Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who commanded the International Space Station, has claimed that only boring people get bored, and that he never does.
Then boredom researcher James Danckert interviewed him for a book, and a slightly different story came out.
Hadfield grew up on a farm in southwestern Ontario, and one of his chores was harrowing. That means going back over a field that’s already been plowed and breaking the big clumps of dirt into smaller ones. Mud in front of you, mud behind you, and no way to see any progress. So he passed the time by seeing how long he could hold his breath.
He got bored. He just didn’t stay bored for very long.
Telling the story later, Danckert said that people who claim they never get bored “just deal with their boredom exceptionally well.”
If you’ve never once felt bored by your own company, that’s probably closer to the truth about you, too. You’ve had long layovers and slow Sunday afternoons like everyone else. You just handled them so quietly that they never registered as a problem.
At some point, you figured out how to actually enjoy your own company, and the skills underneath that are ones plenty of people never get around to building.
1. You can sit alone with your thoughts without reaching for a distraction
The doctor is running 40 minutes behind, and your phone is at 3%. You put it away, lean back, and let your mind go wherever it wants. By the time the nurse calls your name, you’ve mentally rearranged the living room and figured out what to say to your brother about Thanksgiving.
For a lot of people, that stretch would be close to unbearable.
In a series of studies from the University of Virginia and Harvard, researchers left participants alone in a bare room with nothing to do but think. In one version, participants could press a button and give themselves a mild electric shock, one they had already said they would pay money to avoid.
Two-thirds of the men and a quarter of the women pressed it anyway.
Other researchers have since argued the results were less grim than the headlines made them sound, since most people in that study never touched the button. Still, a good number of people would rather feel pain than sit quietly for 15 minutes.
You’d have been fine in that room. You might even have enjoyed it.
2. You know that time spent thinking is more enjoyable than most people expect
Most people assume that sitting and thinking will be dull, so they never try it long enough to find out.
You found out a long time ago.
A team led by Aya Hatano at Kyoto University asked people to predict how much they would enjoy waiting quietly in a room with nothing to do, then had them actually do it. Across six experiments, people consistently underestimated how much they would enjoy being alone with their own thoughts.
Because they expected it to be boring, participants tended to choose checking the news online instead, even though the two experiences ended up rating about the same.
That’s the loop most people are stuck in. They expect boredom, grab the phone to head it off, and never learn that the quiet version would have been perfectly pleasant. You broke out of that loop years ago, so you get to enjoy something other people keep talking themselves out of.
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3. You can calm yourself down without anyone else’s help
The meeting went badly. Your manager said something in front of the whole team, and you’re still turning it over on the drive home.
You don’t call anyone right away. You sit in the driveway for ten minutes with the engine off, and by the time you walk through the front door, your shoulders have come back down from around your ears.
Psychologists at the University of Rochester have a name for what’s happening in that driveway. When they had people sit alone for 15 minutes without their devices, intense emotions like anger, worry, and excitement dropped, while calmer, lower-key states went up. They called it a deactivation effect, and it showed up again when students practiced solitude over the course of a week.
It isn’t a perfect fix.
Some of those lower-key feelings included sadness and loneliness, and a later study that followed people through their ordinary days found a less consistent pattern than the lab did.
But people who are uneasy alone usually need someone else to settle them down. You’ve been using quiet time as your reset button for years, and it works partly because you don’t fight it.
4. You have more self-control than you probably give yourself credit for
A lot of the choices people regret start with having nothing to do. The second glass of wine on a slow Tuesday. The online order that arrives four days later and never leaves the box. The hour of scrolling that nobody remembers.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo surveyed nearly 2,000 undergraduates and found that self-control was a strong predictor of how prone someone was to boredom. The less self-control people reported, the more easily bored they tended to be, and self-control accounted for much of the link between boredom and problems like depression and aggression.
It’s a correlation, so it can’t prove which one drives the other. But it lines up with what an empty afternoon looks like for you. The urge to do something, anything, doesn’t push you around. You can let a quiet hour stay quiet without it costing you anything.
5. You choose how you spend your free time on purpose
Danckert himself isn’t immune.
In an essay for Behavioral Scientist, he admitted that around 4 p.m. most days, he starts pacing his living room looking for something to do. Once, he baked a cake just so he’d have something to show for the afternoon. He described the result as horrible.
His larger point was that boredom is a nudge to go do something that matters to you, and the answer doesn’t have to be impressive. When it comes to beating boredom, what matters most is that you were the one who chose the activity. He even says bingeing a mindless show is fine, as long as you see yourself as the one deciding to do it.
That describes your downtime pretty well. When you watch three episodes of a baking competition on a Saturday, it’s because you wanted to, not because you ran out of ideas. When you spend a whole evening sorting old photos into albums, you meant to do exactly that.
Your free time has someone steering it, and it’s you.
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6. Your curiosity keeps you busy when your schedule is empty
You once spent an entire rainy afternoon reading about why some lighthouses are painted with stripes. Nobody asked you to. It wasn’t for anything. One article led to another, and suddenly it was dark outside.
Danckert has pointed out that curiosity is one of the real opposites of boredom. You can’t be curious about something and bored at the same moment. The two don’t fit in your head together.
People who are never bored alone tend to carry around a running list of things they want to know more about. A historical rabbit hole they haven’t finished. A houseplant that isn’t thriving and needs figuring out. A language they keep meaning to pick back up.
So when the calendar clears, they don’t feel emptiness. They feel like they finally have time.
7. You don’t need other people to keep you entertained
“What did you even do all weekend?”
Your coworker asked it like the answer might be a little sad. You told her you went to a used bookstore, finished a novel, and reorganized the spice cabinet, and you meant it when you said it was a great weekend.
That independence changes how you show up for other people.
When you make plans, it’s because you want to see someone, not because you’re trying to get out of your own apartment. Your friends aren’t your entertainment. They’re people you actually picked.
It also makes you easy to be around. You don’t need a packed itinerary on vacation or nonstop conversation at dinner. You can sit on a porch with someone in total silence, and neither of you feels like something’s gone wrong.
8. You’re comfortable with who you are
There’s a simple reason your own company doesn’t wear thin.
You like the person you’re spending all that time with. Your thoughts aren’t somewhere you avoid going. When things get quiet, the replay of old mistakes doesn’t get to run the whole show, and when it tries, you know how to change the subject in your own head.
Danckert has noted that people who get bored easily also tend to have lower self-esteem, and his lab has been looking at whether a shakier belief in their own abilities plays a part. He’s careful to call it a correlation, not a cause.
Still, the pattern makes sense. When you’re at ease with yourself, quiet time doesn’t feel like being stuck with bad company. It feels like time with someone you’d choose anyway.
