, swishing through social media apps, even when we're walking from one room to the next or waiting for the cashier to bag our groceries. We've become conditioned to constantly seek out novelty and deliver a hit of dopamine to our brain. Sadly, once that sense of novelty fades, it leaves behind a stronger feeling of boredom, which we then try to get rid of with even more stimulation. It's a vicious cycle that keeps our brain occupied with mindless entertainment designed to capture our attention for the longest time possible.

Studies have shown that when given tasks that require minimal mental capacity, participants often contemplated their future and their plans for it. On the other hand, if your brain is constantly consumed by stimuli, it'll rarely have the time to think of the bigger picture and is less likely to set goals for the future or to be more creative.