By Emily Reynolds. How do you deal with boredom? And does being bored even come with some benefits? Here’s the research on boredom, digested.

Feeling bored? Instead of fighting it, embrace boredom, make friends with it, learn from it, and see where it takes you

Technology keeps us constantly stimulated. What do we lose when we no longer have nothing to do?

A job is boring or monotonous when it ceases to become interesting to the individual performing. Monotony is not a characteristic of a particular job. It is characteristic of the worker and the job at a particular time. A job that looks boring or monotonous to one individual may arouse the interest of another individual.

Boredom teaches us that life isn’t a parade of amusements. More important, it spawns creativity and self-sufficiency.

Today’s teens are still bored, often incredibly so. They’re just more likely to experience a new type of boredom: phone bored.

Every emotion has a purpose—an evolutionary benefit,” says Sandi Mann, a psychologist and the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good. “I wanted to know why we have this emotion of boredom, which seems like such a negative, pointless emotion.” That’s how Mann got started in her specialty: boredom.