Daydream your way to happiness & success

Daydream your way to happiness & success

Do you want to achieve more? Do you want more happiness and success? Maybe the answer's in allowing your mind to wander! Check out this article that suggests you might be able to daydream your way to happiness and success…

Entrepreneurs might be especially focused on productivity, but despite your best efforts to concentrate on your business, you're probably not awfully consistent at it. You are human, after all, and various scientific studies have found most people spend between 30% and 47% of their waking hours daydreaming.

Your response may be horror that between a third and a half of you and your employees' workdays are spent gazing out the window or pondering their next vacation. But reserve judgment. A recent post by Jonah Lehrer for his New Yorker science blog, Frontal Cortex, explains that not only have scientists confirmed humans are incorrigible daydreamers (yes, even hard-nosed business owners), but also uncovered that this seemingly useless activity actually has an important function.

A forthcoming paper in Psychological Science, from a research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara, demonstrates how daydreaming can be useful. Lehrer describes their study and its outcome:

The experiment itself was simple: a hundred and forty-five undergraduate students were given a standard test of creativity known as an "unusual use" task, in which they had two minutes to list as many uses as possible for mundane objects such as toothpicks, bricks, and clothes hangers.

Subjects were then given a twelve-minute break. During this time, they were randomly assigned to three different conditions: resting in a quiet room, performing a difficult short-term memory task, or doing something so boring that it would elicit mind-wandering. Following this interlude, the subjects were given another round of creative tests, including the unusual-use tasks they had worked on only a few minutes before.

Here's where things get interesting: those students assigned to the boring task performed far better when asked to come up with additional uses for everyday items to which they had already been exposed. Given new items, all the groups did the same. Given repeated items, the daydreamers came up with forty-one per cent more possibilities than students in the other conditions…

…keep reading HERE