My laboratory has long been fascinated by phenazines, a class of secreted redox-active metabolites produced by diverse soil bacteria, including the opportunistic human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. One important context where phenazines are made is in biofilms: multicellular aggregates that are found in environments ranging from the surfaces of plant roots to within the tissues of chronic human infections. Though phenazines were once thought to function primarily as antibiotics, we have found additional physiological functions for phenazines under anoxic conditions, including roles in signaling, energy conservation, and nutrient acquisition. Recently, we have shown that phenazines support a non-growth state where bacteria remain active at an extremely low metabolic rate. Such a maintenance state characterizes how most bacteria exist in nature and disease yet has been difficult to study due to a lack of a quantitative and mechanistically-tractable experimental system. In this talk, I will discuss our emerging insights into how phenazines sustain one of the lowest metabolic rates ever reported for any organism, the extent to which these insights are generalizable, and how they may be leveraged to control biofilm populations.