If I have a fatal flaw, it’s that I get distracted a lot. I can be reading, I can be writing, I can be talking, I can be listening, I can be in class, I can be at home, or I can just be eating or anything else, and then my mind snaps away to somewhere completely different.
For the longest time, I saw this as a problem. After all, if you’re in a lecture and you start reminiscing about a book you just read, you’re not going to take good notes. If you’re meeting someone for the first time and you start pondering over existential questions, you’re going to have trouble making friends.
To an extent, I still believe that. I can’t be daydreaming all the time, and certainly not any time. But I’ve come to the conclusion that if I don’t let myself daydream freely, then I’m just going to fall into a world of trouble.
So if you’re someone whose head constantly whisks yourself to worlds beyond your own, instead of trying to stop it, you might want to take a look at why it’s actually one of the best things you could be doing.
It Gets Your Brain Moving
You hear a lot about how important meditation is, but I think there’s also a lot to be said for daydreaming—it gets your brain spinning, answering questions and inventing ideas, and since you’re so fully immersed in the fantasy, you’re giving your brain free reign to run as fast as it wants.
What’s so great about this is that afterwards, if you need to get to work on an essay or assignment, you’re able to jump into it without constantly lagging. Sure, it might take a few moments to snap out of the zone and focus on the task at hand, but once you’ve done that, you’re set!
You’re Basically Getting a Free Vacation
This one may sound a little weird, but the fact of the matter is that the more vivid you let your imagination become, the better your daydreams are going to get. Sure, travelling to other countries is ridiculously expensive, but your mind is the only thing in life that’s free, and you have the power to do anything in there. When I feel like my day’s in a bit of a rut, a daydream always helps to shake things up—just make sure that you don’t go overboard!
You Start Looking at the World Differently
Now, depending on the way you daydream, this could be a bad thing—real life might be dull and unappealing compared to daydreams, and if you keep that sort of mindset then you’re never going to be satisfied with reality.
But there’s another way to daydream, the way I like to do it. Let your daydreams focus on potential—on choices and blank pages, on what could be. When you do that, the search for potential starts bleeding into real life, and you start seeing so much more. You see where things can be improved, and how you have the power to improve them. You see choices and options for your own life and happiness that you never saw before. You see the potential in people—yourself included—to be great.