Daydreaming Can Help: If You Do It Like This

Do you remember those days back in school where your eyes would wander around the room, settle on a space, and feel so comfortable on that spot that you would just zone out, leave the room, and ponder around in your mind? Dreams you never thought possible suddenly become more real.

• You’re an astronaut floating in space.
• You’re giving your winning Oscar speech.
• You’re sailing the high seas, shouting at the helm of a ship.

And then, your teacher shouts at you. They ask you a question. You freeze because for the last few minutes you were far, far away. You get reprimanded, and the other students laugh. You hang your head in embarrassment.

Daydreaming lives in what scientists call the default mode network. Because of this, for many years they associated daydreaming with a period of rest, but with better technology, we’ve been able to see the brain's areas where daydream curves are actually the same areas that light up when we revisit a memory and when we think about our game plans or goals.

• As we get older, we lose the ease of that wandering idea.
• As we get older, our minds wander around our worries instead of our dreams.
• And since daydreaming is often about anticipating the future, as we get older, we have less for that future to happen.

In a sense, the future begins to shrink, and so too does the amount of time that we spend daydreaming.

According to research, when people daydream, they forget about what they were doing before the dream started, and the type of daydream affects how much you forget. In their research studies, scientists asked people to dream about their childhood home. The older subjects forgot the interrupted task more than the younger subjects, which shows the further back in time we dream, the bigger the forgetting effect has on us. And that’s not all. If you daydream about, say, being a lawyer, and you have a parent who’s a lawyer, then you’re forgetting effect will be minimal because that seems achievable, but if you daydream about becoming an astronaut, the forgetting effect will be far greater.

“The bigger your dream, the more brainpower you need for it!”

This means that sometimes daydreaming has to turn off other parts of your brain. Our brains, they’ve got main systems, the analytical part that helps us to make decisions, and the compassionate part that allows us to have empathy for other people.

Now usually, when we are busy with an analytical task, our compassionate brain turns off. It might be why a genuinely kind person could work for a medical insurance company and calmly input all the details of people being denied chronic medications, and likewise, when we were engaged in empathy and compassion, the analytical part of our brain rests. With daydreaming, we cycle through compassion and analysis every few seconds, so the brain turns both sides on and off, and this is an incredible tool because it allows you to work through two opposite problems at the same time, something you wouldn’t be able to do if you were engaged with a specific task. In this setting, your reasoning becomes clearer and you’re able to take away numbers and emotions to see the true solution.

As your daydreaming mind cycles through different parts of your brain, you’re able to access information that would usually be out of reach. Suddenly, you can connect different pieces of details that seemed unrelated to each other just a few moments ago. You might suddenly realize why your friend is being acting kind of weird with you lately. Well, a few weeks ago you snubbed their lunch invite and while they’re not usually sensitive, it did seem like they wanted to tell you something important. Or maybe a light bulb goes off about why your manager seems to be giving all the fun projects to your colleague. Well, a few months ago everyone went out after work and you went home. Perhaps they had a conversation about it and your colleague highlighted the kind of work they enjoy doing.

You know, we spend half of our mental activity daydreaming. Every day about a third of your waking hours is spent in some kind of daydream. We can either see it as a waste of time and energy or we can use it to our advantage. As we get older, because our goals are more fixed, realistic, and achievable, our daydreams are a lot more controllable. Now, we can’t control every move in our daydreams — that would defeat the purpose, but we can direct it to specific situations and allow it to wander from there.

From work projects and your personal life to your health and your finances, if you pick one key topic, start off there, your wondering brain will often move around in that area and if you let it go far enough without feeling guilty about staring off into space, then you might just be able to work through some of your most and nagging issues. When your mind crosses over into free-moving associative thought, which is a path that you aren’t directly, then you can get a lot of ideas and positive emotions, almost like you’ve just downloaded them out of somewhere. Daydreaming can help you think about your goals, navigate your relationships, and reflect on your past more clearly than when you were directing the thought. It’s like the opposite of manifestation, and it still works.

Scientists say there are two processes to free flow day treatment: The generative fates, which is driven by the default network. Now, this phase is spontaneous and unprompted. After the generative fates, the second process kicks in. Here your best ideas are selected, developed, and pursued. Now, while it may seem random, your brain's logical thinking is still working because the executive network is active. Daydreaming is like the perfect synchronization of the imagination of the default network and the logic of the executive network. Together, they’re unstoppable.

Daydreaming turns your brain into a supercomputer that flies through thousands of random events and situations, picks out the best ones, and works through them. So, the next time you find yourself drifting off, just go with it, readers. Go daydream and be that astronaut once again. You’ll be better off because you did!

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