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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.

informative essay on daydreaming

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

informative essay on daydreaming

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.

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.

Kam JWY, Irving ZC, Mills C, Patel S, Gopnik A, Knight RT. Distinct electrophysiological signatures of task-unrelated and dynamic thoughts .  Proc Natl Acad Sci USA . 2021;118(4):e2011796118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2011796118

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.

Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Human Brain — Lost in Thought: The Complexities of Daydreaming

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Lost in Thought: The Complexities of Daydreaming

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Published: Feb 11, 2023

Words: 1521 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

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Introduction, what is daydreaming, bad vs good aspects, functions of daydreaming, maladaptive daydreaming.

  • Daydreaming increases creativity. The best thoughts are those that came from when we are not thinking. A UC Santa Barbara research instructed a comparison group to let their minds wander while attempting to complete a creative problem. The end result was outperformed the group that did not take the break by 41%. So, if you've been working on a subject in a really focused manner, it might be time to allow your thoughts to be free
  • Daydreaming calms anxiety. A study conducted by Columbia University proves that allowing your mind to think about whatever it wants when you feel stressed by compressive thoughts will make you find peace and conclude the solutionnt.
  • Daydreaming enhances your relation. You can envision being around partners the moments between you and them when there are not present which improves the length of the connections.
  • Daydreaming increases your production. It is known that production is related to the active mind but it should not be active to the point of exhaustion if you take a break in wandering of mind you will be productive. Georgia Tech proved short breaks connected with daydream make you more refreshed and energized by charging you after fatigue from constant work.
  • Daydreaming is a path to your goals. One of the motivators to reach your goal is to imagine you have reached the existence of a dream in itself, which is a motivator to reach the goals. Daydreams, no matter how reasonable or unreasonable they are, are what encourage a person to reach his goals. Oettingen said, “If you want to fulfill your wishes, start with daydreaming, then find your obstacle” and he devising a strategy to dream in a reasonable and realistic way, then imagine the best results, disadvantages, and what prevents ambition, and then develop a plan to exceed what prevents you to reach your goal.

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informative essay on daydreaming

Daydreaming and Concentration: What the Science Says

informative essay on daydreaming

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.

informative essay on daydreaming

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.

informative essay on daydreaming

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.

Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D.

Why and How You Daydream

What's the stuff of daydreams your brain's default network may have the answer..

Posted January 8, 2013 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

Everyone, or nearly everyone, reports daydreaming on a regular basis, with studies indicating that as many as 96% of adults engage in having at least one bout of daily fantasies . Psychologists have long been interested in the vagaries of our mental meanderings. William James, credited with being the founder of American psychology, famously studied streams of consciousness to provide “data” for his functionalist theory of the mind. In 1890, he wrote that “When absorbed in intellectual attention we become so inattentive to outer things as to be ‘absent-minded,’ ‘abstracted,’ or ‘distraits.’ All revery or concentrated meditation is apt to throw us into this state that transient lapses in the control of attention may lead to a shift in attention from the external world to internal mentation.”

While James pursued his studies of consciousness, across the Atlantic, University of Leipzig psychologist Wilhelm Wundt used introspection to understand how the mind works. They may have had similar methods, but they had very different theories . James was interested in finding out how the mind adapts to experiences; Wundt wanted to learn about the mind’s structures. Today, neuroscientists combine the best of both of these worlds, looking at brain scans while their study participants complete various mental tasks. Serendipitously, it was while studying the brain’s activation during tasks involving memory and attention that neuroscientists first discovered the neural basis for daydreaming. While in between tasks, the researchers noticed that a set of brain structures in their participants started to become more active. These same structures turned off as soon as the participants began to engage in the cognitive tasks that were the original focus of the research.

Eventually, scientists were able to pinpoint this set of specific brain structures, which we now know as the brain’s “ default network .” This network links parts of the frontal cortex, the limbic system, and several other areas involved in sensory experiences. While active, the default network turns itself on and generates its own stimulation. The technical term for such a product of the default network is “stimulus independent thought,” a thought about something other than events that originate from the outside environment. In common speech, stimulus independent thoughts make up fantasies and daydreams, the stuff of mind wandering .

Apart from entertaining us when we’re bored, what does the default network do for us? Some researchers propose that it’s actually a type of watchdog or sentinel, ready to spring into action when we need to attend to an outside stimulus. However, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the default network is there to help us explore our inner experiences (Buckner et al., 2008). Specifically, we engage our default network when we’re thinking about our past experiences, imagining an event that might take place in the future, trying to understand what other people are thinking, and assisting us in making moral decisions.

It seems, then, that our default network makes daydreaming possible. The effect of daydreaming on our psyche may depend, furthermore, on the nature of our daydreams. In a series of questionnaire studies, York University psychologist Raymond Mar and associates (2012) asked men and women ranging from 18 to 85 to report on the frequency and vividness of their daydreams as well as their life satisfaction, levels of loneliness , and social support. For men, the more frequent their daydreams, the lower their life satisfaction. For women, vividness but not frequency was related to lower life satisfaction. For both genders, people who daydreamed about their close family and friends reported higher levels of life satisfaction. Those who daydreamed about romantic partners that they didn’t currently have (past or potential), strangers, or fictional characters were lonelier, had less social support, and tended to have lower life satisfaction.

Although this was a correlational study, the Mar findings suggest ways to use daydreaming to your advantage. Your daydreams may be more likely to bring you happiness if they’re about the actual people you know rather than the imaginary people you would like to know. The Mar findings also suggest that there are times when it’s better not to daydream. Anytime you’ve drifted off to la-la land while someone is giving a boring talk, speech, or seminar, you may suddenly come to the realization that you have no idea what this person just said. You’ll be in trouble if you need to take a test or answer a question directed toward the inattentive you. In a social situation, such as a date or family meal, the consequences can prove embarrassing.

Other evidence suggests that the content of your daydreams can interfere with your memory, even when you’ve paid attention to the information you’re trying to learn. University of North Carolina Greensboro psychologist Peter Delaney and colleagues (2010) instructed college student participants to daydream about a situation either very much like or very much unlike what they were doing at the moment. Those who were told to imagine themselves in very different circumstances had poorer memories than those who were instructed to daydream about someplace close. If you’re going to engage in mental time travel, and there’s something you need to remember, better keep that travel pretty close to home.

You might expect that with its tendency to reach inward, your default network’s activity could make you more creative. This may be only partly true. University of British Columbia researchers Melissa Ellamil and her colleagues (2012) found that it’s the temporal lobe in the cortex that seems to generate creative ideas. Reinforcing Delaney’s findings regarding memory and daydreaming, Japanese researchers Hiraku Takeuchi and collaborators (2010) showed that the people more likely to generate creative ideas in a laboratory task were less able to deactivate their default networks.

These studies on daydreaming suggest 4 practical ways you can try to put your brain's default network to best use for you:

1. Tune out your default network when you need to focus. Your best chance to learn something new comes when you deactivate the network. If you feel your inner thoughts are crowding out the new information, take that extra step to turn down their volume.

informative essay on daydreaming

2. If your daydreams are bothering you, change them. We know from the Mar study that people who daydream about unobtainable relationships tend to feel unhappier and less satisfied. As difficult as it may be, try to fantasize about the relationships you now have.

3. Use your daydreams to help, not hurt, your memory. From the Delaney study, we learned that students who daydreamed about faraway places or situations had poorer memories than those whose daydreams stayed closer to their current realities.

4. Don't stifle your creativity , but don't let it interfere with what you need to know. Before you let your imagination run rampant, make sure you're paying enough attention to what is going on around you to get that information to stick in your long-term memory .

Your daydreams might influence your memory, your attention, and even your happiness within your relationships. Daydreams may be the stuff of your brain’s default network, but they can also prove to be the source of your personal fulfillment.

Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging . Feel free to join my Facebook group, " Fulfillment at Any Age ," to discuss today's blog, or to ask further questions about this posting.

Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 2013

Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain's default network: anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1124 , 1-38. doi: 10.1196/annals.1440.011

Delaney, P. F., Sahakyan, L., Kelley, C. M., & Zimmerman, C. A. (2010). Remembering to forget: The amnesic effect of daydreaming. Psychological Science, 21(7), 1036-1042. doi:10.1177/0956797610374739

Ellamil, M., Dobson, C., Beeman, M., & Christoff, K. (2012). Evaluative and generative modes of thought during the creative process. Neuroimage, 59(2), 1783-1794. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.08.008

Mar, R. A., Mason, M. F., & Litvack, A. (2012). How daydreaming relates to life satisfaction, loneliness, and social support: The importance of gender and daydream content. Consciousness And Cognition: An International Journal, 21(1), 401-407. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.08.001

Takeuchi, H., Taki, Y., Hashizume, H., Sassa, Y., Nagase, T., Nouchi, R., & Kawashima, R. (2011). Failing to deactivate: The association between brain activity during a working memory task and creativity. Neuroimage, 55(2), 681-687. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.11.052

Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D.

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.

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Home / Essay Samples / Life / Dream / The Effects of Daydreaming: Exploring Creativity and Productivity

The Effects of Daydreaming: Exploring Creativity and Productivity

  • Category: Life
  • Topic: Dream

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Enhancing creativity, balancing productivity and rest, escapism and mental well-being, challenges of excessive daydreaming.

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