We all love to daydream, it makes us feel good when we think about all the great things that we want to achieve in our lives. However, some people believe that daydreaming is unproductive and a waste of time, is it really so?
To answer the above question, you need to understand how our brains work. Basically, we have two brains – left and right.
The right side of your brain tends to be used for creative thinking and artistic work, while the left side of the brain is used for analytical and methodical thinking.
And depending on which side of the brain you used more often, you tend to dominate in that area.
For example, if you are creative and artistic, you tend to use more of your right brain, and vice versa.
The thing is that to be optimal, we need to use both sides of our brains.
According to research published in Creativity Research Journal, daydreaming makes us more productive.
The more you daydream, the more creative you become because you are using your brain to imagine all the possibilities and fantasies.
Not only that, when you daydream, different parts of your brains will be activated, accessing information that you are thinking or are out of reach.
This is why the ‘aha’ or solutions come when you are less expected or when you’re daydreaming.
How daydreaming can help you make progress to reach your goals and dreams
David B. Feldman, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University once conducted a study about the relationship between productivity and daydreaming.
Feldman asked nearly 100 students to name one of their most important goals in their lives. The students named everything from making new friends or finding a soulmate, to earning enough money for their next semester’s tuition.
And then Feldman and his team asked a portion of the students to undergo an hour-long intervention consisting in part of daydreaming about their chosen goal.
After a month, a survey was conducted to rate the students’ degree of progress they had made. The results showed that those who took part in only one session of daydreaming reported greater progress than the rest who did not.
Therefore, daydreaming can actually help improve your productivity and put you into taking action and make progress to reach your goals and dreams.
Fantasy-based daydream VS realistic daydream
Professor David B. Feldman said in this article on Psychology Today that daydreaming can be good or it can be bad.
Basically, if your daydream is fantasy-based, it can lead you to disappointment. Like if you dream about the impossible things like flying like superman or seeing yourself as a Skywalker yielding a lightsaber, then your daydream doesn’t give you any realism.
You will end up feeling disappointed and you will waste your time thinking about things that are near impossible to achieve.
On the other hand, if you daydream about something more realistic and something that can really come true, like achieving success and living a better life, then you are giving instructions to your brain the direction you want to go in life.
Realistic daydream gives us mental practice pursuing real and important goals before we actually put in real effort and time.
Your mind makes your dreams real
Do you know that our minds can’t differentiate between what is imagined and what is real?
When you daydream or envision about something, especially about things that you can do in reality, your brain makes it real.
A study conducted by Dr. Biasiotto at the University of Chicago has proved this.
Dr. Biasiotto recruited a group of basketball players and then divided them into 3 groups to test their free throws.
He requested the first group to practice free throws every day for an hour, the second group to only visualize themselves making the free throws, and the third group did nothing.
After 30 days, he tested the players again. And the results were astonishing.
The third group who did not practice saw no improvement in their free-throw skill, which is expected.
The first group who practice physical free throws improved their scoring by 24%.
And the second group who practice via visualization saw an improvement of 23%, without actually touching the ball at all!
This is how daydream and visualization can help you achieve your goals and dreams.
And this is also what professor Feldman meant by a realistic daydream. When you imagine about a real-life situation where you have the power to change, you heighten your awareness to do it in reality.
Use structured daydreaming to help you reach your goals and dreams
Daydreaming doesn’t need to be something happens on random. And you can use the structured daydreaming method to really increase your productivity and boost your probability of achieving what you want in life.
Instead of allowing your thinking to go random, choose a goal that you really want to achieve in your life or in the next few months.
Then, spend a few minutes, close your eyes, and envision yourself pursuing that goal as realistic as possible.
See yourself working on the goal, making progress, and succeeding at each step.
For example, if your goal is to build a successful blog so that you can quit your day job and work on it full-time, then vividly imagine the process and see yourself work through it.
For instance, you can see yourself writing quality articles and publishing them on your blog. Envision your readers leaving positive comments to compliment your hard work and how your articles have helped them. See your traffic increasing each day, week, and months. Also, see yourself becoming more of an expert and start earning money from your blog.
What if you imagine yourself facing some problems or obstacles? Don’t ignore them or skip them. Instead, see yourself confront the obstacles and work on overcoming them.
This is how you can use the structured daydream method to help you get what you want in life.
If you want to make your daydream more effective and easier, use vision boards.
Create a vision board for your goal and use it to help you envision the things that you want.