Spanista Friday Wellness Tip: Crazy About Daydreaming

PINIMAGEDear Wellness Seekers,

Spanista Friday Wellness Tip: Crazy About Daydreaming. When I was a child daydreaming was a source of entertainment, escape and joy. No electronic gadgets kept me occupied from morning until night like our kids have today.

I am a big fan of what I call Dedicated Daydreaming. This creative art form has been lost in our fast paced, technology dominated world. Yet it offers us so much. It is the ultimate personal ap: simple, free, accessible when ever you want it. Returning to daydreaming as an adult ( great way to spend airplane fly time) I re discovered a unique way to create or imagine “what if”. For example, one of the most prolific young imagineers was Steven Spielberg and he still does it today. It is a practice I would like us to reclaim as part of our Spanista Self Care Journey to Joy.

Let’s step back a moment and recall those times when we were able to just relax and day-dream for a while. Did you ever find yourself daydreaming about your future or your goals?  Perhaps like me, you had downtime on an airplane ride? What emerged? Perhaps a fantastical story or an idea for a new adventure or an idea that came from allowing your brain to relax on something that makes you happy? How did you feel during and after the experience? Optimistic? Happier? Exuberant?

If so, count yourself as one of the lucky and blessed. Studies show daydreaming boosts endorphins, the feel-good hormones in the brain.

While doing my research for this post I came upon this point of view by Indre Viskontas for MotherEarth.com about neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin who penned the book “The Organized Mind”.

Ms. Viskontas writes – The science of what distinguishes restorative daydreaming from maladaptive mind-wandering is still in its infancy. But as Levitin notes in The Organized Mind, when you’re not fully engaged in a task, the default network “eagerly shifts the brain into mind-wandering” and “hijacks your consciousness if the task you’re doing gets boring.”

But Levitin points to another feature of daydreaming that goes beyond simply giving your brain a rest: creativity. “The history of science and culture is filled with stories of how many of the greatest scientific and artistic discoveries occurred while the creator was not thinking about what he was working on,” writes Levitin, “not consciously anyway—the daydreaming mode solved the problem for him, and the answer appeared suddenly as a stroke of insight.”

What Levitin describes is the new science of what’s happening in the brain when it’s at rest. When scientists first developed the neuroimaging tools that allow us to peer into healthy, active brains, they were mostly interested in what was happening in the brain when their subjects were doing something. Anything. From simple arithmetic to jazz improvisation, and everything in between. But in 2001, two neuroscientists discovered that even when the brain is supposedly “doing nothing,” it’s surprisingly active. In fact, there’s a set of interconnected brain regions that seem to work in concert when we’re passively waiting for something to do—neuroscientists call it the default mode network. Per Ms. Viskontas.

If you are into learning more check it out via this link….

How Daydreaming Can Fix Your Brain | Mother Jones

This reference article and quotes were written by  neuroscientist, Indre Viskontas.

This book can be purchased on Amazon.com.

Spanista Friday Wellness Tip: Happy Daydreaming!

To Your Self Care Journey To Joy,

Ginny