Of the many skills I attempted to hone as a young girl, there’s one that came rather naturally to me: daydreaming. At home, at school, at after-school classes, in transit between the three, I could be swept away to Timbuktu in a second of non-stimulation. As an adult, my daydreams are often interrupted by reality checks. My imaginary comebacks to the driver who glared at me after trying to overtake me from the left on a left turn will enter into a Mortal Kombat-esque fight with the email I haven’t responded to. The Victorian gardens that Jonathan Bailey and I are admiring together will suddenly turn into the new glasshouse restaurant I need to make a weekend reservation at. These startling twists are surprisingly useful. When there’s a million things on my mind, everything that slips into a daydream soon takes the shape of a task to be ticked off my to-do list.
I fear daydreaming is a dying art. One of the paths to daydreaming is non-stimulation. And with stimulation-providing gadgets constantly within reach, how often are we truly unstimulated? The minute I start losing focus on the task at hand, my hand reaches for my phone, which then rests comfortably on a dent in my pinky finger. “A phone-occupied mind is not the same thing as a mind left to wander on its own, free from engagement with the outside world,” says Dr Todd Handy, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Those engagement-free pockets have become few and far between. The minutes of daily bowel movement have found a constant companion in Instagram Reels. Traffic-ridden car rides have found a soulmate in YouTube Shorts. Every spare second has been snatched by attention-grabbing monsters that profit off of our time. And as Handy puts it, “The more frequently one picks up their phone, the less time they will spend mind wandering.” Mind wandering is essentially the academic term for daydreaming.
However, the optimal conditions for mind wandering aren’t necessarily when we’re doing absolutely nothing. “The evidence suggests that perhaps the most ideal time is when we’re doing a task like washing the dishes or taking a shower that requires a bit of our mind, but not all of it,” says Handy. The shower stall remains one of the few safe spaces for daydreaming. But who knows how much longer we have until our phones are entirely waterproof? Or until we can scroll simply by blinking really hard and activating a chip implanted directly into our brains?
We need our minds to wander, wonder and fantasise. Our brains evolved to move back and forth in time, for a reason. “It’s long helped us to solve everyday challenges we face, and adapt to changing circumstances that might require new ways to approach things to survive,” says Handy. When you’re not entirely locked into a problem, when it appears to you as a fleeting thought, you’re able to look at it from a new perspective. Your creative juices start flowing, flooding your mind. “We lose this when we bury our brains in phones and social media at every possible chance,” adds Handy. When the body is confined to routine, the mind lets us travel. So, why cage it? Let it run wild.
As you grow older, you daydream less anyway. “Studies suggest that young adults spend up to maybe two-thirds of their waking days engaged in mind wandering, but as we get older that proportion of time appears to decrease,” says Dr Handy. You have more real-life responsibilities that take up brain space. It’s an unfortunate loss—as Oscar Wilde put it, “Youth, what a pity it is wasted on the young.”
