“Boredom might spark creativity because a restless mind hungers for stimulation,” writes Clive Thompson for Wired. A study showed that “the state of boredom contained three main sources of value: altered perception of time, awakened curiosity about the environment, and exploration of self,” reads the abstract of a paper by Professor Tim Loas from the University of East London published in the journal Qualitative Research in Psychology.

Want to make use of the finding? Try not scroll through your phone to “kill time.” Don’t kill it. Make use of the potentially creative state you’re in, instead of binging on the junk that is social media. Doing nothing can actually be important: “If we don’t allow ourselves periods of uninterrupted, freely associated thought, then personal growth, insight and creativity are less likely to emerge,” writes Manfred Kets De Vries, Insead Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change, for Forbes.

Just don’t take it to a crazy level and cut out coffee… Coffee, thinkers in the field suggest, could work against creativity by making you “too focused.” The problem? Creativity is associated with “the ability to link ideas, entities, and concepts in novel ways,” which usually comes at times when our mind is wandering, unfocused, as Maria Konnikova puts it in her The New Yorker article “How Caffeine can Cramp Creativity.”