Why Is It So Hard to Sit Alone with Your Thoughts?

A simple experiment: sit somewhere comfortable. No phone. No book. No music. Nothing to do. Just think, for fifteen minutes.

For many people, this is genuinely difficult. The mind searches for something to attend to, finds the options limited, and turns either to anxious rumination or to an urgent desire to do something — anything.

For a notable subset of people, it’s worse than difficult. It’s uncomfortable in a way they will work actively to avoid.

The Electric Shock Experiment

In 2014, Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia published a series of experiments on what happens when people are left alone with their thoughts.

In the most striking study, subjects were first given a brief electric shock (one they had rated as “definitely unpleasant, but not painful”) and offered the option to give themselves the shock again for a small sum. Most declined.

They were then placed in a room alone for 15 minutes with nothing to do except think. The only object in the room was a button that, if pressed, would deliver the same unpleasant electric shock.

Result: 67% of male subjects and 25% of female subjects chose to shock themselves at least once during the 15 minutes.

The shock was described as unpleasant. The alternative was simply sitting and thinking. Many people preferred the unpleasant physical sensation to the absence of external stimulation.

What the Mind Resists

Wilson and his team’s finding was framed as evidence about how uncomfortable people find unstructured thinking — but the specific nature of the discomfort is worth unpacking.

Unstructured mental time is not neutral. Left to run without task direction, the mind does several things:

It defaults to self-referential processing — the default mode network activates and produces autobiographical review, future simulation, and social modeling. Some of this is pleasant; much of it, in modern anxious adults, is not.

It gravitates toward unresolved problems — the Zeigarnik effect, the tendency for incomplete tasks to be more mentally available than completed ones, means idle time tends to surface the things you’re worried about, haven’t finished, or haven’t figured out.

It produces boredom — which is an aversive state in itself. Boredom signals that the environment isn’t providing the engagement the mind expects, and it motivates information-seeking and activity in a way that can feel like restlessness or urgency.

It removes distraction from emotional states — people who are experiencing anxiety, sadness, or low mood often rely on activity and external stimulation to avoid confronting those states. Sit alone with your thoughts, and there’s nothing between you and what you actually feel.

The Distraction Culture

The finding explains a lot about human behavior in high-stimulation environments.

People choose to play a game on their phone rather than sit at a bus stop with their thoughts. They put on a podcast while washing dishes rather than processing what happened today. They watch television at the end of a long day not because they’re tired of thinking but because they’re tired of thinking about the things that come up when there’s nothing else.

External stimulation doesn’t just entertain — it provides cognitive occupation that prevents the DMN from running its default processing cycle. For people who find their default mental content unpleasant, this is genuinely valuable.

The tradeoff: processing is deferred, not eliminated. The unresolved problems remain unresolved. The emotional states that need processing remain unprocessed. At some point, rest and sleep provide forced unstructured mental time anyway.

Boredom and Creativity

There’s a counternarrative worth acknowledging: boredom and unstructured mental time are associated with creative insight.

Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman’s research found that people who were given a boring task (copying numbers from a phone book) before a creative task performed better on the creative task than people who went straight to it. The tedium of the first task appeared to allow mind wandering that primed creative associations.

The experience of boredom — the aversive feeling of unstimulated waiting — may be part of the mechanism that pushes the mind toward exploratory thought. Some of the most valuable thinking happens in under-stimulated states.

The problem is that smartphones have made genuine boredom rare. The moment external stimulation is available, most people reach for it before the boredom can do anything useful.

The Men vs. Women Split

The finding that 67% of men chose to shock themselves compared to 25% of women is striking, and Wilson was careful not to over-interpret it.

Possible explanations include: higher sensation-seeking in men, differences in comfort with idle mental time, different default mental content during unstructured thought. The gender difference is large enough to be real, but the underlying mechanism is not established.

What is consistent across genders: a significant fraction of people actively prefer unpleasant external stimulation to sitting with their own undirected thoughts.

What Meditation Is Training

Contemplative practices across traditions have, for millennia, targeted exactly this capacity: the ability to sit with mental content without immediately fleeing into activity or distraction.

Meditation, in many forms, is training in the willingness to observe unstructured mental activity without acting on the impulse to escape it. The discomfort of initial meditation practice — the boredom, the intrusive thoughts, the urgency to stop — is the discomfort that Wilson’s subjects were expressing through self-shock.

What meditation appears to change, over time, is the relationship to that discomfort. Not the elimination of unpleasant mental content, but an increased capacity to observe it without requiring it to stop immediately.

The button is there. The thought is unpleasant.

A lot of people press the button.