When is that last time you caught yourself daydreaming? If you're like the rest of us, then chances are that as soon as you get tired, bored, or any sort of distracted, you'll pull out your phone. You may proceed to check your texts or cruise through your favorite social media timeline. With this being the case, there is less time that our brain has to be bored and eventually start daydreaming. But is daydreaming really even good for us?
Well, it turns out that daydreaming is not only good for us, it may actually be vital to our well-being. It gives our brain a chance to cycle through the days events and consolidate important information into memory. When we pull out our phone and halt this process, eventually our memory begins to suffer and thus we hear the inevitable "OMG I can't remember anything these days".
When I thought more about it, I realized that it should come as no surprise to me. During Neurofeedback Clinician training, I learned that theta brainwaves are important in memory consolidation. Coincidentally theta waves are exactly what are produced when our brain is "relaxed and unfocused", or an excellent example of this would be, daydreaming.
So next time someone gets mad at you for daydreaming, tell them you were simply working on your memory. And whenever you can, try and skip at least one or two urges to pull out your phone per day and let your brain just get bored. Who knows, you might just remember something important that you would have otherwise forgotten.