Oh, sorry. I was distracted for a second. I have an article to write, but I was just imagining my trip to Greece later this month; thinking about the flavor of ice cream we might make in August at the beach; wondering if it’s true, as I read the other day, that books didn’t have spaces between words until the Middle Ages because no one read quietly to themselves.
In other words, I was daydreaming.
Or, put another way: I was saving my life.
In 1967, John Stewart, shortly before leaving the Kingston Trio, wrote a song called “Daydream Believer.” “I remember going to bed thinking, ‘What a wasted day—all I’ve done is daydream,’” Stewart said. “And from there, I wrote the whole song. I never thought it was one of my best songs.” After the song was turned down by two groups, the Monkees recorded it, turning it into a number one hit; Anne Murray also had a hit with it.
Today, more than 50 years later, a host of new research shows that Stewart was right: The rap against daydreaming is wrong. This essential life skill has many benefits—from planning for the future to creativity to improving friendships.
But only if you do it right.
Daydreaming, it seems fair to say, has a bad reputation. People have blamed it for being ruinous, costly, self-destructive, and dangerous. Freud called daydreamers infantile and neurotic; twentieth-century textbooks said daydreamers were headed for psychosis.
Right around the time that Stewart was writing “Daydream Believer,” however, Yale’s Jerome Singer started pushing back, saying that daydreaming is both commonplace and, at times, a welcome part of daily life. Singer identified three types of daydreaming.
The first type, which he considered harmful, is associated with “easy distractibility and difficulty concentrating.” Singer called this approach a sign of poor attentional control. As Scott Barry Kauffman, the author of Ungifted, summed up the prevailing view, “People with this style do not report elaborate daydreams and score low in conscientiousness,” which is the personality trait most often linked to success.
The second type, which Singer called guilty-dysphoric daydreaming, is associated with “unpleasant emotions such as anxiety, guilt, fear of failure, and obsessive, hostile, and aggressive fantasies about others.”
But the third type of daydreaming is associated with more openness, imagination, and a sense of adventure and exploration. This type, which Singer called positive-constructive daydreaming, has robust positive outcomes associated with happiness and creativity. Fortunately, it's the most common.
Here, based on the latest studies, are three reasons to enage in positive daydreaming.
1. YOU'LL BE BETTER AT PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
Daydreamers are better planners.
Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and Jonathan Schooler, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, along with several colleagues, found that subjects who engaged in mind-wandering, or what they call mental time travel, show greater skill at self-reflection and greater aptitude at planning ahead. I may not finish this article on time, but, hey, we’ll have great peach ice cream this summer!
The reason future planning is so important is that it stimulates parts of the brain associated with anticipation, which increases your self-worth and allows you to be more constructive.
“This propensity to simulate the future rather than dwell on the past,” the authors write, “is consistent with the viewpoint that the most obvious benefits of spontaneous thought emerge when people look forward rather than backward in time.”
In other words, when you let your mind wander toward what's to come, you'll both have a better tomorrow and do a better job of forgetting the pains of yesterday.
Daydreaming > Ruminating.
2. YOU'LL BE MORE CREATIVE
Daydreamers are more creative.
Benjamin Baird, also of the University of California, Santa Barbara, along with several colleagues, discovered that when we’re involved in completing an undemanding task, our minds wander to trying to solve a demanding problem we haven't yet cracaked. As we're vacuuming, say, we’re spending our unused brainpower working through what paint color we might want to put on the trim or what joke we might want to include at the start of that wedding toast.
“Engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial improvements in performance on previously encountered problems,” the authors write.
Stuck on a mental problem you can’t untangle? Clean your toilets! Your house will be tidier, and your problem is likely to be resolved in a more inventive way.
3. YOU'LL HAVE DEEPER RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS
Daydreamers are better friends.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, of UCLA and colleagues found in reviewing daydreaming research that what they call “constructive internal reflection” improves a wide range of socio-emotional skills, including compassion, empathy, simulating the perspective of others, and deriving meaning from social encounters.
“Rest is not idleness,” they write. Rest is productive.
All of us, especially children, find ourselves in social situations that we can't entirely explain. We use daydreaming to work throught those problems. The authors write that forcing children in particular to focus exclusively on what they call "high-attention demands" may hamper children's ability to be socially adaptive.
The costs of daydreaming are often "public and visible,” the authors warn, but the benefits are often “private and hidden.” As important as concentration is, it's not the only skill we need. We also need time within our busy days to process the painful and confusing parts of our relationships that require the types of creativity and future-planning that daydreaming improves.
The moral of this story is that our minds know what's good for us. Instead of pigeonholing the wandering mind as the lazy mind, we should see it as a more adaptable one.
So cheer up, sleepy Jean.
Now we know what it means.
To be a daydream believer.
Means having bigger dreams.
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