Is Daydreaming good for your brain?

"Everything starts as somebody's daydreams," quoted Larry Niven, American fiction writer. Since childhood, we've been conditioned to think that daydreaming is bad and it can ruin your otherwise bright future. In contrary, daydreaming is actually good for you brain and it can help improve your memory, make you smarter, as long as it is under your sphere of control, and moderation is maintained. Recent studies and researches in Neuroscience underscore the above statement. 

In this article, we shall highlight the exquisite benefits that daydreaming has to offer.  Let's get started. 

Is daydreaming good for your brain? ; Visualization

Daydreaming and General Conditioning

Until the age of 7, we absorb everything we are exposed to. The saying that children are like sponges is very true. As children, we haven't yet developed our critical faculty which is our ability to question information. This critical faculty is what separates our conscious mind from our subconscious mind. Only 5% of our thinking and actions come from our conscious mind remaining 95% comes from our subconscious mind. Our experience as children, the things we were exposed to, heard, saw, and felt shape our subconscious thinking patterns, our paradigms. Children are known for their ability to daydream a lot.

As we grow, we become reconditioned to ignore our dreams, to make them smaller, more realistic based on someone else's perception and limiting beliefs. We stop dreaming and only pay attention to our current circumstances and situations surrounding is. What was once celebrated in us as young children, becomes something we cease to do. 

Why experts suggest you to daydream or visualize?

Cheryl Himburg, Mindset coach, and CEO of Key Element Solutions, says, "The greatest that I did for myself was to learn how to daydream again and to make it a part of my everyday routine. It empowered me to completely reshape my life, my identity, and my happiness to build a life that I love, by design". 

When we daydream or visualize, we create a visual picture and also feel the emotions associated with it. Our subconscious mind, the part of us that power 95% of our thinking and actions operates on pictures and visuals. This has an extremely powerful impact on our subconscious mind. For, what we focus is what we create. What we think is what we attract. It is the universal law of the subconscious mind. 

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Daydreaming or visualization helps us to reshape our subconscious paradigms by connecting pictures and emotions to an experience that has not yet happened. Often in life, we make our past more real than our future, which is why we repeat things we don not necessarily want, which is why, we fail. Through daydreaming or visualization, we create the same powerful experience and channelize that impetus to build our future. As rightly stated by Gloria Steinem, "Daydreaming, after all, is a form of planning".

How is daydreaming good for your brain?

Many people do not know that daydreaming is a naturally occurring light hypnotic trance state. It can be likened to Hypnosis which is a natural state that we experience in our daily lives. Benefits of daydreaming have been outlined below.

1. Daydreaming promotes brain health 

When we allow ourselves to daydream, it takes our mind off problems and helps relax our Nervous System and makes our brain healthier. It can help relieve your stress. Daydreaming can help you take a break, relax, imagine positive scenarios and outcomes, and improve your mood. According to a study, daydreaming helps people interact with themselves, with their own thoughts, which improves the workings of their brain.

2. Daydreaming helps you solve problems

Daydreaming helps us solve problems. When we focus too hard on a problem, it gets more difficult in finding a solution to it. In that case, still your mind, let the problem fade for a while and daydream. When we think about something else, our subconscious mind works on the answer. This is called Zeigarnik effect which allows our mind to solve complex problems when we are not focused on them. Lynell Ross, Psychology trained-Health and Wellness coach, says, "Daydreaming can also make us smarter by helping recall information better when faced with distraction". 

3. Daydreaming improves memory

Stanford University's Robert Ehorm explains that when we visualize, we create something new and we augment our communal intelligence. Visual language has the potential to increase 'human bandwidth'- the capacity to take in, comprehend, and more effectively synthesize large amounts of new information. Human beings are visual creatures. Visual information is processes at a faster rate and it gets embedded deep into your brain. According to a study published in frontiers daydreaming is an ode to positive construction of your brain.

Daydreaming can sometimes be bad

As long as moderation is maintained, nothing is detrimental. If you exceed the limits and cross the boundaries to such an extent that you barely live in reality, that is called maladaptive daydreaming which is a serious condition. 

Daydreaming can prove to be bad especially for people with a negative attitude, thoughts, and mindset because they may create a loop of negative thoughts that can lead to lower self-esteem and in some cases depression. Illuminating the negative shade of daydreams, Linda Mueller, Founder of the Expat Partner Coach LLC says, "I have always thought of daydreaming as a positive activity. When the pandemic hit, I realized that my daydreaming was very unhealthy and it was adding to my anxiety. One would argue for the benefit of ruminating over things in your sphere of control, but the pandemic and political landscape fall very far outside of control". 

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Concluding 'Is daydreaming good for your brain?'

As long as it is done in a right manner, there is no harm in daydreaming as suggested by field experts. It can feel a bit silly when starting over with daydreaming again. Do not feel guilty about it and don't shame others for taking a few minutes of mind wandering. Experts suggest starting with 10 minutes in the morning and do the same before drifting off to sleep. 

If you liked my work, you can also buy my ebook, 'Resuscitate yourself', by clicking here or you can get it from Kindle and Amazon. It is a self-help book, which is mainly focused on an effectively efficient approach in improving brain power and beating stress, depression, and other mental ailments. 

I hope you liked my article, 'Is daydreaming good for your brain? This is what experts say'. Subscribe for updates. Let's dream!