When Boredom Feels Like a Threat…life becomes a never-ending stimulus cycle which exhausts, frustrates, and even shames.

Have you been there?

Those moments when everything is fine on the outside and restless on the inside. No crisis. No tragedy. No emergency. Just a quiet stretch of time, and yet my hand still drifts toward my phone like it has a mind of its own. Not because I need information. Not because I need connection…

Just because there is space.

And somewhere along the way, my heart learned to believe that space is dangerous. That realization on its own has been humbling for me. Because it means my struggle is not simply about morality. It is about formation. It is about what my habits have trained my heart to expect from the world and from God.

Avoiding the quiet

For many of us, porn and sexual sin enter precisely there. Not when desire is raging, but when boredom feels unbearable. When stimulation feels like survival. When the absence of noise feels like something is wrong with us. Porn becomes a tool. A regulator. A way to manage the quiet without ever having to listen to it, and the more honest I am, the more I realize this is not a niche struggle…this is the water we are swimming in.

Psychologists have been sounding alarms for years now about how constant digital stimulation reshapes the human brain. Dopamine is often described as the pleasure chemical, but that is not quite accurate. Dopamine is released most powerfully in anticipation, not fulfillment. It fires when your brain thinks something rewarding might be coming. Scroll. Click. Refresh. Repeat. Something new could be waiting. That anticipation loop is addictive precisely because it never resolves.

Over time, this does something profound to us. It lowers our tolerance for stillness. It makes quiet feel threatening. It makes boredom feel like failure.

Understanding the struggle of boredom

One well-documented study, you may have heard of (don’t Google AI it yet!) asked participants to sit alone in a room for fifteen minutes with no stimulation. No phone. No book. No music. Just their thoughts. Many participants chose to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than remain alone with their own minds. That is not because humans are simply masochists. It is because we have been trained to associate stimulation with safety.

So when boredom shows up, your nervous system reacts, your body tightens, your mind looks for an exit, and your soul reaches for anything that promises relief. Porn, with its endless novelty and intensity (especially as we foray into the “Age of AI”), becomes one of the fastest exits available.

This is why telling people to “just stop” has never worked.

The struggle is not merely behavioral. It is neurological. Emotional. Spiritual. It is about how we have learned to cope with being human in a world that never stops offering us anesthetic.

“How long, O Lord?”

And Scripture, remarkably, speaks directly into this. The Bible does not assume a constantly stimulated people; rather, the Word assumes a waiting people. A longing people. A restless people learning how to live with unmet desire. The Psalms are full of ache. Full of delay. Full of questions that are not answered quickly. “How long, O Lord?” is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the prayer of someone who has learned to stay present when relief does not come on demand.

“My soul thirsts for God” is not the language of instant gratification. It is the language of hunger endured. Have we, as Christians, forgotten how countercultural this is? The Bible consistently treats waiting not as punishment, but as maturation. “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” That renewal does not happen by accident. It happens because waiting retrains the heart. It slowly loosens the grip of demand and teaches trust instead. Porn short-circuits that process.

Porn promises renewal without waiting. Satisfaction without covenant. Intimacy without vulnerability. Control without cost. And every time we reach for it, our hearts learn the same lesson again: Do not wait. Do not trust. Do not endure. Escape.

God offers a better story

But here is the mercy of God: He does not just expose the lie. He offers a better story. Again and again, Scripture calls us to look, notice, and behold. “Consider the lilies.” “Look at the birds of the air.” “The heavens declare the glory of God.” “See what kind of love the Father has lavished on us.” This is not poetic filler. This is an invitation to Recover wonder.

Wonder, however, requires slowness. It requires attention. It requires the courage to stay present long enough for meaning to surface. Porn trains us to consume without wonder. To move on without noticing. To treat bodies, stories, and even our own souls as content.

Resisting porn, then, is not only about saying no to something harmful. It is about saying yes to a way of being human again. Psychologically, this is deeply grounded. Practices that slow the nervous system—silence, walking, prayer, reading, and yes, even boredom itself—increase emotional regulation and reduce compulsive behavior.

When the brain learns that stillness is survivable, urges lose some of their urgency. The need for immediate relief weakens.

Unshockingly, to those who know the One who designed the brain, Scripture calls this self-control. Psychology calls it delayed gratification. Both are describing the same reality from different angles. You are learning to say, “I do not need to obey every impulse to be okay.” That is not repression. That is freedom.

And this is where I have had to repent. Too often, I treat boredom like an enemy instead of a teacher. I rush to fill it before it has a chance to reveal anything. I numb it before it has time to speak. But boredom often exposes something life-altering. It exposes my limits. It exposes my longing. It exposes my fear of being alone with God when there is nothing to distract me. When I finally sit with it, I notice how quickly my thoughts scatter. How uncomfortable silence feels. How much I want to be entertained rather than transformed.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

And yet, this is exactly where God meets us. “Be still, and know that I am God.” That command is not cruel. It is the definition of kindness in a restless modern world that has lost the ability to wonder. It is God interrupting our frantic attempts at self-management and saying, “Let me be God here.” Stillness does not mean nothing is happening. It means something deeper finally has room to happen.

This is where wonder slowly returns.

Not as fireworks. Not as emotional highs. But as quiet recognition. The warmth of sunlight through a window. The sound of a child laughing in another room. The weight of Scripture in your hands. The ache you have been avoiding that finally comes into focus. Wonder is not excitement. Wonder is presence. And presence is something our age is starving for.

The more we Resist immediate stimuli, the more our capacity for joy expands. That joy becomes slower, deeper, and more durable. It does not disappear the moment the screen goes dark. This does not mean the struggle disappears per se, but the struggle does change.

Temptation still comes. Urges still arise. But they are no longer the loudest voice in the room. They become invitations to ask better questions: What am I really longing for right now? What am I trying to escape? What would it look like to bring this ache into the light instead of anesthetizing it?

And here is where the gospel matters most. Jesus did not escape discomfort. He entered it. He resisted the quick kingdoms offered to him, choosing waiting and suffering instead. He trusted the Father through silence and delay. He knows what it is to be human without anesthesia.

Which means when you are bored, restless, tempted, and tired, you are not meeting God at the edge of his patience. You are meeting him at the center of his compassion. He meets you before the click. Before the spiral. Before the shame. He does not just forgive failure. He restores humanity.

So Resist, yes—but Resist wisely. Resist the lie that boredom is meaningless. Resist the story that stillness is unsafe. Resist the voice that says stimulation is salvation.

Let yourself be bored for a moment. Sit with the discomfort without obeying it. Take a walk without filling the silence. Open the Psalms and pray someone else’s words when your own feel thin. Reach out to someone instead of disappearing into a screen. And when the urge says, “This feeling is unbearable,” answer it with the truth: This is not unbearable. This is the ache of being human in a broken world. And God is not absent here. He is forming you. He is retraining your heart. He is teaching you how to wonder again—and leading you to the wonder of wonders: the cross and the empty tomb.

 

Jonny Lehmann is an editor of the CtC newsletter. He, his wife Abbie, and three children live in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he serves as lead pastor at Divine Savior Church.