From the A.C. Grace Company Blog
© 2012 Health Realizations, Inc.
“I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.”
— Stephen Wright, American actor, writer, comedian
Daydreaming, long associated with the procrastinator or the lazy student in the back of the classroom, has gotten a bad rap — unfairly it now seems. For a while daydreaming was often looked down on as something to be done only in extreme moderation, and even then only on a rare summer day, preferably in a hammock.
It turns out this pastime may actually be good for you.
“If your mind didn’t wander, then you’d be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now,” Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara said in The Boston Globe. “But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded.”
A daydream, it turns out, is actually your brain’s “default” mode, a fundamental element that allows you to imagine, create and process thoughts. This is great news given that daydreaming may take up a full one-third of our waking lives!
Four Top Reasons to Daydream Intentionally — Starting Today
A daydream is much more than just a silly fantasy to keep you from getting bored at work. Following are some very real benefits that daydreaming has to offer, and if you’re interested in securing some of them for yourself, well, you know what to do.
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- Activate your brain’s “executive network.” This is the area of your brain associated with high-level, complex problem-solving. According to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the less people were aware their minds were wandering, the more this “executive network,” and also the “default network” associated with easy, routine mental activity, were activated.
What this means is if you’re trying to solve a complicated problem, engaging yourself with a simple task, then letting your mind wander, may help.
- Improve your relationships and social interactions. When you daydream, your ability to think abstractly flourishes. And most often, we think abstractly about “what if” scenarios relating to people and social situations in our lives, which may help you to be more empathetic in real life.
- Boost your creativity. People who engage in more daydreaming score higher on experimental measures of creativity, according to research by Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- Increase your success. Daydreaming about achieving a particular goal you have, such as winning an upcoming marathon or getting into grad school, can actually help you achieve it. This type of daydreaming, sometimes called visualization, helps you to become more self-aware, and may actually count as “practice” to your brain that helps you during the actual event.