Benefits of Daydreaming 🧙- 10 Unique Benefits

As the calendar showed May 25, 1961, US President 👨🏼‍💼 John F. Kennedy said something quite assertive:

“The time we have to wait to send astronauts to the Moon is less than 10 years.”

The benefits of dreaming as a team came into play at this point, and only 8 years after Kennedy's statement, 🚀Apollo 11 landed on the 🌗 Moon. This was humanity's first contact with the moon, and 🧑🏻‍🚀 Neil Armstrong, who shared this historic moment with 🧑🏻‍🚀 Buzz Aldrin, expressed his excitement with the following words:

Houston, this is the Sea of Silence. The Eagle landed.

You can read the detailed story about it here: 🛰️ NASA

Dreaming is the first and perhaps the most important step towards something planned and desired to be achieved. Below is a fictional story about daydreaming, and some of it will probably sound familiar to you.

When I take myself away from the sound of my heels on the hard ground, I find myself on a big stage. As I begin to blush with excitement, the bright lights of the stage dazzle my eyes. A much larger audience than I expected applauds me standing, and I make eye contact with a few people who look at me with admiring eyes. The applause is very loud and when the presenter says my name, butterflies in my stomach start to take off from the branches they landed on. I notice my cheeks start to hurt and then my mouth reaches my ears and suddenly my computer starts beeping for a reminder I set weeks ago and I find myself sitting in the living room, working on the computer. I immediately gather my mind and continue working.

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We all know many of the proven benefits of taking a vacation. We are constantly and painfully reminded that trying to complete a task or please our managers has negative effects on our productivity, creativity, performance, and even our health. So, is it possible for us to benefit from these proven benefits by going on vacation, even for a few days every year?

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Daydreaming is generally defined as visualizing a universe that our imagination desires, and academic research reveals that the benefits of daydreaming are exactly the same as the benefits obtained by going on a mini vacation!

Here's why:

Benefits of Daydreaming

1. You Exercise Your Brain

Daydreaming is an activity that requires a lot of neural effort and is beneficial for important functions in the brain. Remembering the past and imagining the future is a very complex thought function, and as far as we know, we are the only living species that can do this. Dreaming and thinking are a natural result of the physical structure of the brain and a necessity to constantly create new information pathways for every new information we process.

2. You Allow Different Parts of the Brain to Rest

There are two main systems in our brain:

1. The analytical part that makes decisions
2. The empathetic part that establishes relationships between everything.

When you focus too much on any one of these parts, the other part goes to rest. Daydreaming allows these two parts of the brain to work alternately and naturally. While one part is active, the other part becomes passive and rests, and then they change places.

3. You'll Notice You're Becoming More Creative

Many celebrities known for their creative personalities, such as Woody Allen and JK Rowling, say that they owe their best ideas to imagination. This is because when daydreaming, your mind scans through different parts of your brain and combines small pieces of information. These connections often ignite the spark for new and creative ideas.

4. You Become More Understanding and Open-Minded

Being able to understand another person's perspective, like remembering the past or thinking about the future, is a behavior unique to the human species, as far as we know. A person spends approximately half of his waking hours daydreaming. If you spend even a fraction of that time trying to visualize what another person is thinking or feeling, it will change your relationships with people and create wonderful opportunities for better connections and communication.

5. You Establish Closer Bonds with People Close to You

Research proves that certain types of daydreaming, such as those involving people with whom you are in a serious relationship and approach-oriented, enable you to be happier, more loving, and establish tighter bonds in your relationships with those people. What is meant by approach-oriented is that the dream is about something positive. The type of daydreaming in which you try to avoid negative things is known as avoidance-focused daydreaming.

6. Improves Working Memory

Working memory involves the brain's ability to successfully store and then recall information under distracting conditions. A study conducted at the University of Wisconsin proved that there is a close connection between daydreaming and this type of memory.

7. Increases Efficiency and Performance

This is the most widely known benefit of daydreaming. A positive and instant performance increase is observed on a task performed as a result of the act of imagination, in which self-generated thoughts and the connections between them are established. It has been proven that the small distractions you experienced due to daydreaming in primary school did not actually cause any harm, but were quite beneficial.

8. You'll Be Healthier

Research has proven that daydreaming is a low-level form of self-hypnosis. By daydreaming, you reduce your stress level and indirectly contribute to your physiological health. Another way to reduce stress by dreaming is to create a kind of shield for yourself by dreaming before stressful events. If you have a stressful event that you will experience soon (such as giving a presentation at work), you can rehearse it by dreaming and prepare for the real event. And that's not all. Daydreaming is a direct indication that your brain is healthy. Autism and Alzheimer's patients do not have this self-hypnosis ability. Daydreaming also helps you sleep easier, as long as you don't have very detailed and serious dreams. Make sure that the dreams you have at night are about peaceful things rather than action-packed things.

9. You Can Achieve Your Goals

In addition to being more creative, improving your working memory, increasing your performance and reducing your stress level, it is also easy to realize how you can achieve goals that require a certain process by dreaming. There is even an academic study that proves this. When you abandon yourself to your dreams, your brain's problem-solving mechanism works much more actively than when you devote yourself to solving a problem. So set your goals, make plans to achieve your goals, and when you encounter a problem, let your dreams find the solution.

10. Most Importantly, You Will Be Happier

In addition to so many different benefits of daydreaming, it's surprising how much happier you can be by abandoning yourself to your own little mind game. Another reason for this relationship is that hope and expectation trigger a feeling of joy in people, and every dream contains a lot of hope and expectation.

Little Warnings About Daydreaming

You need to know that not every dream is the same. To fully reap the benefits of daydreaming, you should avoid having anxious or fearful daydreams. We all do these things from time to time, so you don't have to be ashamed of anything. But if you find yourself biting your nails while daydreaming about tomorrow's appointment or wondering what your boss meant by what he said, you're doing something wrong. All you have to do is direct your mind to more positive things and create new ways of information, allowing your brain to go on a joyful journey.

What are the Benefits of Daydreaming? 

- It gives agility to the brain. 
- It allows the brain to rest. 
- It increases creativity. 
- It helps to be understanding and open-minded. 
- It allows you to establish closer communication with those around you. 
- It contributes to working memory development. 
- It has a positive effect on efficiency and performance. 
- It has a positive effect on health. 
- It helps in achieving goals. 
- It makes you feel happy.

Writing such an article and not including Martin Luther King's legendary words would be like doing an injustice to the world.

I have a dream!