The Case for Boredom on the Trail

We treat boredom like a malfunction. Something to fix, fill, or scroll past. Our phones have made us allergic to empty moments, and the outdoor world hasn't been immune. Podcasts on the trail. Music in the tent. Audiobooks on the approach.

I'm not judging — I've done all of it. But I've also started leaving the headphones behind, and what I've found has surprised me.

The First Thirty Minutes

The first half hour without stimulus is uncomfortable. Your mind reaches for the phone. Your hand twitches toward your pocket. You feel a vague restlessness, like you're wasting time, like you should be catching up on something.

This is withdrawal. It passes.

What Comes After

Around the forty-minute mark, something shifts. The restlessness fades, and in its place comes a different kind of attention. You start noticing more — not in a mindful, intentional way, but naturally. The sound of wind changes depending on what it's moving through. Grass sounds different from heather. Heather sounds different from trees.

Your thoughts change too. They become less reactive, less list-like. Instead of thinking about what you need to do, you start thinking about what you actually want. These are different questions, and they need different kinds of silence to surface.

Your mind is a landscape too. It needs open space to show you what it's carrying.

Why We Avoid It

Boredom is uncomfortable because it's honest. Without distraction, you're left with your actual thoughts — not the curated, productive, optimised version, but the raw, unstructured, sometimes inconvenient version. This is why we reach for the phone. Not because the content is compelling, but because the silence is revealing.

On the trail, though, this honesty is useful. Some of my best decisions have come from hours of unstimulated walking. Not lightning-bolt insights, but slow, quiet clarifications. The kind of thinking that only happens when you give your mind enough room.

The Practice

This isn't about suffering through boredom or treating it as some kind of purification ritual. It's simpler than that. Next time you're on a long walk, try leaving the headphones in your pack for the first hour. Just one hour. If it's unbearable, put them back in. But give the boredom a chance to become something else.

Most of the time, it will.

The trail doesn't need a soundtrack. Sometimes the most interesting thing to listen to is what your own mind does when you stop entertaining it.