5 Positive Effects of Daydreaming

Key Takeaways

• Daydreaming can reduce stress and anxiety by allowing your mind to relax and wander.
• Letting your thoughts drift can help solve problems by giving you a fresh perspective.
• Daydreaming uses different parts of the brain, making it a valuable way to connect ideas and enhance creativity.

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.

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.”

Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

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By Barbara Field

Barbara is a writer and speaker who is passionate about mental health, overall wellness, and women’s issues.

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