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5 Positive Effects of Daydreaming

Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Margaret Seide, MS, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of depression, addiction, and eating disorders. 

Thomas Barwick

When we daydream, our mind wanders to faraway places, putting us in a dream-like state even when fully awake. Research suggests that as much as 50% of our waking hours are spent daydreaming. This may leave you concerned that you are wasting time or not as productive as you'd like .

Certainly, daydreaming isn't always a good idea—such as when you're driving or in another situation where attention is required. However, as long as it's safe to do so, giving yourself permission to get lost in a daydream can provide several positive effects, such as these.

Daydreaming Reduces Stress and Anxiety

Daydreaming breaks are not just fun; they are necessary. Our brains cannot maintain focus and productivity nonstop. Good brain health requires regular periods of relaxation. When these periods involve letting our mind wander, it helps reduce our anxiety.

By tuning out the noisy “outside” world, you allow your thoughts to flow freely. This fosters mental relaxation and exploration by putting us in an alpha wave state. While in the alpha zone, we are calm and don't think of anything with forced vigor.

After a long day at work or a disagreement with a friend, let your mind float away to something completely unrelated and pleasurable. This can help you distance yourself from worrisome circumstances .

Having a tool like daydreaming at our disposal is useful especially when we deal with perceived threats or overly busy environments. It’s another tool in your mental health toolkit to evade stress and anxiety.

If you feel yourself getting more and more anxious , take these steps to help you get into a more relaxed daydreaming state:

• Look away from your desk, work, or any distractions.
• Next, breathe in deeply. Then breathe out slowly. Repeat.
• Lastly, think of something pleasant that has meaning to you.

Mindful Moment

Need a breather? Take this free  9-minute meditation for enjoying the little moments in your day —or choose from our  guided meditation library  to find another one that will help you feel your best.

You might imagine yourself at your favorite spot where you like to hike in the woods. Or you might think about that new car you’d like to buy. What color would it be? What features would it have? Can you imagine yourself feeling great in the driver’s seat?

Daydreaming Helps Us Solve Problems

Daydreams aren’t merely mini-escapes. Allowing your thoughts to roam around revitalizes you. Most of us can benefit from approaching our problems with a fresh perspective. You're able to return to them more refreshed. 

Besides having a fresh perspective, daydreaming seems to work better than trying to force a solution. In a study that tracked different patterns of internal thought, researchers concluded that mind-wandering is important and good for us. It seems that this cognitive process leads to new ideas.

By just hammering away at something steadfastly, you may be overlooking all sorts of information. But freely associating can enable your mind to flit from memories to something you read and then back to something you imagine.

In other words, daydreaming can lead you down a sort of magical yellow brick road to insights. These insights may help you solve your problems . So, if you’re stumped by a problem, instead of trying harder to solve it, try the opposite. Daydream and then daydream even more.

While it might sound unusual, letting our thoughts drift can help us solve problems when focusing on them does not work.

Daydreaming Uses Diverse Parts of the Brain

If you’ve ever noticed, children’s minds wander constantly. It’s no secret that the young daydream a lot. Yet, having your "head in the clouds" as some people describe daydreaming, turns out to be more than a simple or diversionary pastime.

What’s happening in your brain while daydreaming is pretty sophisticated. As your mind wanders, you are using diverse aspects of your brain. Both the brain's executive problem-solving network and creativity network are working simultaneously.

As we activate these different brain areas , we can access information that might have previously been out of reach or dormant. Therefore, boredom or idleness serves a great purpose. It inspires us to daydream, which forges important connections across our brains.

Daydreaming Helps Us Reach Goals

How can meandering thoughts help you reach your goals ? These stray thoughts are indeed unguided, but research reveals they are often motivated by the goals we have.

Athletes and performers sometimes use purposeful daydreaming to practice before a game or performance. This method pre-wires their brains for success. It’s like practicing mentally rather than physically for an outcome you desire. This kind of structured daydreaming or imagining is popular in sports psychology .

While a fantasy-based daydream like morphing into a superhero might end up disappointing or frustrating you because it’s too far-fetched, a structured daydream is more realistic. It invites you to think through steps you’d take, ways to stay motivated , and how to overcome obstacles .

Daydreaming Expands Our Creativity

Daydreaming is correlated with higher levels of creativity. This is due, at least in part, to both using similar cognitive processes and sharing common brain functions.

Daydreaming is especially helpful for boosting creativity when it is problem-oriented. That said, relentlessly drilling down on a complex problem doesn’t result in the discovery of new solutions. So, take a break. The mind will still incubate on the issue at hand.

Bianca L. Rodriguez , Ed.M, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist says, “That's why most of us have aha moments while doing mundane things, like washing the dishes where we don't have to focus too hard on the task at hand, which allows space in our psyche to receive and reveal new information.” 

When your mind doesn’t have to ride on a narrow track, it reorganizes all the tidbits of information and forms new and unexpected connections. Being distracted and allowing your mind to wander is powerfully positive.  

Rodriguez adds that daydreaming is “exercise for your mind.” She elaborated further, saying, “We are rarely taught to allow our minds to wander. It's like only tending to one tree in a gigantic forest. Daydreaming allows your mind to zoom out and see the whole forest, which creates a different perspective and invites creativity.”

Daydreaming has gotten a bad rap, yet it affords us many benefits. If you are frustrated by a situation or problem, or you simply want to expand your imagination or creativity, give daydreaming a try and see what mental pathways might open up for you.

Poerio GL, Totterdell P, Emerson LM, Miles E. Social daydreaming and adjustment: An experience-sampling study of socio-emotional adaptation during a life transition . Front Psychol . 2016;7:13. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00013

Pillay S. Brain science suggests "mind wandering" can help manage anxiety . Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School.

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Poerio GL, Smallwood J. Daydreaming to navigate the social world: What we know, what we don't know, and why it matters . Soc Personal Psychol Compass . 2016;10(11):605-618. doi:10.1111/spc3.12288

Ridderinkhof KR, Brass M. How kinesthetic motor imagery works: A predictive-processing theory of visualization in sports and motor expertise . J Physiol Paris . 2015;109(1-3):53-63. doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2015.02.003

Sun J, He L, Chen Q, Yang W, Wei D, Qiu J. The bright side and dark side of daydreaming predict creativity together through brain functional connectivity . Human Brain Map . 2021;43(3):902-914. doi:10.1002/hbm.25693

Baer M, Dane E, Madrid HP. Zoning out or breaking through? Linking daydreaming to creativity in the workplace . Acad Manage J . 2021;64(5):1553-1577. doi:10.5465/amj.2017.1283

By Barbara Field Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women's issues.

Why Daydreaming Is So Good For You

O ften derided and the topic of many a teacher’s report card comment daydreaming, or mind-wandering, is generally seen as an undesirable activity, especially among school-age children from whom the education system demands unrelenting focus. “Monica likes to daydream,” notes home to my Mom would read. “I do wonder what she is thinking about.” And yet, on average, we daydream nearly 47% of our waking hours . If our brain spends nearly half of our awake time doing it, there is probably a good reason why.

The term “daydreaming” was coined by Julien Varendonck in 1921 in his book The Psychology of Day-Dreams (with a foreword by Sigmund Freud, so sort-of a big deal). While Varendonck and Freud saw benefits to daydreaming, the past 20 years have yielded research that portrays daydreaming as “a cognitive control failure,” with some researchers out of Harvard recently declaring “a wandering mind is not a happy mind.” An exception to that opinion was one held by the late eminent psychologist Jerome Singer, who spent most of his professional life researching daydreaming (he preferred the term to “mind-wandering”). Singer identified three types of daydreaming, and while two can have negative impacts, one is quite beneficial.

The first is “guilty dysphoric” or fear-of-the-future daydreaming, when we either think about the past, perseverating on a negative experience (like reliving a tough phone call over and over), or we catastrophize the future (like imagining failing spectacularly at an upcoming work presentation). Then there is “poor attentional control , ” where a person struggles to focus on a particular thought or task, particularly troublesome for those with attention deficits. These two kinds of daydreaming don’t have identifiable benefits . But the third type, “positive constructive daydreaming ( PCD),” where we cast our mind forward and imagine future possibilities in a creative, positive way, can be quite beneficial. Helpful for planning and creativity, PCD is the bridge that links our internal observations with the forecasting required for future exploration.

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Philosophers have long stressed the importance of the type of inner reflection associated with PCD. Most of the enlightenment philosophers like Diderot, Locke, and Kant believed it was inward reflection, not external drivers, that empowered humanity to direct their own lives and lead themselves. In his 1690 work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke ponders the term “consciousness,” describing it as the “perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” For Locke, consciousness was “inseparable from thinking” and represented an integral awareness of the working of our own mind. To him, open observation of our internal consciousness paved the way for curious exploration of our external world.

The part of our brain most often associated with daydreaming is called the “default mode network” (DMN). The term “default mode” refers to the part of our brain associated with our resting state and is responsible for our ability to reflect on our own consciousness and internal narrative. The DMN is an anti-correlational system active during contemplation like daydreaming and quiet when our working memory becomes engaged. The DMN is also something of a hub, with lots of connections running through it that impact a host of other activity patterns. But more interesting and somewhat mysterious, the DMN is responsible for much of our abstract conceptual thought —the introspective, self-referential kind that separates us from primates—and it recalls and constructs social scenarios to help us make meaning of our life.

While the DMN can become disrupted during cognitive decline, such as dementia, PCD can actually thicken the cerebral cortex, or what’s known as our brain’s gray matter, the thinning of which is associated with the cognitive decline of aging . While this link isn’t fully understood yet, we know that a well-functioning default mode network—where we cast our mind’s eye forward in time or reflect on our past experience (as in positive constructive daydreaming)—plays a pivotal role in our healthy mental functioning , in areas like memory consolidation, planning, and impulse control.

Despite the benefits, we are conditioning daydreaming out of our kids—and in turn, out of our adult lives as well. Daydreaming is strongly discouraged in the majority of traditional learning environments, Most schools dwell so much on an assumption of high attentional demand that they’ve failed to balance the potential benefit of PCD’s “constructive internal reflection.” When we consider that daydreaming is a hallmark of ADD/ADHD, one has to question if neurodivergent children are being labeled as “underachievers” or “troublemakers” for simply engaging in an activity we all do with frequency, but one that doesn’t fit within the rigid strictures of the modern education system.

Rather than demonizing daydreaming, we should protect it, nurture it, honor it—if not for the raft of physiological and psychological benefits, then for the potential societal benefits. People who daydream are more reflective, have a deeper sense of compassion, and show more moral decision-making. And ultimately, children who are more reflective, compassionate, and moral grow up to be the adults who build a more just society.

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80 Dreaming Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best dreaming topic ideas & essay examples, ✍️ interesting topics to write about dreaming, 🔖 good essay topics on dreaming, ❓ research questions about dreams.

• The Importance of Sleeping and Dreaming Finally, I would not take this pill since I love seeing dreams and realize that this “miracle medicine” will cause too many negative consequences.
• Dreaming in Christianity and Islam Indeed, I was influenced mainly by the studies that explained this phenomenon from the point of continuous activity of people’s minds that processes daily routine during the night.
• Dreaming, Consciousness and Cognition For instance, the behaviorist supposition that the brain is always awakened and only from the external by sense organ procedures cannot define daydreams; likewise, for the statement that consciousness is the straight or restricted product […]
• Dreams and the Process of Dreaming Analysis Dreams are said to be like opening a door to the rest of the mind, all of one’s friends, fears, phobias, hopes, wishes, good times, and bad times are there.
• Lucid Dreaming in Science Fiction and Technology The author provides an interesting and intriguing article about the phenomenon of lucid dreaming and its representation in culture and media.
• Impoverished and Excessive Dreaming Many patients saw a dog in their dreams that tried to bite them; they began to defend themselves or hit the dog, and, in reality, they hit their spouses or walls/beds.
• Nature and Functions of Dreaming Still, other researchers argue that one of the key functions of dreams is to maintain our bodily and psychological health. To conclude, it is obvious that many suggestions have been put forward by researchers about […]
• Kertha Gosa Ceiling vs. “Dreaming” paintings by Aborigines of Australia Over a long period, Aborigine’s paintings have advanced to the point of intertwining with the public dissertation, with a great recognition in Australia and the rest of the world.
• Concept of Dreaming Theories in Psychology One of the theories that are common is the belief that dreams occur as a result of the human mind trying to incorporate external stimuli while one is sleeping.
• The Use of Illusion Argument, Dreaming Argument, and Evil Genius Argument by Descartes
• The Centrality of the Dreaming and Its Importance for Aboriginal Spirituality
• An Overview of the Dream State and the Concept of Human Dreaming
• Animal Dreaming and Substantiation a Connection to Humanity
• Understanding the Unconscious Dreaming
• Exploring Predictors of Lucid Dreaming Skills
• Dreams, Dreaming and Phases of Sleep
• A Neuropsychodynamic View of Dreaming
• Dreaming in Religion and Pilgrimage: Cognitive and Cultural Perspectives
• Examining the Changing Conception of Dreaming in Psychoanalytic Theory
• Phenomenology of Dreaming
• The Beauty of Dreaming: How Dreams Drive the Individual
• The Dreaming and Traditional Aboriginal Spirituality
• Freud’s Theory of Dreaming and Repression
• Sleeping and Dreaming and Theories of Sleep
• Investigating Dreaming in Cognitively Diverse Older Adults
• Gender and Dreaming in Mapuche Shamanistic Practices
• The Benefits of Lucid Dreaming
• An Overview of the Controversy of Dreaming, a Cognitive Activity During Sleep
• Discussing the Value of Dreaming and Sharing Dreams in Relations
• The Importance of Dreaming and Sleeping
• Procrastination and Daydreaming
• The Psychological Theories of the Function of Dreaming
• Difference Between Astral Projection and Lucid Dreaming
• Dreaming as Significant Process in Human Life Experience
• Exploring Causes of Sleep Difficulty and Dreaming Problems
• Dreams and Dreaming: Nightmares in Children
• Dreaming Can Bring Misery in “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott
• Alpha-Function and the Dreaming Dyad in Psychoanalytic Process
• The Effect of Childhood Emotional Abuse and Neglect on Disturbed Dreaming Frequency
• Dreaming and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Understanding the Science of Dreaming Through Oneirology
• The Importance of Dreaming and the Sub-Conscious
• Lucid Dreaming as a Tool for Development and Innovation
• The Sleep/Dream State Frequencies of Consciousness
• Comparing and Contrasting Psychological Theories of Dreaming
• The Skeptical Dreaming Argument of Rene Descartes, and the Priori and the Posteriori
• Examining the Connection Between Dreaming, the Brain, and Mental Functioning
• Intentionally Awakening From Sleep Through Lucid Dreaming
• Synchroncities in the History of Paranormal Dreaming
• What Dreams May Come True?
• What Every Athlete Dreams, of but Few Achieve?
• What Makes Your Friend’s Dreams Come True?
• What Does the Bible Say About Dreams?
• When Dreams and Reality Collide?
• Why Do We Forget Dreams?
• Why Are Dreams Interesting for Philosophers?
• What Makes a Nightmare a Nightmare?
• What’s the Most Common Nightmare?
• What Are the Most Typical Nightmare Themes and What Do They Mean?
• Why Are Dreams Important to Duddy Kravitz?
• Why Do People Dream and What the Dreams Mean?
• What Are Dreams, and Do They Affect Us in a Good Way or a Bad Way?
• What Are the Key Similarities and Differences Between Freud and Jung’s Theories of Dreams?
• What Are You Doing to Achieve Your Dreams?
• How Dreams Affect Our Personalities?
• How Dreams and Omens Support the Theme of Interconnection?
• How Can Dreams Sustain People Through Life, or Can Break Them Down When It Doesn’t Come True?
• How Do Dreams Have Symbolic Meaning?
• How Women Follow Their Dreams Without Embarrassment?
• How Do Different People Use Different Things to Escape Life Problems or Find Motivation to Dreams?
• Can Dreams Tell the Future?
• Are Dreams Messages From Our Subconscious Mind or Insignificant Manifest?
• Are Dreams the Reason for Mythology?
• Can Blind Person See Dreams?
• What Are the Most Rare Dreams?
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• Can You Learn From Your Dreams?
• Do We Dream Differently Across the World?
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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Dream — The Effects of Daydreaming: Nurturing Creativity and Fostering Reflection

The Effects of Daydreaming: Nurturing Creativity and Fostering Reflection

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Published: Sep 1, 2023

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Enhancing creativity and innovation, fostering self-reflection and emotional regulation, cautions and limitations of daydreaming.

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Living in a Dream World: The Role of Daydreaming in Problem-Solving and Creativity

Daydreaming can help solve problems, trigger creativity, and inspire great works of art and science. When it becomes compulsive, however, the consequences can be dire

By Josie Glausiusz

When Rachel Stein (not her real name) was a small child, she would pace around in a circle shaking a string for hours at a time, mentally spinning intricate alternative plots for her favorite television shows. Usually she was the star—the imaginary seventh child in The Brady Bunch , for example. “Around the age of eight or nine, my older brother said, ‘You’re doing this on the front lawn, and the neighbors are looking at you. You just can’t do it anymore,’ ” Stein recalls. So she retreated to her bedroom, reveling in her elaborate reveries alone. As she grew older, the television shows changed—first General Hospital , then The West Wing —but her intense need to immerse herself in her imaginary world did not.

“There were periods in my life when daydreaming just took over everything,” she recalls. “I was not in control.” She would retreat into fantasy “any waking moment when I could get away with it. It was the first thing I wanted to do when I woke up in the morning. When I woke up in the night to go to the bathroom, it would be bad if I got caught up in a story, because then I couldn’t go back to sleep.” By the time she was 17, Stein was exhausted. “I love the daydreams, but I just felt it was consuming my real life. I went to parties with friends, but I just couldn’t wait to get home. There was nothing else that I wanted to do as much as daydreaming.”

Convinced that she was crazy, she consulted six different therapists, none of whom could find anything wrong with her. The seventh prescribed Prozac, which had no effect. Eventually Stein began taking another antidepressant, Luvox, which, like Prozac, is also a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor but is usually prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Gradually she brought her daydreaming under control. Now age 37, she is a successful lawyer, still nervously guarding her secret world.

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The scientific study of people such as Stein is helping researchers better understand the role of daydreaming in normal consciousness—and what can happen when this process becomes unhealthy. For most of us, daydreaming is a virtual world where we can rehearse the future, explore fearful scenarios or imagine new adventures without risk. It can help us devise creative solutions to problems or prompt us, while immersed in one task, with reminders of other important goals. For others, however, the draw of an alternative reality borders on addiction, choking off other aspects of everyday life, including relationships and work. Starring as idealized versions of themselves—as royalty, raconteurs and saviors in a complex, ever changing cast of characters—addictive daydreamers may feel enhanced confidence and validation. Their fantasies may be followed by feelings of dread and shame, and they may compare the habit to a drug or describe an experience akin to drowning in honey.

The recent discovery of a network in the brain dedicated to autobiographical mental imagery is helping researchers understand the multiple purposes that daydreaming serves in our lives. They have dubbed this web of neurons “the default network,” because when we are not absorbed in more focused tasks, the ­network fires up. The default network appears to be essential to generating our sense of self, suggesting that daydreaming plays a crucial role in who we are and how we integrate the outside world into our inner lives. Cognitive psychologists are now also examining how brain disease may impair our ability to meander mentally and what the consequences are when we just spend too much time, well, out to lunch.

Videos in the Mind’s Eye Most people spend about 30 percent of their waking hours spacing out, drifting off, lost in thought, woolgathering, in a brown study or building castles in the air. Yale University emeritus psychology professor Jerome L. Singer defines daydreaming as shifting attention “away from some primary physical or mental task toward an unfolding sequence of private responses” or, more simply, “watching your own mental videos.” The 86-year-old Singer, who published a lyrical account of his decades of research on daydreams in his 1975 book, The Inner World of Daydreaming (Harper & Row), divides daydreaming styles into two main categories: “positive-constructive,” which includes upbeat and imaginative thoughts, and “dysphoric,” which encompasses visions of failure or punishment. Most people experience both kinds to a small or large degree.

Other scientists distinguish between mundane musings and extravagant fantasies. Michael Kane, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, considers “mind wandering” to be “any thoughts that are unrelated to one’s task at hand.” In his view, mind wandering is a broad category that may include everything from pondering ingredients for a dinner recipe to saving the planet from alien invasion. Most of the time when people fall into mind wandering, they are thinking about everyday concerns, such as recent encounters and items on their to-do list. More exotic daydreams in the style of James Thurber’s grandiose fictional fantasist Walter Mitty—such as Mitty’s dream of piloting an eight-engine hydroplane through a hurricane—are rare.

Humdrum concerns figured prominently in one study that rigorously measured how much time we spend mind wandering in daily life. In a 2009 study Kane and his colleague Jennifer McVay asked 72 U.N.C. students to carry PalmPilots that beeped at random intervals eight times a day for a week. The subjects then recorded their thoughts at that moment on a questionnaire. About 30 percent of the beeps coincided with thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Mind wandering increased with stress, boredom or sleepiness or in chaotic environments and decreased with enjoyable tasks. That may be because enjoyable activities tend to grab our attention.

Intense focus on our problems may not always lead to immediate solutions. Instead allowing the mind to float freely can enable us to access unconscious ideas hovering beneath the surface—a process that can lead to creative insight, according to psychologist Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

We may not even be aware that we are daydreaming. We have all had the experiencing of “reading” a book yet absorbing nothing—moving our eyes over the words on a page as our attention wanders and the text turns into gibberish. “People oftentimes don’t realize that they’re daydreaming while they’re daydreaming; they lack what I call ‘meta-awareness,’ consciousness of what is currently going on in their minds,” he says. Aimless rambling across the moors of our imaginings may allow us to stumble on ideas and associations that we may never find if we strive to seek them.

A Key to Creativity Artists and scientists are well acquainted with such playful fantasizing. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, imagined “another world,” to which he retreated as a child, where he was “someone else, somewhere else ... in my grandmother’s sitting room, I’d pretend to be inside a submarine.” Albert Einstein pictured himself running along a light wave—a reverie that led to his theory of special relativity. Filmmaker Tim Burton daydreamed his way to Hollywood success, spending his childhood holed up in his bedroom, creating posters for an imaginary horror film series.

Why should daydreaming aid creativity? It may be in part because the waking brain is never really at rest. As psychologist Eric Klinger of the University of Minnesota explains, floating in unfocused mental space serves an evolutionary purpose: when we are engaged with one task, mind wandering can trigger reminders of other, concurrent goals so that we do not lose sight of them. Some researchers believe that increasing the amount of imaginative daydreaming we do or replaying variants of the millions of events we store in our brains can be beneficial. A painful procedure in a doctor’s office, for example, can be made less distressing by visualizations of soothing scenes from childhood.

Yet to enhance creativity, it is important to pay attention to daydreams. Schooler calls this “tuning out” or deliberate “off-task thinking.” In an as yet unpublished study, he and his colleague Jonathan Smallwood asked 122 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia to read a children’s story and press a button each time they caught themselves tuning out. The researchers also periodically interrupted the students as they were reading and asked them if they were “zoning out” or drifting off without being aware of it. “What we find is that the people who regularly catch themselves—who notice when they’re doing it—seem to be the most creative,” Schooler says. They score higher on a standard test of creativity, in which they are asked to describe all the uses of a common object such as a brick; high scorers compile a longer and more creative list. “You need to have the mind-wandering process,” Schooler explains, “but you also need to have meta-awareness to say, ‘That’s a creative idea that popped into my mind.’ ”

The mind’s freedom to wander during a period of deliberate tuning out could also explain the flash of insight that may pop into a person’s head when he or she takes a break from an unsolved problem. Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod, two researchers at the University of Lancaster in England, conducted a recent meta-analysis of studies of these brief reveries. They found that people who engaged in a mildly demanding task, such as reading, during a break from, say, a visual assignment, such as the hat-rack problem—in which participants have to construct a sturdy hat rack using two boards and a clamp—did better on that problem than those who did nothing at all. They also scored higher than those engaged in a highly demanding task—such as mentally rotating shapes—during the interval. Allowing our minds to ramble during a moderately challenging task, it seems, enables us to access ideas not easily available to our conscious minds or to combine these insights in original ways. Our ability to do so is now known to depend on the normal functioning of a dedicated daydreaming network deep in our brain.

The Mental Matrix of Fantasy Like Facebook for the brain, the default network is a bustling web of memories and streaming movies, starring ourselves. “When we daydream, we’re at the center of the universe,” says neurologist Marcus Raichle of Washington University in St. Louis, who first described the network in 2001. It consists of three main regions: the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and the parietal cortex. The medial prefrontal cortex helps us imagine ourselves and the thoughts and feelings of others; the posterior cingulate cortex draws personal memories from the brain; and the parietal cortex has major connections with the hippocampus, which stores episodic memories—what we ate for breakfast, say—but not impersonal facts, such as the capital of Kyrgyzstan. “The default mode network is critical to the establishment of a sense of self,” Raichle says.

It was not until 2007, however, that cognitive psychologist Malia Fox Mason, now at Columbia University, discovered that the default network—which lights up when people switch from an attention-demanding activity to drifting reveries with no specific goal—becomes more active when people engage in a monotonous verbal task, when they are more likely to mind wander. In an experiment, participants were shown a string of four letters such as R H V X for one second, which was then replaced by an arrow pointing either left or right, to indicate whether the sequence should be read forwards or backwards. When one of the characters in the string appeared, subjects were asked to indicate its position (first, second, third or last, depending on the direction of the arrow). The more the participants practiced on each of the four original letter strings, the better they performed. They were then given a novel task, consisting of letter sequences they had not seen before. Activity in the default network went down during the novel version of the test. Subjects who daydreamed more in everyday life—as determined by a questionnaire—also showed greater activity in the default network during the monotonous original task.

Mason did not directly measure mind wandering during the scans, however, so she could not determine exactly when subjects were “on task” and when they were daydreaming. In 2009 Smallwood, Schooler and Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia published the first study to directly link mind wandering with increased activity in the default network. The researchers scanned the brains of 15 U.B.C. students while they performed a simple task in which they were shown random numbers from zero to nine. Each was asked to push a button when he or she saw any number except three. In the seconds before making an error—a key sign that an individual’s attention had drifted—default network activity shot up. Periodically the investigators also interrupted the subjects and asked them if they had zoned out. Again, activity in the default network was higher in the seconds before the moment they were caught in the act. Notably, activity was strongest when people were unaware that they had lost their focus. “The more complex your mind-wandering episode is, the more of your mind it’s going to consume,” Smallwood says.

Defects in the default network may also impair our ability to daydream. A range of disorders—including schizophrenia and depression—have been linked to malfunctions in the default network in recent years. In a 2007 study neuroscientist Peter Williamson of the University of Western Ontario found that people with schizophrenia have deficits in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-reflection. In patients experiencing hallucinations, the medial prefrontal cortex dropped out of the network altogether. Although the patients were thinking, they could not be sure where the thoughts were coming from. People with schizophrenia daydream normally most of the time, but when they are ill, “they often complain that someone is reading their mind or that someone is putting thoughts in their head,” Williamson says.

On the other hand, those who ruminate obsessively—rehashing past events, repetitively analyzing their causes and consequences, or worrying about all the ways things could go wrong in the future—are well aware that their thoughts are their own, but they have intense difficulty turning them off. Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema does not believe that rumination is a form of daydreaming, which she defines as “imagining situations in the future that are largely positive in tone.” Nevertheless, she has found that in obsessive ruminators, who are at greater risk of depression, the same default network circuitry turns on that is activated when we daydream.

These ruminators—who may repeatedly scrutinize faux pas, family issues or lovers’ betrayals—have trouble switching off the default network when asked to focus mentally on a neutral image, such as a truckload of watermelons. They may spend hours going over some past incident, asking themselves how it could have happened and why they did not react differently and end up feeling overwhelmed instead of searching for solutions. Experimental studies have shown that positive distraction—for example, exercise and social activities—can help ruminators reappraise their situation, as can techniques for cultivating mindfulness that teach individuals to pay precise attention to activities such as breathing or walking, rather than to thoughts. Yet people who daydream excessively may have the same problems ignoring their thoughts once they get going. Indeed, extreme daydreamers find their private world so difficult to escape that they describe it as an addiction—one as enslaving as heroin.

When Daydreaming Becomes a Drug “I’m like an alcoholic with an un­limited supply of booze everywhere I go,” says Cordellia Amethyste Rose. A 30-year-old computer science student in Oregon, she started an online forum called Wild Minds for people who simply cannot stop daydreaming. Since childhood, Rose has conjured up countless imaginary characters in ever changing plots. “They’ve grown right along with me, had children; some have died,” she says. The deeper she delved into her virtual world, though, the more distressed she became. “I couldn’t pay attention for more than a split second. I would look at a book and zone out after every word.” Even so, she found her invented companions more compelling than anyone real. “I learned to socialize internally with fictional characters I get along with,” she says. She could engage them in intellectual debate, whereas “socializing with outside people frustrates me. They all want to talk about the silliest things.”

Rose says that she has no friends, but on Wild Minds she has found her peers. Many people posting to the site express relief that they have found others like themselves, emerging from a cocoon of loneliness and shame to share their experiences: misdiagnoses, lack of understanding from families and therapists, and rituals like the one described by a quiet girl who spends “endless hours” swaying in a rocking chair listening to music, daydreaming her life away. “It’s like a drug, poisoning and destroying your life,” says one anonymous fantasist, who admits to bingeing for days on a story line. “It’s even worse, because an addict can put a drug down and walk away. You can’t put down your mind and walk away from it.”

Yet few of the members of the Wild Minds community would abandon their mental creations, even if they could. One hardworking nurse revels in imagined adventures starring a fictional medieval Queen Eleanor of Scotland, a skilled horsewoman with four concurrent husbands, who practices a made-up religion and is “a genius in both state and battle-craft ... trained in martial arts and is always inventing marvelous things.” Like Thurber’s fictional fantasist, Queen Eleanor’s creator spends a lot of time mentally rescuing disaster victims from burning buildings or “abseiling over cliffs, being winched in and out of helicopters with casualties.”

She has also documented her preposterous plots for independent biopsychological researcher Cynthia Schu­pak, a woman with a single-minded mission to understand compulsive daydreamers, who treated Rachel Stein and described her ordeal in a journal article published in 2009. Schupak is convinced that compulsive daydreaming is a unique disorder, characterized by an inability to control it and the deep distress over the condition. “Everyday escapist fantasy is fine and dandy, but this syndrome is different,” she says. Schu­pak has enrolled 85 subjects—garnered mostly from Web postings—for an in-depth study of the syndrome. Respondents to her questionnaires devote between 12 and 90 percent of their waking hours to daydreaming—often while pacing, twirling or waving a string. Nearly all believe that everyday activities pale by comparison with their vivid inner worlds, and some often drift in and out of their alternative reality in the midst of conversation. Typically they report that their daydreams made them feel comforted or confident, “because it’s me, just magnified,” as one subject put it. Nevertheless, 93 percent say they feel anguished over the amount of time they spend fantasizing, admitting that their habit has prevented them from forming relationships, studying or holding down any but the dullest jobs.

Schupak believes the syndrome could be a psychiatric illness, but is it? Singer, for example, believes it is nothing new: he says that he encountered many similar cases in his years of research and practice. Yet some evidence suggests that maladaptive daydreaming could be a distinctive disorder. Eight years ago clinical psychologist Eli Somer of the University of Haifa in Israel recounted cases of six people consumed by fantasy lives packed with sadism and bloodshed. All had suffered some form of childhood trauma. One had been sexually molested by her grandfather. Another described his father as a brutal man who humiliated and physically abused family members.

Somer believes that this mental activity emerged as a coping mechanism to help his patients deal with intolerable or inescapable realities. When their enhanced ability to conjure up vivid imagery is under control and does not interfere with social or academic success, “the phenomenon should probably be classified as a talent rather than a disorder,” he says. Attitude may also be important. Singer, who grew up during the Great Depression and had no formal musical training, he says, entertained himself through childhood and adolescence with the imaginary achievements of “Singer the Composer,” an alter ego who wrote a complete repertoire of classical music, including operas and an unfinished Seventh Symphony. He does not consider his inner adventures harmful but rather sees them as a boredom-banishing sport—one that likely helped to propel him into his profession.

Is Your Mind Wandering Out of Control? How do you know when you have tipped over from useful and creative daydreaming into the netherworld of compulsive fantasizing? First, notice whether you are deriving any useful insights from your fantasies. “The proof is in the pudding,” Schooler says. “Creative individuals—artists, scientists, and so on—oftentimes report ideas that have occurred to them during daydreams.” Second, it is important to take stock of the content of your daydreams. To distinguish between beneficial and pathological imaginings, he adds, “Ask yourself if this is something useful, helpful, valuable, pleasant, or am I just rehashing the same old perseverative thoughts over and over again?” And if daydreaming feels out of control, then even if it is pleasant it is probably not useful or valuable.

Whether or not mind wandering causes distress often depends on the context, Kane observes. “We argue that it’s not inherently good or bad; it all depends on what the goals of the person are at the time.” It may be perfectly reasonable for a scientist to mentally check out in the midst of a repetitive experiment. And a novelist who can pour her reveries onto paper and publish them is clearly putting them to good use.

“Happily, a lot of what we do in life doesn’t require that much concentration,” Kane says. “But there are going to be some contexts in which it is costly. Does the cost to your activity, to your reputation, to your performance, overwhelm the benefit that you may be getting from those thoughts? You can imagine situations where it is so costly that there’s no thought you could be having that’s worth it,” he says, pausing to consider the possibilities. “You’ve crossed the line,” he concludes, “if you walk into traffic and get killed.”

Josie Glausiusz is a journalist in Israel who writes about science and the environment for magazines, including  Nature, National Geographic, Hakai, Undark  and  Sapiens . From 2013 to 2015 she wrote the weekly  On Science  column for the  American Scholar . Glausiusz is the author of  Buzz: The Intimate Bond between Humans and Insects . Follow her on Twitter  @josiegz .

Daydreaming: Not a Useless Waste of Time

Why wandering minds are often the most creative..

Posted March 24, 2016

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As a child, daydreaming was one of my favorite activities. Or should I say, non-activities? I spent hours alone in my room with random thoughts wandering through my mind. I loved to think about patterns, people, and the mysteries of how things were connected. My parents believed I was doing homework. And because I did well enough in school, they had no reason to think otherwise.

Looking back, I remember feeling embarrassed about my daydreaming. After all, isn’t daydreaming a useless waste of time? At least, that’s how I understood daydreaming as a child. It’s why I made excuses to be in solitude. That way, no one would make fun of me. No one would know that I wasn’t accomplishing a thing. Or so I thought.

Today, I look at daydreaming differently. I recognize how the process of mind-wandering is a critical aspect of creativity , our ability to produce and communicate original ideas. Like all things human, creativity is not simple or easily understood. In fact, creativity is full of contradiction, complexity, and perplexing mystery.

In their book Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind , Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire dig into the science of creativity in a new and exciting way. They convincingly argue that this “messy” ability we call creativity is integral to our everyday lives. Our brains are not only wired to be creative, but our creativity is connected to all aspects of our lives­—to our thriving.

I couldn’t agree more.

The Advantages of Daydreaming

Let’s face it. Most of us are daydreamers.

According to a study by Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew A. Killingsworth, we daydream forty-seven percent of our waking hours. That’s right. Forty-seven percent!

Whenever we are the least bit bored, our minds naturally wander. What happens in those hours of daydreaming? We explore associations. We make connections. We search for possibilities.

Kaufman and Gregoire devote an entire chapter of their book to the topic of daydreaming. In fact, they present good scientific evidence that both daydreaming and using solitude for reflection are among the attributes of highly creative people.

In an excerpt from their book, Kaufman and Gregoire point out the many benefits of daydreaming:

Creative thinkers know, despite what their parents and teachers might have told them, that daydreaming is hardly a waste of time. But unfortunately, many students learn to suppress their natural instincts to dream and imagine— instead, they’re taught to fit into a standardized mold and to learn by the book, in a way that may not feel natural and that very well may suppress their innate desire to create. But as two prominent psychologists recently noted, “Not all minds who wander are lost”— in fact, the mind’s wandering is vital to imagination and creative thought*. Nearly fifty years ago, psychologist Jerome L. Singer established that daydreaming is a normal and indeed widespread aspect of human experience. He found that many people are “happy daydreamers” who enjoy their inner imagery and fantasy*. According to Singer, these daydreamers “simply value and enjoy their private experiences, are willing to risk wasting a certain amount of time on them, but also can apparently use them for effective planning and for self-amusement during periods of monotonous task activity or boredom .” Singer coined the term positive-constructive daydreaming to describe this type of mind wandering , which he distinguished from poor attention and anxious , obsessive fantasies *. By making these important distinctions, Singer was able to highlight the positive, adaptive role that daydreaming can play in our daily lives, under the right circumstances*. From the beginning of his research, he found evidence that daydreaming, imagination, and fantasy are related to creativity, storytelling, and even the ability to delay gratification*. Of course, mind wandering can be costly when it comes at the wrong time, especially in regard to things like reading comprehension, sustained attention, memory , and academic performance*. The inability to control your attention when the task at hand requires it often leads to frustration, just as the tendency to get wrapped up in distracting negative thoughts can lead to unhappiness. But when we consider the fact that most of our important life goals lie far into the future, it’s easier to see how daydreaming might be beneficial. When our inner monologues are directed toward and measured against goals, aspirations, and dreams that are personally meaningful, the benefits of daydreaming become much more clear*. Over the past decade, scientists have employed newer methodologies to investigate these potential benefits. In a review of the latest science of daydreaming, Scott and colleague Rebecca McMillan noted that mind wandering offers very personal rewards, including creative incubation, self-awareness, future-planning, reflection on the meaning of one’s experiences, and even compassion*.

Like all human abilities, it’s important to understand both sides of daydreaming—the positives and negatives. Many parents worry about children who daydream excessively. And indeed, daydreaming can cause developmental challenges. In 2002, Eli Somer introduced the term maladaptive daydreaming to describe how mind-wandering can interfere with academic, physical, and interpersonal functioning. When daydreaming inhibits healthy development, affects sleep habits, or increases negative behaviors, parents should seek professional advice.

For the majority of children (and adults) daydreaming is not only a good thing, it’s essential to our flourishing as human beings.

Now, go do some daydreaming!

Kaufman, S. B. & Gregoire, C. (2015). Wired to create: Unraveling the mysteries of the creative mind. New York, NY: Perigee.

Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330 (6006), 932.

Somer, Eli. (2002). Maladaptive daydreaming: A qualitative inquiry. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy . 32:2-3, 197-212.

Excerpted with permission from Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. © 2015 by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. A Perigee Book, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. (*See book for noted references.)

Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD, is the author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers: Reclaiming the Power of Citizenship for a New Generation . A developmental psychologist and researcher, she works at the intersection of positive youth development and education .

Follow Marilyn's work at Roots of Action , Twitter , or Facebook . You can also subscribe to receive email notifications of Marilyn’s articles.

©2016 Marilyn Price-Mitchell. All rights reserved. Please see reprint guidelines for Marilyn’s articles.

Marilyn Price-Mitchell, Ph.D., is an Institute for Social Innovation Fellow at Fielding Graduate University and author of Tomorrow’s Change Makers.

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When we fall prey to perfectionism, we think we’re honorably aspiring to be our very best, but often we’re really just setting ourselves up for failure, as perfection is impossible and its pursuit inevitably backfires.

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Daydreaming and Concentration: What the Science Says

You’re probably familiar with the phenomenon of suddenly catching yourself daydreaming while reading. Your eyes travel back and forth across the text, but the information isn’t being processed. Instead, you’re thinking about the vacation you have planned or the argument you thankfully resolved yesterday. Before you know it, you’ve reached the bottom of the page, but you have no idea what you have just read.

When you are daydreaming (or mind-wandering , as it is more accurately referred to within scientific circles), memories that you thought were lost forever can come to the surface again, or you may suddenly find yourself realizing that you have forgotten someone’s birthday — the kinds of things that don’t happen when you are deep in concentration. The neural activity that can be observed when you are daydreaming is very similar to that found in the “default network,” a network of regions in the brain that are active during periods of rest. This is a brain state in which you are not actively performing any task; in other words, when your working memory is empty.

We actually spend more of our waking hours daydreaming than you might think — as much as half our day, according to at least one study . About a decade ago, scientists at Harvard developed an app that asks test subjects what they are doing at any given moment during the day (a method called experience sampling ) and to report their level of happiness at that particular moment. The scientists are still collecting additional data, but they have already compiled a massive amount of it — approximately 250,000 measurements from more than 2,000 individuals were recorded in that first study alone.

Their findings showed that the participants spent 47 percent of their day daydreaming instead of working on the task they were supposed to be carrying out. When the test subjects indicated that they were thinking of something other than their intended task, they were asked whether they were thinking happy, neutral, or unpleasant thoughts. When the study was published in Science magazine, the headline, surprisingly enough, was, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” The participants indicated that they were significantly unhappier when they were daydreaming than when they were performing a certain activity.

It is quite possible that we are a lot happier when we are fully immersed in our work than when we are daydreaming.

These results have interesting consequences for people who, in their pursuit of the perfect life, believe that never having to work a single day again would make them happy. Although this is very much open to interpretation — happiness is a relative concept and one that is notoriously difficult to measure , and the sample taken was not entirely representative of the population as a whole — it is quite possible that we are a lot happier when we are fully immersed in our work than when we are daydreaming. This idea can also be found in many forms of relaxation therapy in which people are advised to focus on the activity currently occupying their mind (so that they can “be in the moment”), and the Harvard study is often cited in support of such techniques. As the scientists themselves so succinctly concluded, “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

There are significant differences between individuals when it comes to how much time we spend daydreaming. We are all familiar with the image of a child staring out of a classroom window into the distance. You may even be a dreamer yourself. In which case you may not be surprised to learn that daydreaming can have a negative effect on your ability to perform a specific task. It may come as a surprise, however, that on average people who are inclined to daydream a lot have a lower working memory capacity and score worse on IQ tests . That said, we must remember that we are talking about a correlation here and it does not necessarily mean that daydreaming leads to a lower level of intelligence, although there is a strong relationship between the two. And that makes sense — you need a good working memory to be able to maintain your concentration, after all. Given the fact that you suppress your default network when you are concentrating, this automatically means that your default network becomes activated again when you suffer a lapse in concentration, and then you start daydreaming. You could say that daydreaming is actually concentration gone wrong.

In another excellent daydreaming experiment , test subjects were asked at random moments while performing a task whether their attention was actually focused on the task or whether their mind was somewhere else entirely. The results showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the periods of reduced attention were the periods during which the most mistakes were made, but they also offered a possible route out of the daydreaming maze: the prospect of a reward. When test subjects knew that they would be given a reward if their performance was good, not only did their performance improve, but they were also less inclined to daydream. So the next time you want to concentrate intensively on your work and avoid daydreaming, you could try promising yourself a reward.

So is it all bad news when it comes to daydreaming? Well, some scientists believe that daydreaming also serves important functions. For example, when you are less preoccupied with the world around you, it is easier to focus on yourself and make plans for the future. When people are asked what their daydreams are about, many say that they often concern personal matters, otherwise known as autobiographical planning . These kinds of thoughts can serve important functions for our well-being, especially when the task on which you are supposed to be focusing is not especially important or does not require all that much attention.

When test subjects knew that they would be given a reward if their performance was good, not only did their performance improve, but they were also less inclined to daydream.

Another benefit of daydreaming is that it can make a mind-numbing task more enjoyable. In one study, a team of cognitive neuroscientists found that after test subjects had been asked to perform a very tedious task for 45 minutes, they reported feeling less happy than they did beforehand. However, the drop in the level of happiness was less pronounced among those test subjects who reported having daydreamed during the task. A potential solution for boredom is often included on the list of possible functions of daydreaming. You could regard the brain as a machine that always has to be doing something. So when you’re killing time, you might allow your thoughts to whisk you away briefly to some imaginary future.

One of the most important possible functions often attributed to daydreaming is the stimulation of creativity, thinking up new ideas and taking the time to solve complicated problems — the power of the unconscious. Books about concentration and creativity often advise readers to daydream and let ideas appear of their own accord. The theory goes that when you are daydreaming, your unconscious mind goes about solving your problems for you. In fact, the argument goes, it would be better to leave this kind of thing to your unconscious mind altogether.

But this claim is one worth investigating. There is no doubt that taking a break during work so that you can come back later and tackle a problem with a clear mind is a good idea. That much is intuitive. But can unconscious processes really solve problems for you or unleash your creativity? This argument is based primarily on the findings of the psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, who has written a number of influential scientific books and articles on this subject. His findings are surprising, given what we already know about the human brain. The functions of calculation and reasoning are the domain of the working memory and they require concentration. The working memory is the place where all of the information in the brain is brought together and where the tools we need to be able to consider that information are located. This is also the information of which we are conscious, and on the basis of these definitions there cannot be any such thing as “unconscious thinking.” After all, that would mean that we also have an “unconscious” working memory that is just as powerful as our conscious working memory. In recent years, the findings of Dijksterhuis and his colleagues have come under increasing scrutiny . It turns out there is no clear evidence to suggest that the brain can solve problems on its own while you are taking a mental siesta.

However, for many of us, a mental pause can have a positive effect, hence the often-heard suggestion that we should “sleep on it” when faced with making an important decision. Switching your attention to something else can give you the time you need to approach a matter from a different perspective and maybe even reach a different conclusion. After all, the brain can become exhausted from the effort involved in trying to ignore all of the stimuli, both internal and external, with which it is constantly being bombarded. So the next time you need a reset, go outside and let your mind wander. Who knows what might happen in your stream of consciousness.

Stefan Van der Stigchel is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Utrecht University and the author of “ Concentration: Staying Focused in Times of Distraction ,” from which this article is adapted.