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Is Daydreaming good for you?

Daydreaming can be considered an art, a place which can find you happiness, help you focus and understand things while helping you analyzing different situations. A place you can just space or zone out and create images in your mind which can help you deal with stress and anxiety be it any of these, daydreaming in itself is something everyone does and for good reason.

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In the past and even during the current age, Daydreaming has been associated with individuals who were deemed not serious or as slackers, people who would escape situations or were just plain lazy. But one has to understand that daydreaming isn’t just escaping reality, it is a function which naturally occurs in the brain for every human being even animals and is one of the best stimulant for the brain to increase creativity and improve judgement skills.

Researchers at Harvard University find that daydreaming is in fact the default mode unless we have something more engaging to do, the mind by default will wander if we do not find something interesting and suggest that people daydream for almost half a day.

But does that mean that daydreaming is good for you? That’s a little unclear, because when the mind wanders, we usually try to go back to instances in the past which may have caused us distress or how it might have played out if we had chosen a different option or solution. We daydream about past, current, future events and even events which haven’t happened and can make up scenarios so many times that we may start to believe them.

Daydreaming may indeed boost our brains activity, memory, creativity and improve efficiency but the study finds that daydreaming can leave individuals unhappy especially adults but given different circumstances many people may find comfort in their daydreams as way to escape their problems. Whereas the studies overall outcome is that, the more engaged a person is the happier that person will be, especially activities such as exercising, reading and having conversations. The whole notion from the studies understanding is that individuals who keep busy throughout their day tend to be happier as the mind rarely enters its default mode which is daydreaming but it can be argued that the benefits from daydreaming are also great for future planning, reducing stress and improving functionality for quick decisions. The pros definitely outweigh the cons but the con is something we all seek, which is constant happiness.