How Daydreaming Can Improve Your Overall Health

The Comfort of Quiet

I’ve often found the rich value in finding a quiet, serene place to just sit and think without boundaries — in short, I like to daydream a lot. As we grow up, many people in our lives tell us that we need to stay focused and be on point all the time, which is a part of the culture we live in here in the west.

Daydreaming is often considered “wasting time,” and is generally frowned upon, but did you know that daydreaming is actually good for you? Researchers and psychologists alike have shown that daydreaming is a very necessary activity to keep your brain healthy by exercising some very important regions of your brain.

Stimulus-Independent Thought

It is believed that daydreaming provides for us and our neural networks what’s called “stimulus-independent thought,” which it actually needs. Stimulus-independent thought is when the brain is allowed to roam freely and simply imagine. Thoughts that take place completely in abstract without any input from the world around us.

In short, stimulus-independent thought is “using your imagination.”

Simply imagining things in abstraction gives your brain a workout in producing its own stimuli, allowing it to flex its creative muscles. As the old adage goes, the brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the healthier it becomes.

Research has shown the exact networks which are exercised when we simply sit and imagine stuff, the areas which are responsible for processing our sensory input and experiences, but also the limbic system, which deals with a lot of our core emotions, and even the frontal cortex, which handles our higher faculties. These are critical networks for our emotional well-being and ability to think clearly in abstraction.

The Default Network

The aforementioned networks involved in the process of daydreaming are called “the default network.” The default network is composed of the core portions of our brain that we use to imagine things, and it becomes highly active when we don’t focus on external stimuli or any of our sensory input — when we picture ourselves happy in the future or think about our dream house, when we remember a memory or recall the answer to a question, and when we wonder what someone else might be thinking, we’re using our default network.

These faculties of abstraction are absolutely critical for our lives, especially in the realm of problem-solving. Psychologists believe that allowing our minds to wander aimlessly helps these regions of the brain get a workout, making us sharper and more capable of abstract tasks. Want to improve your memory or perhaps your problem-solving skills? Daydream.

Philosopher David Hume beautifully conveys the power of the unbridled imagination at work in his Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding:

“ Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of [human], which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects. And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe;”

Such is the power of the human imagination left to its own devices, when we feel we have nothing more important to focus on and can just stare off into space. The imagination is boundless, and daydreaming is our way of letting it play uninhibited. The imagination is what we use to imbue our lives with meaning and decide what’s really important to us, as we draw upon reflections of our past tell us where we want to go in the future. Hume goes on to say:

“Or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion. What never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is anything beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction.”

Our minds are where we are the freest, and when we free our minds, in a very real way, we free ourselves. Simply exercising the brain like this has tremendous health benefits and has been shown to have a positive effect on mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, not simply because the thoughts we have are pleasant, but because we give the necessary regions of our brains a work out to stay balanced.

Daydreaming has been shown to reduce stress in the long run, which can have powerful overall health implications. Stress has been linked to the six leading causes of death, while 43% of all adults suffer from stress-related ailments, and a full 75% to 90% of patient complaints and doctor visits are stress-related.

Meditation

Daydreaming is seen by psychologists and researchers as a form of meditation, and the same positive effects can be felt from both. It is believed that because they both exercise the default network, they help us reduce negative emotions and contribute to our overall mental well-being. If you’ve tried meditation and found that it’s just not for you, research has suggested that daydreaming can improve your mental health in the same ways, and might actually be a good substitute, believe it or not.

The default network also controls the parts of our brains that “watch out,” for newly incoming stimuli so it can better detect threats in time to keep you safe, so exercising it makes it much more comfortable in operation. A robust default network is prepared for whatever perceived threats you may have to deal with. It’s been theorized this is how it reduces our levels of anxiety and depression, by keeping the system that “looks” for new threats healthy and happy.

The Good Brain

Psychologists also believe that exercising the default network makes you a better person. Many parts of the default network are thought to have been designed just right so that we’re capable of introspection and deep questioning, both of which are heavily involved in coming to moral conclusions. It’s no surprise that people who ponder abstract questions would be better at answering them. When we’re thinking about someone we’ve wronged in the past or a joyful moment when we did the right thing and made someone’s day, we’re exercising our default networks.

Sometimes it's important, in life, to step away, and allow our thoughts to play in the boundless playground that is the deepest recesses of our minds. It’s good for your health.