Caught Up in a Daydream? Enjoy It — It Could Just Help Your Productivity Rather than Hurt It.

Striking the right balance between mind wandering and staying focused is the key to creativity.

If you’ve ever had a tough time finishing a task because your mind keeps drifting off, you’re not alone. And if you’ve beaten yourself up about it, you’re still not alone.

Most adults spend about 47% of their waking life in a state of mind wandering, according to Harvard research, and many of us have been raised to believe that freewheeling daydreams are unproductive and our minds have done something wrong by breaking concentration. As researcher Scott Barry Kaufman writes, most recent scientific studies of mind wandering depict it as a “costly cognitive failure” that detracts from our everyday performance in the world.

But this same activity is fertile ground for our creativity. Maybe it’s worth a second look.

Creative Wandering

Before your mind starts wandering away from this article, we’ll explain how daydreaming and mind wandering work in the brain. It’s critical to understand two types of brain activity that work in tandem: the default mode network and the working memory network.

These networks generally anticorrelate, meaning one system takes the driver’s seat while the other takes a rest. Not entirely, of course, but when activity is high in the working memory network, it’s lower in the default mode network, and vice versa.

Your working memory network (WMN) means business. It’s an executive function that helps you focus, guides your decisions, and processes information in your environment. When you’re buying groceries, ordering your latte, or taking notes in a meetings, the working memory system is activated to record what’s going on and help you act appropriately.

The default mode network (DMN), on the other hand, is the home of daydreaming, night dreaming, and a host of other rich, personal mental activity, such as retrieving memories and processing feelings about ourselves. People who have higher baseline activity in the DMN when their brain is at rest tend to report more frequent mind wandering.

What’s more, a new study, which asked participants to engage in working memory tasks (and therefore hand the wheel to their WMN), found that the more creative a participant was, the less able they were to suppress, or lower, brain activity in their DMN. Specifically, this phenomenon was located in the precuneus, an area of the brain linked to episodic memory retrieval and mental representations of oneself.

The researchers suggested a positive outlook on this inability to suppress what seems like unnecessary (or even disruptive) cognitive activity: it might help people associate unrelated ideas, and therefore make more creative connections.

So with all this hustle and bustle in the imagination center, no wonder your savant classmate in 7th grade art was staring off into the distance while you mixed your colors.

Kaufman points out that this inability to suppress the DMN is also present in patients with working memory disorders, schizophrenia, and schizotypy, according to earlier research. This highlights the need for a balance between mind wandering and the focus of your working memory when you want to actually get a creative project done. “The key to functional creativity,” he writes, “seems to be the ability to keep one’s internal stream of consciousness ‘on call’ while being able to concentrate on a task.”

Keep Positive to Be Productive

It’s also helpful to note that not all types of mind wandering are productive. Rumination is a type of mind wandering that fixates on a negative topic. For example, you might obsessively replay the horrors you screamed at your significant other last Wednesday, or your mind keeps coming back to worried thoughts about tomorrow’s work performance review. That’s rumination, and it’s often linked to depression and other mental illness.

Why is rumination bad for creativity? Researchers at the University of British Columbia recently published a literature review proposing an important difference between ruminative mind wandering and “spontaneous thought.” Spontaneous thought is free. It’s mind wandering that allows the brain to move dynamically, imagine, and connect unrelated ideas. “Without this spontaneous mode, we couldn’t do things like dream or think creatively,” writes lead author Kalina Christoff. Rumination, on the other hand, constrains spontaneous thought and therefore can dampen creativity.

So are you an active dreamer? Constantly following twists and turns of your imagination? It may be a good thing. When you want to get a creative project done, allow your default mode network to do its dance in spurts between longer periods of concentration. And if you’re concentrating hard on a project that could use a boost of new ideas, try taking a breather every so often. Your imagination just might spark something new.