This habit sounds lazy, but it’s actually a little vacation for your brain | Chantal van der Leste

Are you comfortably seated and staring out the window again? girl’s face. I was really working, but I also understand that it doesn’t look like that. The idealized image of a productive employee is a busy bee raging at the keyboard and running through the building. However, daydreaming is beneficial for your productivity.

Although researchers haven’t seen it that way for a while. People don’t feel alone with their thoughts anyway. If you put them alone in a boring room doing nothing, some of them were prepared for mild electric shocks. Anything is better than nothing. No wonder we are so stuck with our phones. They always give us something to do.

In addition, it has been found that many people feel worse when daydreaming. If we let our thoughts run free, we quickly end up in a negative spiral of lifting old wounds and chewing on roots. So don’t do that anymore.

but. Something wasn’t right. Because babies and children are constantly daydreaming and we adults can do something about that too. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, believe that daydreaming should have a purpose. They saw that anxiety was confused by daydreaming. When you worry, you constantly indulge yourself in the same cycle of negative thoughts. But with daydreaming, you let your mind wander freely.

The researchers had daydreams while scanning their brains. The frontal lobe of your brain, which you use to focus so intensely, turns out to be quite relaxing. Almost as if he was taking a nap. After this intellectual journey, people were able to focus better again. They knew better what they wanted to achieve and came up with creative solutions. As if their brains had just gone on vacation.

Another colleague called my work habit Curk-en: a creative look outside the window. Well, that’s exactly, because I think of the most beautiful things. As with audiobooks, I’m also distracted. I want to rummage about the new information for a while, but in the meantime, the narrator falters. I can’t keep up at all. You can return an audiobook, but recently I got this with a friend. Haha, I had to laugh a lot, it was a weird day anyway..

Want to learn more about psychology and work? Read Chantal’s books Why Perfectionists Are Rarely Happy, 13 Tips Against Perfection (2021) and Our Fallible Thinking at Work (2018).

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