Anti-Boredom Month: I have the solution!
Is July a boring month? I guess it depends on your perspective. I don’t love the summer, as a season – it’s generally oppressively hot and humid where I live. But the month of July does include a couple bits of excitement, for me anyway: 1) stores start selling Halloween merchandise (only 115 days left ); and 2) hubby and I celebrate the week of the Open Golf Championship in Britain, where the weather is almost invariably cool out on the course, by eating delicious British food and pretending it’s sweater weather.
Boredom is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde emotion. At its most benign, it fits this description from the Days of the Year website: “boredom is about more than just having nothing to do; it’s about the activities at hand failing to engage us mentally”.
So perhaps we need to try something new. That’s a pretty reliable antidote to boredom – try a new restaurant, visit a new garden, hike somewhere you haven’t been before, see something intriguing at the theatre, even try a new sport.
But it turns out that doing an activity that bores us can be rather liberating, actually, from a creativity standpoint. I’ve gotten some of my best ideas when I’ve been out for a walk, just getting some exercise, with my mind free to wander and go off on tangents – OR (and many writers will attest to this) when I’m falling asleep and not thinking about anything in particular.
The dark side of boredom can be harmful. When people are either prevented in doing what they want (e.g. children who must attend an adult function instead of being allowed to play), or are forced to do something they don’t want to (perhaps like writing lines over and over on a chalkboard as punishment), or don’t have access to meaningful activity, they can get into trouble.
It turns out that the feeling of boredom is so disagreeable to people that some are willing to do almost anything to relieve it. In one study, some participants were willing to give themselves small electric shocks rather than sit there with nothing but their own thoughts.
In another, a computer system that tutored students in physics, not the most scintillating of subjects in school, was programmed to be rude – it insulted people who made mistakes and sarcastically praised those who got things right. Interestingly, the learners who used it seemed engaged by the novelty of the disagreeable software and did better in the course.
The month of July received its designation as National Anti-Boredom Month in the 1980s, when a man named Alan Caruba decided to provide some stimulus for people suffering the doldrums of summer after ‘the excitement of Independence Day’, which may make it a uniquely American holiday, but we can get into the spirit of it.
Caruba’s idea was to encourage people to explore new things to add some excitement to their lives, and also to embrace allowing their brains to just run in the wild, so to speak.
There are plenty of suggestions online about how to alleviate your July boredom, from “cooking” (I guess for people who don’t usually do it?) to playing board games (I’m up for that one) to cleaning something (not my idea of fun, but whatever).
I think we can come up with something better than that, don’t you? Getting out in nature, and exploring places you’ve never been to are always worthwhile. Find something to celebrate, if it resonates with you, like my household does around the spirit of cold weather during the Open Championship – any excuse to make great food!
But my best suggestion is to read – preferably my second novel, Into the Forbidden Fire, which is being released this Friday! A continuation of Romy Ussher’s quest to survive the bizarre supernatural world she’s been dragged into, thwarting monsters and twisted adversaries, while she grows closer to her greatest ally, enigmatic professor Rad Enkara, who has some secrets of his own. Her energy levels are dangerously unbalanced after an aborted attempt by the town council of a nearby community to use her for their own ends, and Rad offers a solution: going through the Fires of Rhyxa.
It’s an option that will help her, and enhance her powers enough to save Earth and the people she loves from an ancient and world-wide conspiracy. But it’s the opposite of a win-win — she may lose her humanity in the process and become the greatest predator the galaxy has ever seen, destroying everything she’s sworn to protect. Find out what choice she makes, and then in the final book of the trilogy we’ll see the personal cost for her as well as the consequences for the entire planet.
I’m so excited to bring the second chapter of Romy’s epic journey to my readers! (And while Book 3 isn’t finished yet, I can tell you that it will be a killer!)
Hope you enjoy, and please do me the kindness of posting a review on Amazon, which counts in their algorithm for promoting books to new readers. Happy summer reading 
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