Are the Type of Daydreams You Have Affecting How Happy You Feel?

I have always been a daydreamer. Have you?

When we daydream we unknowingly wander into such an entirely private place that it is not a subject we often discuss nor something we often think about in relation to our daily lives, but whether you consider yourself to be a prolific daydreamer or not, we all spend from a third to a half of our waking hours daydreaming, albeit often without any conscious acknowledgement that we are doing so.

After all, a small moment of imaginary speculation as to how a conversation or situation may play out seems hardly worth noting when compared to long periods of time spent in quiet reverie in an entirely imagined world, rich in detail and with a completely fantastical story line.

You might think that this second kind of daydream is the less productive and more destructive kind. It is certainly the sort of stereotypical daydream we associate with a lack of engagement or interest in what is going on in the world around us. This is certainly the preconceived notion I had when I found myself searching for academic articles on the subject out of some vague concern that I perhaps daydream a little too much, knowing that at times it is far too easy for me to let my mind wander. I began to find a strange irony in the fact that I had written a post demonising television, berating it as a distraction and a vacuum on time and productivity, and yet found myself becoming just as easily drawn in to another kind of escapist fiction that is even more accessible and just as absorbing. At best I could perhaps argue that daydreaming is at least more like a podcast or audio-book than sitting down to watch TV, you can, after all, do other things while you daydream, although perhaps only mundane tasks opposed to anything which involves critical thinking.

It might be assumed then that daydreaming is merely a distraction from anything that is tedious or troubling. I had, for example, noticed that throughout my life that it was often during a challenging or unsettled time that I tended to daydream with greater absorption, and I had taken it to be a purely negative habit that only allows for distracted and inefficient productivity at best. Indeed at one time it was widely believed that prolific daydreaming was a sign of poor productivity and it was even scientifically considered to be a signal of impending or ongoing mental illness. However now there is more evidence that it is not necessarily how much time we spend daydreaming but the content of the daydream that has significant repercussions on how we feel and how we are able to cope with changing situations in our life.

There have been recent studies which suggest that daydreams can function as a means by which we can socio-emotionally adapt to changing situations, for example, during times of loneliness our daydreams may begin to consist of more complex and higher quality relationships, as a result of which we begin to feel less lonely and less isolated.

Most daydreams tend to have a feeling of absorption and dissociation from the world around us but the extent to which this is destructive has more to do with content than time spent. Negative and repetitive daydreams can cause dissociation where the person is absorbed as though they are in a ‘flow state’ or engrossed in a story, this continual focus on a very negative scenario or idea embeds itself as a very destructive pathway of thought which our mind then begins to habitually wander down with increasing regularity.

This has an inevitable impact on how we feel and how happy we are to the point that ‘re-scripting’ daydreams to be more positive may even help to prevent or reverse dissociation disorders where people feel isolated from the world around them and are experiencing a loss of identity.

This difference between negative and positive daydreams is something that had a great deal of resonance with me. I had taken the more positive storytelling day dreams, for their pure escapism, to be a negative use of time, and felt that they were potentially holding me back in as much as they were a distraction that kept me from being ‘present’ it what was happening in my own life from moment to moment.

Perhaps it is only because such daydreams are pleasant and enjoyable that a feeling of guilt is attached to them but the fact is that they have a much more positive effect on well-being than more negative thought processes. The only difference is that I hadn’t considered those negative thoughts to be daydreams at all, perhaps because they felt more like nightmares, they are both negative and repetitive and have an extremely detrimental impact on emotional health and well being.

They are those kinds of familiar scenarios that you imagine running over and over again, a conversation where you defend yourself against persistent feelings of guilt, where you try and justify your actions to someone in a conversation you are never likely to have in real life, or similarly a scenario where you are confronting someone who has upset, offended or angered you. These pervasive thoughts may not feel like daydreams, so lacking as they are in that starry-eyed quality, and yet they are just as absorbing, just as invasive on your daily thought processes and just as hard, if not harder to, break away from.

It was only through a persistent and concerted effort that, once I had realised I was living my life in such a self destructive way; absorbed as I was in feelings of anger, guilt and a sense of failure that were not a true reflection of the world around me, that I managed to slowly, although not entirely, shift my mind set and prevent my thoughts from wandering down these well worn paths of negative contemplation.

Another interesting concept that definitely rings true to me is that a feeling of being authentic and ‘true to yourself’ has a very real impact on how happy you feel and is inexorably linked to your well-being. This in turn can be hugely affected by the content of your daydreams.

Guilt and fear-of-failure daydreams create greater feelings of self-alienation and lead people to be much more accepting of external influences and therefore with a diminished sense of self that has an overall negative impact on well-being. Coming out of a more difficult period in my life I have definitely been struck with an uncomfortable feeling that I had no sense of self during that time, that I had lost my identity and ability to express myself in a way that was true to the kind of person I believed myself to be.

Taking all of this into consideration it could be assumed that fantastical daydreaming is actually a very positive thing especially given that such a great deal of our waking life is dedicated to daydreaming behaviour, whether we are conscious of it or not, and that switching the focus of that time to more positive idealised scenarios rather than manifestations of our anxieties could in fact lead us to make better sense of the world around us, allow us to be more adaptable to change, help us to create a more certain sense of self and ultimately makes us happier and more content.

Until I had looked into the psychology of daydreaming I had been in two minds; on the one hand I had thought of fantastical daydreaming in this more positive light, assuming that much like normal dreams it was my mind’s way of making better sense of the world around me and helping me to form my own opinions and responses to any challenges I was facing, on the other hand, in this world were so much import is given to dream-free meditation, being ‘present’, hyper-productivity and living in the moment, I feared it might just as easily be a slippery slope into a Better Than Life dissatisfaction that was more of an avoidance than an aide to dealing with the realities of life as they unfold around me.

A relief then, as someone who dreams, invents and creates endless stories, that it is the former. That in a life where we all spend up to half our waking days dreaming, that a fantastical and creative daydream is as much a help to our happiness and well-being as anxious and fretful daydreams are a hindrance that hold us back. That creating wild and inventive stories while you take a pause from work, undertake a mundane task or walk an unremembered path is neither childish nor fanciful, it is not unfocused nor a waste of time, it is self affirming and protective; our own worlds inside our heads help us to make sense of the real one, ceaselessly rolling on around us.

Sources

Poerio, G. L., Totterdell, P., Emerson, L.-M., & Miles, E. (2016). "Social daydreaming and adjustment: An experience-sampling study of socio-emotional adaptation during a life transition": Corrigendum. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article ID 174.

Tracking Potentiating States of Dissociation: An Intensive Clinical Case Study of Sleep, Daydreaming, Mood, and Depersonalization/Derealization Giulia L. Poerio, Peter Totterdell, Lisa-Marie Emerson & Eleanor Miles Pages 1197-1207 | Received 13 Jan 2015, Accepted 04 May 2015, Published online: 20 Jul 2015

Daydreams and the True Self: Daydreaming Styles Are Related to Authenticity Honey Williams, Matthew Vess Imagination, Cognition and Personality Vol 36, Issue 2, pp. 128 - 149 First Published May 22, 2016 https://doi.org/10.1177/0276236616646065

Science of Daydreaming Posted by DUJS / In Fall 2010 / February 3, 2011