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How many times have we heard, ‘get your head out of the clouds!’; and realized that we were zoned out to a completely different world amid a dull class or a meeting.
That’s what daydreaming is, theoretically, a daydream is when your mind creates a series of thoughts that distract your attention from the present.
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The one fascinating thing about a daydream is, it’s all about you. It’s a place where your mind allows you to wander freely, away from the harshness of reality.
A daydream is a place that is entirely yours, where your mind runs wild, and you can be anywhere and do absolutely anything. A study in the Journal Science stated that we spend about 30 to 47% of our conscious day in daydreaming, spacing out and drifting.
Daydreaming Is Good And Even Science Says It!
Before a big day, we often replay the event in our head several times to get more
comfortable with the scenario. Daydreaming helps to get comfortable in a stressful situation. Psychiatrist Stuart Twemlow says, “Daydreams allow you a range of possibilities which, in the hard cold light of reality, aren’t ‘possible’.”
Daydreaming also enhances your creativity and productivity. It helps to improve mental illness and reduces stress and anxiety. As said by Eugenio Rothe, a psychiatrist at the University of Florida said, our mind wanders, it activates different parts of our brains that were previously out of reach.
In a study conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, brain patterns of more than 100 people were measured using the MRI machine. It was seen that people who frequently daydreamed had higher intellectual and creative abilities and more efficient brain systems.
Also Read: FLIPPED: Our Bloggers Argue Whether 2020 Was A Doomed Year Or One Of Learning
In a nutshell, daydreaming seems to be a brain exercise that offers a mini-vacation to an imaginary world.
How often do you find yourself daydreaming? A term that has been gaining a lot more popularity in the last decade has now become a hot topic for debate amongst psychologists and behavioral experts and for all the right reasons.
As the name itself justifies that daydreaming is about, dreaming during the day. Considering the fact that our dreams are a process of visualization by our subconscious mind, dreams are usually associated with sleep when the active brain is at rest.
Daydreaming is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction.
In fact, in an experiment, it was inferred that 47% of the participants spent their wake time in daydreaming. A comic notion suggests that people in love are more prone to daydreaming and a lot of love songs have also been cultivated around the same.
Blogger Yameena’s Views:
But, surprisingly, considering the alarming rise in mental health issues, researchers suggest that daydreaming is one of the foremost indications of deteriorating mental health.
An Unhealthy Escape?
Daydreaming is like an unhealthy coping mechanism to distract yourself from your reality. The fact that you need this distraction during the day when you are cramped up with work and other stuff, indicates that you have been in a toxic situation and your headspace is getting clouded by negativity.
Thus, you seek an escape from the same in the form of ‘daydreaming’ about the to-be-good-things of your life.
Sounds positive on the upfront but intense daydreaming has a dark side. It tends to create unrealistic scenarios in your head and failure to accept reality leads to mental health issues in the long run.
According to Igor Marchetti (Ghent University) and colleagues, individuals who struggle with negative emotions or who are under intense stress are particularly vulnerable to negative thoughts when their minds wander. When an at-risk individual is struggling to accomplish a goal, their spontaneous thoughts and daydreams may take a dark turn.
Their research further suggests that this repetitive cycle of negatives thoughts induces many cognitive risk factors of depression and anxiety in an individual.
Daydreaming Is Addictive!
Another reason why daydreaming is detrimental because you do it too much!
Yes, your positive escape can even turn into an addictive pleasure without you even knowing of it and might soon become a might. At this point, if you are daydreaming too much, you will inevitably keep losing focus at work, and eventually, your productivity gets affected.
Addictive daydreaming is also known as maladaptive daydreaming where an individual finds it as a compulsion to daydream and lose control over its habit. This situation of guilty pleasure gets worse and is followed by underlying causes of more severe mental illnesses triggered by the habit of daydreaming.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Psychology Today, Science Daily, Health US News +more
Find the Blogger: @ZehraYameena
Double Tags: daydreaming, daydreaming side effects, daydreaming science, good side of daydreaming, negative daydreaming, maladaptive daydreaming, daydream, science and daydream
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Hi, I would just like to add some thoughts on this. Though this is not still a proposed disorder(still not officially added in the current diagnostic manual DSM-V), there have been studies that have done on this phenomenon that many researchers believe should be considered as one or at least taken more seriously as a symptom in a clinical setting. A study done at the University of Haifa in 2017 by Dr. Somer and colleagues found a significant correlation between excessive(maladaptive) daydreaming with multiple disorders that can be associated with the DSM-V such as ADHD, anxiety, and depressive disorders, as well as OCD. They used the DSM-V Structured Clinical Interview for the diagnosis model for this and 100% of their participants were fit to be diagnosed with at least one disorder. The comorbidity of excessive daydreaming with other disorders is what concerns researchers more rather than being “… one of the most foremost [indicator] of deteriorating mental health” as per the author. There’s really just a high correlation but no evidence of causality. But in my opinion, this could just be another form of escapism that many a turning to due to the circumstances that we are all in right now, living in a pandemic and all.