675: Daydream Believer

I'm exercising, and I hate it, really. I really do, because I'm. I'm taking these exercise courses online, trying to get fit, and I just think it's the most boring thing in the world. I know some of you guys love exercise so much, I just don't. I love the way I feel afterwards. Don't get me wrong, but every time I gear up, I just feel like this is so boring. I can't think of a more boring thing I could possibly be doing right now. And then my mind wanders, and I'm looking over across my office at my energy anchor vision board and thinking about the stuff on it. And then I'm moving over, and I'm thinking about how I want to build, like, a little gazebo over the pond to keep the tree leaves from falling in and what it might look like. And then I think, God, you know, I really should plant some of those. What are those called again? Oh, yeah, camellias. They grow well in the shade. I'm gonna put those over there by the backside of the pond. And before you know it, I'm daydreaming, and time is going by, and I'm doing my exercises, and I think to myself, well, I guess it's not as bad as it could be. And this is the inspiration, frankly, for today's episode of let's Get Bored. Okay, Right. I'll make you bored. Just keep listening. I will make you bored. And I mean that with love, because daydreaming is incredibly healthy. It is incredibly rich for your mind. It is core to the processes that we do as flow dreamers. Daydreaming, in other words, is an incredibly underrated ability, a skill, something we should unleash ourselves into. And the question is, how? Well, I've got some ideas for you, so stay with me, and we'll go into episode number 675 of Flow Dreaming called Daydream Believer. Flow Dreaming, it's a show where we talk about the power of your mind to change your mind world around you, to literally affect the fabric of your reality. We talk about this feeling of hope and joy and relief. And that is what being aware of your flow does. It gives you a feeling of power again in your lives. Breathe. I'm Summer McStravik, and welcome to another episode of Flow Dreaming. As I was researching today's episode, I really had a lot of fun. Fun because every few years I go out there and search for what's the latest on daydreaming. And it's been interesting to see over the last almost 20 years. How the research has really shifted and changed over time. Back in 2005, when I wrote my first book, Flow Dreaming, there's a big section in there about how we use daydreaming, directed conscious daydreaming, as part of our flow dreaming process. And so I did a lot of research on it, and it wasn't hard to do because there was hardly any research out there. Not a lot to find. It was still vastly, vastly overlooked by the medical community, the psychological communities. It was still just kind of poo pooed and put aside as just something kids do or something your brain does when it's not doing other more important things. Well, have things changed? One of the first pieces that I stumbled on as I was researching it today comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology. There's a guy there, his name's Eric Schumacher. He's a Georgia Tech associate psychology professor who co authored this study. And he suggests, he actually says, people with efficient brains may have too much brain capacity to stop their minds from wandering. Yeah, okay, just pull that apart a second with me. What he's saying is, smart people, our brains have so much capacity that just staying focused is not enough to feed them. So that's why we're always daydreaming in our meetings with staff or management and why we're daydreaming and we're doing all kinds of other things when we are supposed to be paying attention. And how did he figure this out? That smart people daydream more because we're so super duper smart? I just love this, right? It makes me feel so superior. Oh, I'm kidding. But you know what I mean. He figured this out by putting like 100 or so people under MRIs and contrasting their cognitive, you know, brains lighting up while they were staring at fixed points versus their general creativity and innovative, you know, abilities and so forth. And anyway, the upshot is, I think it's particularly funny. I don't know if this is true or not. I think. I'm not sure if I believe the intelligent bias theory here, but I just thought it was. I just got such a kick out of it. And then that's not enough. The other most intriguing thing that popped up as I was researching, why do we daydream? Because, you know, in flow dreaming, it's really central, that daydreaming, this conscious, guided daydreaming. I look at it like the opposite of lucid dreaming at night. At night you're sleeping and you wake up and you guide your dream in the daytime. We typically Drift off, you know, and it's often when we're doing some very, you know, mediocre chore, we're folding laundry, we're doing dishes, you know, just boring stuff. And we're drifting and we realize, oh, here I am. I'm. I was. I was gone. And I don't even, like, even remember half the things that I was thinking about. But I'm back, I guess. Why? Why did I do that? Well, in flow dreaming, of course, we use conscious daydreaming, meaning we're going to direct our thoughts as they drift away because we want to direct them into a certain space. Anyway, I digress. Probably all the research I've done on daydreaming is making me totally going to wander through this entire episode. It's quite possible. But let me get back to the second thing that I thought was so super, super cool. So it turns out daydreaming uses diverse parts of your brain. And you think, yeah, well, don't most things, as it turns out, no, not really. Usually different areas of your brain fire up for different functions. But when you're daydreaming, both the executive sort of problem solving area as well as the area that's involved with creativity, those both areas in your brain are working simultaneously. The old right brain, left brain thing, they're both firing. And to have both firing at the same time is not common. I wouldn't say it's incredibly rare, but it's not common. So fascinating, right? This means that when we're daydreaming, we're able to sort of activate and integrate these two areas together. It lets us access information that we might not otherwise wise readily get to. It might be dormant, it might not be available without the trigger of this other kind of, you know, flow, I guess you could say, of both of them being active together, pretty darn cool. Furthermore, and this I think is probably the best part, we used to have a lot more boredom in our lives. I'm serious. We used to have a lot more boredom. Think about people pre electricity, right? You're sitting there around candlelight. What do you have to do? You can read a book. Unless you've got bad eyes and it's late, you don't want to read every single night. You could sit around talking with your family if they feel like talking with you. Or if you have a family, you could play a piano if you wanted to hear music, because there was no other option unless you happen to be wealthy and had a cello or a piano, for that matter. So there wasn't A lot to do. There was a lot of times where guys are just out in the field, women are out in the field, and they're just taking the hay and pitching it up into the cart. And they're doing a repetitive thing. And what are they doing this whole time? They're daydreaming this part of their minds for fully integrated, overlapping. You know why? Because they were bored. They were bored. Most of humanity has been bored a great deal of the time, except for, say, the last 50, 40, 30, 20, especially 10 years. Every person we see now has a phone in their hand. Every moment when we normally would be bored, standing in a line waiting for the laundry to finish at the laundromat, we're on our phone and we're getting stimulated. The times for us to be legit bored have dwindled. Unless you're a student in class or sitting at a meeting at work, you know, you don't have really much board time anymore. We fill it, we pack it. There's always something coming in, coming at us for our brains to drink in, absorb, be entertained by. Right? We're the entertainment economy. But what has this done for this ability of our brain to kind of mesh together, for both sides to light up in that third area to arise? And what is that third area? That's the daydream, right? That's when your mind is making random associations. The logical and the creative are both helping one another instead of one or the other being dominant. And we used to be thick in that amount of time that we spent in there, and today we have almost none. And I wonder, what is this doing for us? What does this mean now? You know, maybe when you lay in bed at night, that's the only time your mind is wandering. And maybe you hate it because you can't fall asleep. So you get back on your phone and try to get sleepy reading stuff. But then it doesn't make you sleepy, it just makes you more awake. So you put down your phone, you go back into daydreaming again, and then you finally fall asleep. Is that it? Like, I think I'm on a mission to get us daydreaming more and the way that we need to do this, because I want us, I want you, I want me, I want everybody to be in that creative association making state of mind, state of being. This is a kind of collateral damage that really no one expected or saw coming. But it's here. Daydreaming is healthy. It's necessary, and it's needed. When you're in that space Your mind is coming up with solutions to problems that may have been hovering in the background for a while. Unsolvable. Your mind is hashing out potential ideas, deciding if it wants them or doesn't want them. Your mind is discovering what makes me feel good. Oh, I want to. I want to maybe taste or explore that a little bit. Right. And you're having that little fantasy, like I am about maybe planting the camellias behind the pond. Why am I thinking that makes my heart feel good. Oh, that would feel so good. Oh, I want to look at those flowers. Oh, this feels so nice. Okay. My brain says, check. That'll work. This is very different than sitting down and plotting out and drawing. Like, here's what I'm gonna do, and here's what I'm gonna plant. Very different. Because my mind has this creative freedom that's daydreaming. Now, daydreaming takes another whole layer level of juiciness and greatness when you merge it into something like manifesting or personal growth work. You know, directed conscious daydreaming. I'm going to daydream. I'm going to do it in a specific way, and I'm gonna feel certain things when I'm there. Right now, I'm describing flow dreaming, and it's what makes things happen. The universe responds. The molecules of the future shift in response to the input we just put in there. And that's why, you know, I'm such a fan of flow dreaming. And dreaming comes from daydreaming. Right? That's. That's how the word actually got put together. Flow and daydreaming, mush them together, and you've got flow dreaming. So I'd like you to think right now of how can I get bored? What can I do? And why do I want to get bored? Because when you're bored, your mind unlocks, it, unleashes. It begins to entertain itself. And not only entertains itself, but it has some other really healthy, necessary functions going on. So the next time you go for your walk, don't put your headphones in. Keep your phone in your pocket. Let your mind wander. The next time you go for a drive, turn off the radio, turn off the music or the podcast. Except for this one. Listen to this one. Next time you go to the gym, no earbuds, no phone, no. No screens. See what it feels like. I bet you like me. You're gonna kick against it. You're gonna fight against it a little bit. I was surprised when I was feeling that way exercising, because I thought, gosh since when did I start to push against or resist being bored? When did I resist these moments of not needing to use my mind for anything? Why? And it dawned on me because I've become habituated to constant stimulation. And doing that has had this collateral damage. This part of me that leads, is creative, makes brilliant associations, solves otherwise unsolvable problems. I'm decreasing it, and I don't want that. So I want you to build in some bored time in your life. Build some in this week. See how you feel. See if you can, like me, push past it. When I exercised today, and I did, I did my cardio, did my strength training, I began to notice, okay, what am I thinking about? Where was my mind just now? And that's how I came up with this strange little list. It bounced all over the place, to be honest. I mean, I was on a billion different things. Everything from, why did I leave my bathrobe over the, you know, the chair in my office. I should really take that upstairs to God, the crystals in my chest are so beautiful. I wonder where that amethyst came from. I wonder what part of the world it originated in. What's it like over there, all over? Healthy daydreaming is going to take you places. It's going to take you into ideas that you have no business thinking otherwise. They're not related to any of your everyday daily life. It's a really different thing than when you're absorbing news, right? That's where people are putting information into your head. It's totally different than your head spontaneously generating things it's curious about. That's big, folks. That's a healthy brain. A bored brain is a healthy brain. I'm just going to put that out there. I know there will be some naysayers. I don't mean a bored brain all the time. I'm fully aware that keeping your brain active and Sudoku and all that keeps you sharp as attack, whatever. Talking about daydreaming here. So I want to encourage you to do it. Go get bored. Go daydream. Go notice if you fight against the feeling at first, and let that be a marker to show you how much your brain has adjusted away from being in that state. Notice when you're in that state of daydreaming, what it's about. Last thing I want to leave you with in our little bit of a shorter episode today is daydreaming is really different than what they call maladaptive daydreaming or mind wandering, which can be a kind of rehashing that kind of daydreaming, this wandering rehashing, is where you are letting your mind wander into the icky stuff, the bad conversation that happened yesterday that you don't know what to do about, that you replay in your head. It is the daydreaming about that hurt, that upset you have with somebody who owes you money or said that mean thing about you. That kind of daydreaming is a circling of your frustrations. It's your mind saying, help solve this. Please help me. We need to solve this. I'm going around and around chasing my tail. Please solve me. Do something. It's a call to action. That kind of daydreaming is. And it should be paid attention to, and it should be nipped in the bud as soon as it begins, because that's not the kind that's healthy and yet we can fall into it. So just be aware. Of course, the second kind that I just briefly mentioned is called maladaptive daydreaming. Very, very rare. Not many people have that. It's when a person has created a fanciful fictional world so real to them that they are kind of purposely driving themselves away from their day, their life, their actual activities, to go into this world that they've built, where perhaps they're the principal character and everything is wonderful, or it's fanciful or, you know, fantasy, like. And it becomes very detailed and very real and they get to the point where they don't really want to come back from it. They can spend hours at a time there in a day. It's a real thing. I didn't know about it either. I think I heard it first on a podcast a year or two ago. But of course that's not you. Probably not you. If it is, well, now you know what it's called. But if it isn't, I'm talking about healthy daydreaming. What 99.9999% of us do. And final little factoid, they do speculate. We do it up to 50% of the day. That is pretty crazy. So I question that fact, given that 50% of my day I'm receiving information or creating information with conscious intensity. I don't drive to work, so I don't have an hour both ways to daydream and let my mind wander. I don't have many moments for that. But maybe that 50% fact is for people who still do. I don't know. I believe in the past, 50% would have been for sure. Absolutely. Sun went down. Now we've got three hours before we get sleepy, what are we going to do? Gonna lie around, stare at the ceiling and think about things. Gonna go over and yell at my neighbors for a bit and come back and lie down again in my little straw hut. Anyway, I'm joking, but please start daydreaming. Let yourself go. Do it a little right now. This podcast is gonna be over in like two minutes and just hit the pause button and let your mind wander and see what happens. It might surprise you. And with that, much love to you all. If you are curious about Flow Dreaming, which I mentioned kind of in here and you're new to the show, go to flowdreaming.com I have a free kit you can download. It teaches you all about how to Flow Dream, this active form of daydreaming that you can manifest with. You can use it for healing, stimulate creativity, focus, create things in your life, make a blueprint for your future. Oh my God, it's endless. Anyway, go check it out. Flow dreaming.com, download the free kit and I'll see you all next time for hopefully another interesting episode of Flow Dreaming. My love to you all. Thank you, thank you so much, so much for listening and I'll see you next time. Hey everyone, thanks for listening today. One request before you go. Please rate this podcast either in itunes or tunein.com or wherever you listen to it. It'll only take you a minute to do, but your rating there is the number one way that other people discover this show. And the more ratings, the more people who will find and get turned on to Flow Dreaming. While you're there, you might also want to download my free Flow Dream podcast app. With this app, you can listen to the show anywhere you want on your mobile device, as well as search through listings of all of my episodes and bookmark your favorites. And if you want to listen to Flow Dreams, actual Flow Dreams on your phone, there's even another app. It's my player app and it will let you browse and sample Flow Dreams from the shop. There's even an oracle inside of that app to help you see and discover what you need to know most or what Flow Dream would be best best for you in your life. Right now. You can find these apps on itunes or in Google or your Amazon App Store. And again, thank you so, so, so much for giving back. Love you. Bye bye.