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If you ask Google about mind-wandering most results will alarmingly tell you how pausing or slowing down your mind from time to time and let it roam on its own can be dangerous.
- Mind-wandering appears to be correlated with unhappiness, bad or “dysphoric” moods, depression, anxiety, higher blood pressure, obsession and selfishness (no evidence for hair loss, to date).
- Mind-wandering makes it hard to stay focused, distracts your attention from immediate tasks at hand and gets in the way of your ability to learn, work and get things done.
- Mind-wandering may overwhelm normal functioning, impeding relationships and in general interferes with your social everyday life.
- Mind-wandering could be detrimental to the establishment of a sense of self-awareness and affects your thought patterns and behaviours.
It’s true! I mean, if you keep ruminating about your latest broken heart this will lead you to depression; if you frequently absent yourself from a demanding task you will hardly complete it within the given dead line, and so on. But I personally do not agree with such a negative scenario, definitely. I do love mind-wandering and I’m going to prove it is good for you, too.
Grants A Better Memory
Research has shown that mind-wandering is in fact a sign of a well-quipped brain and a sign of a high capacity working memory – in other words, able to think about multiple things at once. Self-generated thoughts help you process and consolidate recently acquired information for future reference.
Is A Crystal Bowl For Your Goal-Setting
When you allow your mind to stray, disengage from perception and ignore the immediate situation, you tune out and wander in time and space. This provides a rich mental playground where you can investigate, speculate and learn from past events. There you can anticipate and contemplate possibilities for the future and even rehearse in fearful scenarios without risk. Then you use these pieces of information, you prepare yourself for the future (see: Autobiographical Planning) and work out a basket of readily usable strategies or solutions to apply when faced with a challenging or uncommon situation.
This eventually results in increased future-oriented thinking, which in turn helps you set, clarify and specify your own and business goals.
Promotes Empathy
He who indulges in mind-wandering typically shows more cognitive flexibility, a greater openness to experience and an instinctive ability to understand what others think accurately. Therefore he better relates to strangers and better co-works with them, which can only be a good thing in an increasingly global and interconnected world.
As an extra bonus, the tendency to have absent-mindedness, forgetfulness or “task-unrelated thought” (TUT) episodes appears to make you more careful toward yourself and others, which is – incidentally – associated with happiness (see above...).
Augments Creativity & Problem Solving Ability
Mind-wandering allows your brain to turn its attention to more distant issues and tasks, to explore alternative perspectives and find or make connections and associations between pieces of information drawn from different premises of your know-how and experience. It’s a crucial tool to help you think “divergent” and outside the box, values that lie at the heart of creativity and problem solving skills.
Infact, Walt Disney is quoted to have said: “If you can dream it, you can do it.” and Richard O'Brien coined later a more saucy “Don’t dream it. Be it” for his Rocky Horror Show.
Fights Anxiety
Today’s everyday life is moving at fast pace with information technologies to keep us working round-the-clock. Anxiety has become an annoying colleague at work and a troublesome neighbour at home. Mind-wandering can help controlling it and has proven its effectiveness in reducing it. So, do not hold your mind from thinking off-task when it happens (...it’s not you. Researchers say that on average people are mentally absent for almost half their waking hours). Just surrender and trust me it’s not a waste of time. When you recall and refocus you’ll experience all the benefits of that break your attention needed.
Capitalise Your Mind-Wandering
Now that we’ve established how beneficial mind-wandering can be for our (personal and) working life in an efficiency, productivity and innovation-hungry business environment such our current, all we have to learn is how not take the good from that state.
That’s really easy:
- Don’t get lost in your imagining: remain aware of what is going on in your mind and follow carefully your thoughts drifting.
- Always have a “capture device” handy (your smartphone or just a simple paper notebook) to record any idea coming to your mind, may it make immediate sense or may it just sound fascinating, potentially fruitful somehow, sometime, somewhere.
I don’t mean that being keen on having moments of spontaneous and random thoughts is actually better than being constantly focused. (It’s not mind-wandering vs. mindfulness.) Men simply need both as both aspects of cognition serve a purpose and benefit us and possibly those around us. We just need to learn when it’s best to let our attention set free.
Mind-Wander Responsibly
Needless to say, it’s not wise to mind-wander while driving or doing open-heart surgery, sometimes actually the cost to your activity, reputation or performance happens to overwhelm any of the above mentioned benefits. But don’t take this as a warning or a disclaimer, indeed quite the opposite! It is just a warm invitation to enjoy your zone outs freely and safely. If it was the pay-off from a cheap’n’old ad it could sound like: “Mind-wandering makes you wiser, do it wisely.”
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