system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do people go insane when they spend long periods of time by themselves?
gpt
We have this thing called "stress". However what most people don't know is that the opposite end of stress is actually boredom. While stress is mental exhaustion due to an overabundance of problems to solve, boredom is mental exhaustion due to a lack of problems to solve. The brain doesn't get to "turn off" so it is always working, like a computer with the "idle" process. The problem is that the "idle" process is not always a good thing to do in the brain (useful sometimes, but not too much).

As with stress, every person deals with boredom differently. Some go crazy, some do not, some thrive in it. Just as stress is useful at work as a VERY temporary state to get people to super-focus, boredom is a useful tool by making someone very bored, they retrospect and turn to the stimulus of their memories and inner thoughts, thus igniting creativity.

However as we all know, too much stress is really REALLY bad for you. Exactly the same problem with boredom.