431. Why a boring life is beautiful

What might be seen as a ‘boring’ life is often just a life that wouldn’t be as popular on Instagram. In a world that glamorises chaos, spontaneity and constant stimulation, we need to create lives that truly nourish us, provide safety, and align with who we really are. In this episode, we explore the psychology behind why so many of us begin craving calm as we get older, why that can feel oddly threatening, and why slowing down may be one of the best things we can do for our brains. We explore: • Why many of us start craving a more manageable, peaceful life • Why this can create fear, guilt, or cognitive dissonance in our 20s • The pressure from social media to make youth look chaotic and exciting • The role of FOMO in feeling disconnected from our real preferences • Why our brains crave novelty • What a ‘boring’ life is actually made of: boundaries, routine, presence, and self-trust Watch on Netflix: HERE https://netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s https://substack.com/@thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Our favourite sources: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/development-and-psychopathology/article/abs/differential-changes-in-impulsivity-and-sensation-seeking-and-the-escalation-of-substance-use-from-adolescence-to-early-adulthood/3542107D68176F9B55BC0A2DB212C701 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563213000800 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1052 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1250830 The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 3:10Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg and welcome back to the Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.

• 3:30Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of our 20s. Today, let me get on my soapbox for a second and say, a boring life is a beautiful life.

• 3:52Jemma Sbeg?

  It is my belief that every single day we face this wall of content that wants to convince you that what you are doing isn't enough. And if you were to listen to this tidal wave of videos and posts and whatnot, you would honestly believe that everybody has more motivation than you. Everybody has more friends than you. Everybody has more clothes, more money, more kind of like.

• 4:20Jemma Sbeg?

  Action going on in their life. First of all, that's not true. But second, being boring is a radical act. There is no one to impress. There is no one else's life that you wanna copy because you like what you have. You have no idea how much agency that acceptance of what other people might not see as glamorous gives you. I also think the tidal wave is shifting and more of us are realizing how truly freeing it is to slow down and just go smaller and slower. It it's a bit of, it's revolutionary. It's psychologically revolutionary for sure. So what we're gonna talk about today is the beauty of the boring routine, the boring rituals and why they're important

• 5:00Jemma Sbeg?

  and why they may open doors you didn't even realize were available or were there, especially in your twenties. I also wanna talk about how to cope with feeling like maybe you're wasting your youth and why that's absolutely not true. Let's talk about it. Why is the boring life beautiful? Stay with us.

• 5:21Jemma Sbeg?

  So what do I mean when I say a boring life? Because I feel like that's kind of open to interpretation. For me, and it may be different for you, a boring life is just one that I think has maybe been dismissed by social media because it's not as easy to sell into. It is the one where you don't buy new clothes every week because that's ridiculous. You don't need to go on lavish vacations every month to be happy because who can afford that? You don't need to be constantly engaged in drama or emotional extremes just to feel stimulated. But instead you have firm boundaries. You have a routine you like. You have small luxuries. You have stability,

• 6:02Jemma Sbeg?

  tiny joys, peace really. When I kind of picture it for myself, it's very grammar coded. Maybe I'd use the term like slow maxing if I was that kind of person, but like, again, indulgence in simple pleasures, appreciation for what you have now without constantly desiring more, slowing down, simplicity. And from the outside, yeah, something that might look really boring or maybe lame. But when we get down to it, is deeply nourishing and supremely fulfilling for our psychological needs.

• 6:34Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't think I'm the only one seeing this like mass conversion, mass trend back to this kind of simple understated existence. Uh we've noticed it in like the trend of the trad wife, but also just like in my friends and in myself included. This craving for a life that's more manageable. When previously, you know, we really kind of ran on fumes and kind of had these very packed schedules and we thought that was success. Part of this is developmental. As we get older, even within our twenties, which is by the way, still very young. Many people become, we we just become less drawn to raw stimulation for the for its own sake.

• 7:13Jemma Sbeg?

  There was a very interesting study done in two thousand and fourteen that looked at, I think data from like almost six thousand individuals. And they measured changes in impulsivity and sensation seeking behaviors from the ages of fifteen to twenty six. And what they noticed was that obviously as we get older, those impulses reduce. But specifically found that this drive towards the karma boring life in our twenties is being driven by two things. Firstly, changes in our personality. And secondly, a linear decline in impulsivity and in risk-taking behavior and hunger for novelty. We kind of know what we want. We don't need raw excitement to motivate us.

• 7:58Jemma Sbeg?

  Like we have the pull and the drive of long-term gratification and long-term peace and long-term stability is more motivational and more convincing. Another part of this and why we noticed this change is that in reality, like chaos eventually costs you too much. And it loses its attraction as we get older. When you're younger or like when you're still kind of constructing your sense of self, unpredictability, spontaneity, the pursuit of more. I think that feels like proof that you are open and you're alive and you're an interesting person. It's like also almost like proof that, you know, I'm young. Look at it like, look at this. I'm doing all these things. But over time, I think we do begin to notice how being constantly overwhelmed and stimulated

• 8:43Jemma Sbeg?

  is not necessarily the same thing as being fulfilled. And we also see the burnout that happens when we have plans every single night. When we are kind of living on just like the fumes and highs of life. It's not that we don't crave less life, we just crave less friction and we learn what we don't like about the chaos. Why does it feel weird to admit that, though? Like, why does it feel weird to admit that we seemingly want less? Not less per se, but different. I think right before you were like able to fully accept, like, hey, actually, I don't care what other people say, I want this boring life. We have this thing, this kind of reaction that we actually call in psychology reactance, which is

• 9:26Jemma Sbeg?

  when it feels like our freedom to be young is being taken away, even if it's by our own choices, we kind of act out as like a last hurrah. What is really, what's, what it's really coming down to is cognitive dissonance between what we're deeply craving internally and what the world around us has told us to desire and expect externally that feels like we're trapped between these two ways of living. There is this narrative that our twenties are supposed to be this incredibly fast-paced, hustle-filled, thousand-plans-a-week-end kind of life before like so-called real life begins. You know, you're meant to kind of front-load the stress and socializing of life as an investment for later on.

• 10:10Jemma Sbeg?

  And yeah, at certain times in your life, it's really fun to do that and it, there's definitely seasons for it. But I don't like the idea that you have to keep doing things and keep forcing yourself into like busy chaos, even if you don't like it, just because that's the norm. That gap between what we think we should want and what we genuinely do creates a lot of inattention. If the version of youth we've been convinced into is marketed as kind of constant excitement, then choosing calm can feel kind of unfairly like you are failing at being young, you know? Am I wasting this decade? Am I becoming, am I, am I slowing down too soon? Am I gonna regret this?

• 10:54Jemma Sbeg?

  Shocker, but it's, that's basically yet another yardstick, which we're encouraged to use as a measure of apparent success of our twenties. It's another thing that we meant, we're meant to judge ourselves by. And always feel like we're not doing well enough because of. It's also not quite a shocker that since the introduction of social media, this sense of dissonance has increased at a level researchers and social scientists actually can't quite measure fast enough. One University of Washington study actually talks about how social media especially creates a state of firstly, reduced self-reflection, secondly, narrowed attention, and thirdly, lack of individual interest, all of which is correlated with greater unhappiness.

• 11:38Jemma Sbeg?

  What these studies and what these findings basically say is that we get so focused on how others are living that the result of that is that we can no longer properly articulate or even imagine what we actually want because we're so consumed with what apparently is making them happy. I read this fantastic sub stack the other day that was like the loneliest place in the world is your for you page. And this author talks about like the masochism of the scroll where we kind of torture ourselves with the lives of people that we don't really wanna be like, but convince ourselves we do and kind of torture ourselves by not being like. This gets to like a very vital point. What our equal fear, but also desire for the boring life is really being manipulated

• 12:23Jemma Sbeg?

  by is FOMO. Like, that's really what it is. Your failure or your inability to accept that this is what you actually want really comes down to this fear of missing out. Psychologists in a now very famous twenty twenty one study defined the fear of missing out as a persistent apprehension that other people might be having more rewarding experiences without us, paired with the urge to stay continually connected to what everyone else is doing. It is a social fear and therefore quite an existential fear, striking at our core need to kind of not be alone in an experience or not be alone in the world. That is why we feel like we're missing out by choosing what is not the norm.

• 13:05Jemma Sbeg?

  What is so interesting about this feeling is that it doesn't actually need evidence or need you to feel especially unhappy with your current situation to occur. I think we often think of FOMO as like, that's what happens to people who are very lonely, in their bedroom, visibly isolated. But we can be in the middle of like a movie night at home, best friend on the left, other friend to the right, staring at an Instagram story and suddenly feeling this pain and anxiety that even though we are happy in this moment, somebody else, somewhere else is having more fun and that's where we should be. Somebody else is more alive than we are and therefore we are doing this wrong.

• 13:46Jemma Sbeg?

  Like our quiet life is costing us this like more exciting level or more exciting version of youth. FOMO is evolutionary in origin, we can't forget that. It's meant to drive us back to the herd. But all it does in these moments is create this overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Instead of letting life unfold according to what we actually want and what feels good, it keeps us mentally oriented towards the road not taken. It keeps us focused on the party we didn't go to, the trip we weren't invited on, the people we didn't meet by not going on that trip, the version of ourselves we imagined might have been if we had just said yes more often, stayed out later,

• 14:28Jemma Sbeg?

  been more tired, bought that item, even if in the moment we didn't want that. The twenty thirteen study published in the journal, I think it's like, like human behavior, conducted a series of studies looking at the concept of FOMO in relation to various factors like demographics, motivation, wellbeing, as well as how FOMO relates to.

• 14:52Jemma Sbeg?

  Behavior and emotional wellbeing. What they found was that not only was FOMO linked to a lower mood, lower overall life satisfaction, but also greater distraction from our own lives. People who were experiencing greater FOMO actually had poor autobiographical memory because they were so consumed with comparison, they couldn't appreciate the moment they were in, good or bad. The really painful part is that FOMO can make us mistrust our own preferences. Like I've said this whole time, a boring life is beautiful if you can trust in its beauty and in your desire for it.

• 15:33Jemma Sbeg?

  But if you can't because you are constantly flooded with how other people are living, it's not gonna feel as enjoyable. The other reason I think we may feel apprehension of the boring life is because we think that boring, slow, peaceful, regulated means no more fun, no more excitement. Especially the kind of excitement we might find in like a messy night out or like bad decisions or drama. Again, I think there is a time and a place for that. As much as I have, I've had moments like that, I regret moments like that. I also cherish them equally because they are fundamental to who I am. But I don't need to learn those lessons again. And I don't need to learn those lessons again and again and again, like I'm done. And what was the lesson for if not kind of showing me how to make better decisions?

• 16:17Jemma Sbeg?

  On a neurological level, like yeah, our brains do crave novelty, but that's not novelty if you've already been in that situation and know you don't like it. We are definitely, you know, wired to move towards what is surprising and unpredictable because novelty recruits so many different brain systems involved in attention and motivation and reward. It's a huge factor in how our brain releases dopamine, right? Because we're always wanting to move towards what feels unfamiliar to learn and and because it's because of the anticipation and because like of the possibility of pleasure.

• 16:57Jemma Sbeg?

  But we have to understand just because dopamine is powerful, just because our motivational systems are powerful, doesn't mean they're always leading us in the right direction. But where we often get lost is in how we interpret that need for novelty and the feel good of this dopamine. Even though they feel similar at first, novelty isn't the same.

• 17:19Jemma Sbeg?

  As pure chaos or the kind of busy lives that we think we need, right? There are there are different levels of how dopamine is produced and received. What we really need to understand is that the dopamine or whatever pleasure chemicals you were previously getting from this like chaotic life that maybe you loved and that you were living is not the same that you're going to get from long-term gratification. Sometimes we mistake the emotional highs and lows of chaos for evidence that we're really living, like how somebody in their twenties should be living. But that immediate feeling of stimulation rarely gives us the deeper reward that true novelty and curiosity and enjoyment does.

• 18:03Jemma Sbeg?

  In fact, one two thousand and sixteen study from the neurology department at the University College of London actually found that it can actually create biased choices, like our striving for quick dopamine, for instant pleasure. Yes, may give us a faster result, but it creates an emotional crash later on. You know, we're constantly activated, we're not necessarily enriched. And again, this is the beauty of the boring life. It takes you out of this constant state of needing more, of expectancy, of anticipation, and allows you to just actually choose where your body and your mind wants to flow to and where you actually wanna put your attention towards.

• 18:48Jemma Sbeg?

  Like, real novelty, real dopamine expands and enriches you. It's in learning something new, it's in deepening intimacy with friends or your partner, it's getting into nature, it's dedication to long-term projects or challenges. I think that's what a boring life allows you to do. Okay, let's take a short break here before we talk about what leaning into the intentionality and acceptance of a boring, lame life can do for you psychologically in terms of your relationships and emotionally, and why it's so good for you. Stay with us.

• 19:29Speaker 05

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• 21:52Jemma Sbeg?

  In order to convince you even more of the beauty in your so-called boring life that social media has convinced you to hate, let's talk about the four major changes and benefits you will see when you accept a slower pace. Number one, what looks like a quieter life is often a life with better emotional regulation and fewer extreme lows. When our lives become overstimulated, our brains spend more time in the state of hyperarousal. Cortisol, adrenaline, they stay elevated, attention becomes fragmented, and we begin operating from a place of reactivity rather than intentionality. Research on stress, research on nervous system regulation consistently shows

• 22:37Jemma Sbeg?

  that chronic overstimulation reduces our capacity for emotional control. And as we mentioned before, reduces our capacity to make good, value-based decisions. We become more emotionally vulnerable to small inconveniences, to small frustrations, because our baseline stress is already so high, it doesn't take much to kind of tip us over. A quieter life often reflects the opposite, and it indicates stronger self-regulation skills because there is, there is some emotional curation going on, right? You're not just saying yes to everything, you're not saying yes to being everywhere, especially when you now know the cost.

• 23:18Jemma Sbeg?

  Psychologists sometimes describe this as having a greater window of tolerance, basically. You're better able to make decisions around what you can tolerate, and you're better able to expand, expand your capacity to deal with things coming out of the blue because you're not constantly taxing your emotional systems with stuff you actually don't need to endure. There's also research around something called hedonic adaptation. You've probably heard about this on the podcast before. But the thing about raw novelty and raw chaos and raw excitement is that our brain gets really used to it. And so you need more and more and more to enjoy yourself. Your nervous system. Recalibrates and so it makes it so that small pleasures don't feel as pleasurable anymore when you're used to this

• 24:02Jemma Sbeg?

  big abide, like big stuff. So going back to this peaceful slower life allows you to actually recalibrate it back in the opposite direction. You're able to actually have more of an appreciation for just

• 24:16Jemma Sbeg?

  things that you can and should be grateful for. Secondly, it goes without saying, but a more boring life is also often a life with better boundaries because at that point, what matters most is your emotional and your psychological center. Not someone else's preferences for you, not whether you disappointed somebody by not showing up. You get pretty clear on who likes you for you compared with who likes what you can offer them fairly quickly. And of course, like along with better boundaries, it comes with greater presence. What philosophers like people have been talking about presence for ages. And of course, alongside better boundaries, it also comes with greater presence. What philosophers for like literally hundreds of years have said is like life's most precious gift.

• 25:02Jemma Sbeg?

  Because nothing else is possible without it. Like, that's what you don't realize. You're not really present for those moments of chaos and like glamour and excitement. There are thousands of ancient texts, thousands of books, thousands of articles that have been written about how to really take everything from a moment, how to attune your senses and your mind to appreciate details that most of us ignore. And no surprise here, a big part of their advice is often spend more time being bored, spend more time within the ordinary. Translation like just like slow the fuck down for just a second, to actually notice your life rather than constantly trying to improve it. You ever look back at a really amazing holiday or like a really amazing night out or a really amazing birthday and realize like

• 25:46Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't actually remember the things I thought I would. I remember the strangest little details. That is exactly my point. You remember the moments that felt most natural because presence was greatest. I don't think life happens in a big font. I think it happens in the little font. And a failure to tune into that may just mean actually a deeper failure to live fully. It kind of reminds me of of something I saw the other day, which was like a a quote that said, when your life inevitably flashes before your eyes, will it be yours? Or will it be what you made your life into to impress others or to look good online? Will it just be snatches of presence amongst bigger moments of distraction and fear that you're not doing enough, even when you are?

• 26:31Jemma Sbeg?

  Really, I think I think our growing preference for the slower so-called boring life is that we're kind of waking up to this reality that there's no keeping up with what we see online. There's only ever feeling bad about it. Maybe it's an even deeper reality of like, if I'm doing all of this and I'm still unhappy, if I'm trying to keep up and I'm still miserable, what is it for? Like, this isn't convincing anymore. All those other busy moments, those like moments of trying to fit the stereotype of like what you're meant to be doing with your youth. Like, they don't always make you happy. And presence definitely does.

• 27:12Jemma Sbeg?

  We see this in research on mindfulness. We see this in research on psychological, present moment, health and awareness. It's associated with less emotional reactivity, better behavioral regulation, more life satisfaction, better relationships, blah, blah, blah. Those are all buzzwords. Basically, people are just happy. People who live slowly are happy and happier. They basically cracked the code of happiness. They go towards what feels good, even if to others it seems boring. I think it's a great question to finish this episode on, which is like, in the end, when you resist the boring life, what are you really avoiding? What thoughts are you actually afraid are gonna be there when you turn everything else down or off?

• 27:55Jemma Sbeg?

  Like, what are you actually distracting yourself with? The older you get, I think the more you realize that. Being with your own thoughts is much harder than people tell you. Like, I went through a period a few years back when, like, silence felt like such a threat, like such an intense sign, at least for me, that like, I wasn't doing enough because I had these moments in my twenties that I needed to fill with experiences. And my, like, only way to overcome that was A, to just always be busy, but B, to always have the TV on or music or a show playing. Like, I needed to be surrounded by stimulation. And whenever I had these moments where I wasn't around other people, it was bigger than FOMO. It was like this deep fear of regret that I wasn't doing enough.

• 28:41Jemma Sbeg?

  And what I was really, like, I think hiding from was, again, this sense that, like, time is short, this is what everybody is telling me I should and and will enjoy. It's not actually making me happy, but if everybody is doing it, I don't wanna miss out. Like, it was just a whole smorgasbord of, like, psychological insecurity. And let's just say, like, overworking, noise, busyness, always having something on, that is as much a coping mechanism as anything else. Being busy is the silent coping mechanism, just like an alcoholic uses alcohol to silence the fear and uncertainty and grief. A busyholic uses the rush of a packed schedule to do the same,

• 29:24Jemma Sbeg?

  so that they can crash at the end of the night and put off that self-reflection for another day. There's an absolutely fascinating paper published in the journal, the journal's called Science, basically. Um, and it looks at this, and the researchers wanted to know why people struggle so deeply with being alone or being bored. And they found that if they just left people in a room for like fifteen minutes by themselves, they would literally start shocking themselves with electric shocks to avoid that discomfort. Because they were so not used to just being with themselves and being present in the moment. And the thing was, is it's not boredom that they were scared of, they were scared of loneliness, they were scared of things that they

• 30:10Jemma Sbeg?

  hadn't thought deeply enough about. And I think that's where our real fear of, like, Boredom comes from, our real fear of the boring life comes from, I should say, is like, what's gonna be, what sense of inadequacy is hiding behind that? So I think that's really like, why we can't accept what we know we kind of want, but why getting to the point where we can be like, oh, I'm actually okay to slow down. And when I rest, I'm gonna rest. And when I'm being present, I'm gonna be present. Like, when we get to that point, all those, all those things, yes, come to be. We're more present, we're happier, we're all of that. I think we also just finally get a grip and get a grasp of like, okay, what do I actually want?

• 30:53Jemma Sbeg?

  And that's what the value is in accepting and embracing. What, you know, a lot of people in social media and companies and marketing doesn't want you to accept, which is that actually you need a lot less than you think you do. And that you actually, when you remove all these like distractions and all these other things, you actually get to the core of like, what you desire without all this like, kind of junk surrounding it. So that, my friends, is my argument for the boring life. To summarize very, very quickly, why are we so opposed to the boring life? Well, because we've been sold this idea that especially in our twenties, it means we're failing.

• 31:37Jemma Sbeg?

  It means that we're settling. It means that we've like, we've grown out of our youth too quickly. That's literally not the case. We can still have novelty, excitement, adventure without stringing ourselves along and without getting to a point of like complete exhaustion. And there is real maturity in accepting that like you can do it all. If you go a little bit slower and you can actually enjoy it, a great way to like, accept that is to really dig down deeper into like, what is behind your fear of a boring life? And what it represents to you slash what you're actually trying to avoid? And I think at the end of the day, yeah, you just end up happier. You end up more fulfilled. So I hope it's something that like, if you've been kind of opposed to,

• 32:21Jemma Sbeg?

  you can come to accept and realize the beauty in. As always, I want to thank our researcher Libby for her help with this episode. If you have made it this far and you are listening on Spotify. I'm trying to think about what our emoji will be for the day. Maybe like an olive, an olive branch, a white dove, you choose. Just so I know that you've made it this far. Thank you for listening to the end. If you want to read a transcript version of this episode, you can do that on Substack. You can also watch this episode on Netflix. You might not want to re-watch it. You can watch another episode on Netflix. Or you can follow us on Instagram, all the ways that you can find us, reach us, talk to us, talk to me,

• 33:04Jemma Sbeg?

  watch, engage with the podcast more. We'll be in the description below. But until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. I hope this episode was a little bit convincing. We will talk very, very soon.

• 33:23Speaker 03

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• 34:55Speaker 00

  2026 J.P. Morgan Chase & Company. Building with AI should feel simpler, not harder to navigate. The challenge is finding the right resources to move from exploring AI to building with it. The Microsoft AI Innovators Hub brings together code samples, guided labs, and practical guidance to help you move from exploring AI to building with it. Learn by building at the AI Innovators Hub. Visit aka.ms/ai-innovators. That's aka.ms/ai-innovators. This is an iHeart Podcast.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Guaranteed human.