What is ‘hot boredom,’ and do you have it?
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Hot boredom is that
Hot boredom is that internal groan when you’re in line at the ATM or stuck on the airport tarmac, and your phone dies and there’s no source of distraction within reach.
At its worst, it can feel almost physically painful.
To move beyond hot
To move beyond hot boredom, you have to feel it burn a bit first.
Stick with it, even if you feel like you’re going to blow up like a pressure cooker.
Beyond that, give yourself about 21 days to practice consciously sitting with hot boredom, and eventually, the irritation will cool off.
Cool boredom is the
Cool boredom is the idyllic opposite, and a central goal of meditation overall.
It is spacious, and it creates further softness and sympathy toward ourselves. In that space, we are no longer afraid of allowing ourselves to experience a gap.
Although hot boredom may
Although hot boredom may be an “allergy,” it’s not innate.
It is something we pick up over time through being socially conditioned to work hard, perform well and push through at all costs.
Unfortunately, an unforeseen cost of this always-on mindset is that those brief moments of quiet feel excruciating and stressful.
Cool boredom is basically
Cool boredom is basically the realization that we don’t always have to be spinning away.
If we get stuck in line, we can make space for stillness, and this moment in time calls for us to slow down.
So the next time you’re stuck on an escalator, you’ll remember that boredom isn’t a good or bad thing — it’s just best served cold.
Hot boredom is a
Hot boredom is a common struggle people encounter when they first try to meditate.
A big part of getting past it is learning to sit with that discomfort instead.
Don’t resist it because when we allow for hot boredom to exist, we give ourselves the possibility of transiting to the spaciousness of cool boredom.