One season of the show takes around three months to film, according to Leslie Hughes, a contestant on The Bachelor during Sean Lowe's season. The cast is cut off from all forms of media, social and otherwise, and also aren't able to have books, cellphones, computers, or music. Hughes: "The only things I was allowed to keep were my journal and my Bible." In other words, your only entertainment in Bachelorland is you, your castmates, and lots of alcohol.

"We were so bored all day," Olivia Caridi, a contestant on Season 20 of The Bachelor, told Allure. "There was so much downtime. We were always doing beauty routines because that was literally all we had time to do."

What else do the contestants do to pass the time? Daniel MacGuire (from Season 12 of The Bachelorette starring JoJo Fletcher, and Season 3 of Bachelor in Paradise) told The Verge that on The Bachelorette, "three or four guys brought guitars... but [the producers] often didn't want them to do that... they want everyone to engage with each other, they want everyone to be talking.... They want dialogue and talking and discussion and that kind of stuff, they don't want people to go off and listen to music." There's no gym in the mansion, but, according to Molly Mesnick (The Bachelor Season 13), "there's a hill in the back that girls would run up to exercise." Brian Osbourne, from The Bachelorette Season 10, told Wet Paint that contestants played games, like Cards Against Humanity, checkers, and chess.