Are Social Daydreams Related to Well-Being?

Daydreaming often gets a bad reputation.

While yes– researchers have associated “lapses of attention” with and , here’s the thing: . Sure, when we need to pay attention to the outside world, it can be helpful to quiet the inner monologue. But much of our lives are spend in solitude, alone with our thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and inner strivings. It’d be quite shocking if daydreaming– — wasn’t adaptive.

Well, it can be. But context matters. An suggests that there are indeed many benefits of wool-gathering, but they depend on other factors such as the current goal, the thought content of daydreams and individual differences. In other words, depending on your (paying attention to a boring lecture vs.dreaming up content for your next novel), (neurotic vs. open to your inner experience) and (ruminative vs. positive), daydreaming can either be disruptive or immensely helpful for achieving our personal goals.

Certainly, many people have recurring, ruminative thoughts that they wish would go away. And mindfulness can help with that. But as it turns out, people daydream about the as an attempt to resolve and uncompleted personal goals. Critically, most of this reverie involves .

found that the goal commitments of most people are related to social life, involving “love, intimacy and sexual matters” and “friends and acquaintances”. In another study, Raymond Marr and colleagues found that . Only 1% of people reported that others are “never” included in their inner worlds. This is even built into the fundamental machinery of our minds: found that similar brain areas are active when daydreaming as when thinking about other people.

This isn’t an accident of human nature. As the late, great positive psychologist noted, “other people matter”. Good social relationships are . The is a fundamental human drive.

But this raises an intriguing question: does the influence of others on well-being require people? Can merely imagining others produce the same effects? How do people’s social worlds contribute to their socio-emotional functioning? Most of our days is spend without social engagement. Even if we do get the chance to chit-chat at work, we are often still separated from our loved ones. If being connected to our loved ones only can produce positive benefits, this would support the encouragement of daydreaming in society.

Enter a , which investigated the impact of social daydreams on momentary feelings. At four random times during the day, participants were asked to report on their most recent social or non-social daydream. Therefore, they looked at naturally occurring daydreams. They also reported on the emotional content of the daydreams and the relationship quality of the person in their daydreams.

They found that everyday daydreams with social content were associated with increases in feelings of love and connection, as well as increases in happiness. The same effects were found for non-social daydreams. The benefit of daydreaming seemed to be associated with the actual content of the daydreams, not merely an increase in positive emotions. Increases in social connectedness and happiness were still present even after taking into account the emotional content of the daydreams. They also found that daydreaming about significant others was particularly conductive to well-being. In fact, increases in positive emotions were only seen when the person in the daydream was considered highly central to their lives.

This study extends prior research on the importance of social connectedness in a really important way. We already knew that , with interactions with close loved ones giving rise to more positive social feelings. What this study suggests is that even just close others can bring out the same feelings of love and connection!

Indeed, daydreaming about close loved ones can be an adaptive emotion regulation strategy to compensate for feelings of social alienation in daily life. As the researchers conclude, “people’s everyday social feelings are shaped by their imaginary, as well as actual, social worlds, and daydreams can be a source of positive other-directed feelings.”

This is consistent with showing that daydreaming about people not close to us predicts greater loneliness, whereas daydreaming about close others predicts greater life satisfaction. This research is also part of a larger body of research suggesting the , from relieving boredom, to a , to deep learning and creativity, to an to , to .

Not bad for a mental activity often pushed to the margins of society. I think it’s about time we gave daydreaming its due attention!

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