How to Endure Extreme Boredom And Other Miserable Experiences

Sometimes we have to endure something mildly miserable for extended periods of time, like sub zero temperatures or five hours at an opera. Here's a trick for enduring the experience if you can't get out of that situation any time soon...

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Your brain.

1. First, you need to embrace what is known as Moment By Moment Awareness. What's that? In terms of endurance, it means you must look at your miserable situation, and see that it's really made up of a bunch of very short-lived miserable situations all strung together. Don't look at it as five hours of opera...it's 18,000 seconds of opera. Still a lot, but it's broken down into bite sized pieces.
2. You can endure one second of opera, can't you? Sure you can. You can endure one second of just about anything. Hunger, the pangs of cold, a board meeting, dental pain (well...maybe not dental pain). But you must view each second of misery as distinct and separate from the previous and next second of misery.
3. As the misery continues, you must constantly tell yourself that just a second ago you were someplace pleasant, and you are only experiencing this miserable thing for a moment. That's right. You're lying to yourself. But at least you know you're lying to yourself. And it's either that or endure the next three hours of the Marriage of Figaro. Pick your poison, buddy.
4. Forget each moment of pain. Don't hold on to the pain and let it accumulate. Let it pass through you like water. Each moment of pain is brief, and should wash on through. Let it in and let it out and then forget it...as though each new moment is fresh.
5. If you do this long enough, you'll find this actually helps your mind wander to more pleasant things, as it disconnects you from the global misery at hand. Occasionally the misery will come back to your attention, at which point you should tell yourself, once again, that you JUST got there. Until you have a way out of your situation, or don't have to sit through opera anymore to prove to your significant other that you are willing to do stuff he/she likes, just keep going back to the moment by moment awareness and telling yourself that what you are experiencing is simply a brief moment.

Tips & Warnings

• This is not a substitute for good sense. It's simply a strategy for enduring something until you're out of that situation. If you CAN get out of that meat freezer, you should absolutely bang on the door yelling "I'm FREEZING IN HERE!! GET ME OUT!!!"