If you pay attention at every moment, you form a new relationship to time. Your own absorption slows you down internally. That slowing down feeds your sense of deep appreciation and at the same time produces more energy. In some magical way, by slowing down you become more efficient, productive, and energetic, focusing without distraction directly on the task in front of you. Not only do you become immersed in that moment; you become that moment.

As Nietzsche (who also credited boredom with breathing life into some of his most influential ideas) put it, “for thinkers and sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable windless calm of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.

Psychologists also remind us that boredom is a more fertile mother of invention than necessity, and that it can stimulate very un-Nietzschean pro-social thoughts as well as a heightened sense of self-awareness, a perspective that is theologized in Zen Buddhism.

Boredom can be a useful tool for a psychoanalyst. It can be a sign that the patient is avoiding a particular subject; that he or she is unable to talk directly about something intimate or embarrassing. Or it can mean that patient and psychoanalyst are stuck; the patient is returning again and again to some desire or grievance that the psychoanalyst is failing to tackle. A boring person might be feeling envious, and might kill a conversation – disrupting it or paralysing it – because he cannot bear to hear a helpful or compelling idea coming from someone else. Or the boring patient may be playing possum – just as there are beasts in the jungle that survive by playing dead, some people, when frightened, simply shut down. It’s also true that psychoanalyst and patient will sometimes unconsciously collude to desiccate the atmosphere between them because they fear things becoming too emotionally disturbed, or too exciting.

In general, an energizing relationship enlivens and invigorates you, and it gives you a sense of connection and belonging that remains after the two of you part ways. It makes you feel better than you would feel if you were alone.

A depleting relationship induces tension, frustration, or anxiety, and makes you feel worried, or even demoralized. In some ways, it makes you feel lesser or more disconnected than you would feel if you were alone.

This doesn’t mean that an energizing relationship will make you feel good all the time or that a depleting relationship will make you feel bad all the time.