The Rewilding - Harper's BAZAAR (Copy) (Copy)

Boredom gets a bad rap. But as it turns out, that irritating state we’ve all been running from since childhood has huge benefits for our mental health. Alexandra English heads into the wilderness in an attempt to do — well, nothing

I am not one for following instructions. And with the exception of several too-salty/oily/burnt homecooked meals and a few backwards-built pieces of furniture, discarding the step-by-step process has worked out alright for me. It’s not that I think I know ingredient ratios better than Ottolenghi or bookcase construction better than those two Ikea creatures, I just do not have the type of brain that likes to read about what I’m about to do before I do it. 

Suffice to say, when the instructions came through for a stay in an Unyoked cabin in the New South Wales wilderness, I immediately dismissed them. How much more did I need to know than what address to put into Google Maps? As it turns out: a lot. 

My partner and I arrived in the pitch dark night, at 5pm. I thought it would be fun to get pre-road trip burgers (it was), and did not account for the newly non-daylight savings sun to set while we were still an hour away or for there to be no streetlights. The premise of Unyoked is to be completely immersed in nature. Unlike in other tiny houses, you’re not staying in a shipping container on a farm near a pub. Unyoked is about full nature integration, with varying degrees of adventure indicated by ‘spice’ levels. I, of course, chose the spiciest without checking what that meant.

After a very slow drive around the invisible bends, a lot of swearing, a change of drivers, and a sharp ascent up a hill that felt more like a wall, we pulled into a clearing. By this point, my partner had read the instructions, the first of which was, to paraphrase: do not arrive in the dark. Oh well, we’re here now, I thought. “It’s a 15-minute hike from here,” he said, pointing to a pair of wheelbarrows and a Dolphin torch by our parking spot. 

Into the wheelbarrows went our bags and off into the bush we set. The path was, thankfully, well-maintained, and we came out the other end to see our cosy cabin, a fire pit, a faint wisp of the Milky Way and a bajillion stars. Partly because the drive was so dark and partly because you don’t receive your destination coordinates until right before you leave home, we had no idea where we were or what we’d be looking at in the morning.

There are no curtains in the cabin (you’re so secluded that there’s no need), and so as the sun rose, so did we. Without lifting our heads from our pillows, we saw light emanating from over a vast ocean in the distance, rolling highlighter-green hills in the middle ground and rainforest-like foliage right outside our door. To say it was stunning would be to significantly understate just how beautiful it was, all the more pronounced for having arrived in the darkness. (Was it worth it? I think so, but that’s probably a better question for my travel companion.)

Twin brothers Chris and Cam Grant started Unyoked as an antidote to the stresses of their always-on daily lives. The brothers grew up hiking and climbing trees, but as adults, they found themselves in fast-paced roles at large corporations. “We were spending way too much time at our computers, way too much time inside, way too much time around concrete and pollution,” Chris says. “We were feeling really stressed, under pressure, and probably a bit anxious. We often had these discussions about the fact that we’d lost the connection with nature we had growing up.”

Much has been written about the benefits of nature, so I won’t waste my word count here except to say that multiple studies have shown that getting outside is associated with improved sleep quality and quantity, lowered inflammation, enhanced eyesight and hearing, and improved memory and creativity. 

And so they launched the first Unyoked cabin in NSW’s Kangaroo Valley in 2017. Now, their nature hits are available at more than 100 cabins in Australia, New Zealand, England and Wales, and some will soon pop up across Europe. Each cabin is similar: they are small (about nine metres by three metres) and have even smaller carbon footprints. They’re made with sustainable and recycled materials and are on wheels so they can be installed without disturbing their environment. While they are incredibly chic, it’s what’s outside the cabin and inside your head that matters.

 So, there we were, out in nature and — aside from a sneaky email check — totally off-grid. “Now what?” we wondered over coffee and pancakes on the first morning. I picked up the Unyoked In-Field Guide. “Now what?” it reads. Huh. “Here you are in the middle of nowhere, and you’ve already run out of things to do. Do nothing … We call it good boredom.”

Boredom: that irritated yet listless state that haunted our childhoods. How could that be good? To be bored is to be stuck in a liminal hell between wanting to do something but not wanting to do anything; we want to be engaged, but we can’t be satisfied. Boredom makes us scroll and repeatedly open the fridge on the off-chance that something has appeared to satiate our existential hunger. Boredom is a factor in unhealthy eating, smoking and drug taking; one study found that people would rather give themselves painful electric shocks than have nothing to do for 15 minutes. 

But according to the experts, Unyoked is right — boredom can be good. This unfairly maligned mental state needs a rebrand. 

Sandi Mann, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Central Lancastershire in England, is the author of The Science of Boredom: The Upside of Downtime. She has found there to be multiple benefits to boredom, including that it can lower cortisol levels and inflammation and prevent burnout. “Boredom can be quite paradoxical in that sense because it can seem like a quite stressful, agitating sort of emotion,” she says, “but if you manage to get through that pain barrier, it can become quite relaxing.”

The most important benefit to boredom, though, is that it’s a precursor for creativity and is an evolutionary tool that ensures we have momentum for change. Mann conducted a study in which she made participants copy numbers out of a phone book and then see how many uses they could find for a pair of plastic cups. Compared to a control group who got to skip the phone book exercise, those who did the boring task first came up with more uses for the cups. “When we’re bored, we still seek that neural stimulation,” she explains. “Our brains go into themselves and start looking for that neural stimulation from within. We start daydreaming, and that’s a very creative process. That’s when things are invented.”

Being bored is not necessarily a sign that you are boring — it can be a sign that you’re simply not on the right path. Mary Mann, author of Yawn: Adventures in Boredom and, astonishingly, no relation to Sandi Mann, wrote in The Atlantic that “boredom’s ‘itch’ is how our brain alerts us to the fact that we’ve lost the sense, even temporarily, of being the protagonist in our own life”. While this comes with a degree of privilege, boredom can signal that you need to do something drastic, such as find a new job or move cities. “This annoying feeling is actually a sophisticated alert system, a sort of inner (and free!) life coach tapping us on the shoulder to suggest that we might want to change something,” Mary writes. 

“Boredom serves its purpose only when we don’t immediately quash it, when we take a beat to see where our mind goes when it’s trying to evade the feeling,” she continues. “To shake the feeling, we have to cope with the discomfort of facing ourselves, in order to find the things that actually engage us. Boredom is an opportunity to grow through getting to know yourself better.”

So how to harness bad boredom and turn it into good boredom? “First of all, we have to change how we see boredom,” Sandi says. “We need to change our attitude and see it as a positive thing, and we can then allow it into our lives.” That means making time to be bored without seeing it as a waste of time. “By reframing it as positive downtime, we can make time to regenerate, recharge our batteries and regenerate our creative energy.”

Enter, Unyoked — a dedicated time and space for doing nothing. “The benefits of spending a couple of days in nature can last up to 10 to 12 weeks,” Chris says. “If you can use nature like a service and have a routine around it, like you do the gym, then it has demonstratable positive effects on your life.” It worked for me. After two nights and three days in our cabin doing nothing, I was bored enough to write this story.

This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.