Perhaps our creative minds work best when we stop trying so hard
By Leslie Ellis
Have you ever forgotten someone’s name and strained to recall it, only to have it drift effortlessly back into awareness once you stopped trying? This simple experience reveals something profound: our minds often work best when we stop trying so hard. We are, by cultural conditioning and design, a task-focused society. But our most generative thoughts, our richest creative insights, come not from effort, but from ease. Daydreaming, it turns out, is not a lapse of attention but an invitation into a subtler, more expansive form of knowing.
Freeing the Mind
Cognitive scientists suggest that as much as 95% of our thoughts are unhelpful (Zedelius & Schooler, 2016). Much of our mental energy is spent ruminating on the past or worrying about the future. These exercises in futility elevate stress and reduce clarity. And yet, when we turn our busy minds off, or rather, allow them to wander, we access an entirely different mode of thinking. We open the door to insight, creativity, and deeper self-connection.
We tend to associate mind-wandering with distraction, but when it drifts within the range of real-life situations and relationships, it becomes salubrious. It used to be thought that when we sleep, our brain turns off for the night. Now we know it’s just as active, but in a different way as we surrender to dreaming. Similarly, during the day, when our brains are left to wander, they don’t go dark, they light up, especially in a network of brain regions known as the default mode network (DMN). This neural system becomes active when we are at rest, supporting daydreaming, memory consolidation, emotional processing, and imagining the minds of others (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2014).
The DMN is, in many ways, the neurological signature of reverie. And rather than being a wasteful indulgence, it is essential to how we make meaning of our lives. Even more, it offers us a sanctuary from the constant churn of productivity. When we retreat inward, we are not abandoning the outside world, we are metabolizing it.
Have you noticed that when you’ve had a lot going on during the day and no time for rest or reverie, when you lay down to sleep, your mind won’t let you? Instead, your thoughts race through the day’s scenarios, emotional upsets, outstanding tasks or questions in a relentless fashion. If we don’t take time to attend to our inner world during the day, we can be forced to do so at night before our mind will let us rest.
A Misunderstood Mental State
For years, the scientific literature painted daydreaming in a negative light, describing it with terms like “cognitive leakage” or “task-unrelated thought” (McVay & Kane, 2010). But a more nuanced picture has emerged. Jerome Singer, a pioneer in daydream research, categorized our mental meanderings into three types: positive constructive, guilty dysphoric, and poorly controlled (McMillan et al., 2013). It is the first of these—imaginative, creative, gently goal-oriented wanderings—that opens the door to insight and well-being.
Constructive daydreaming improves our ability to delay gratification, enhances social skills, and fosters emotional meaning-making (Singer, 2009). It also prepares us for the future and helps us resolve internal conflict. Daydreaming becomes a kind of internal rehearsal, a dance between memory, emotion, and imagination. In this space, we explore who we are, who we’ve been, and who we might become.
Crucially, daydreaming grants us freedom from the tyranny of the to-do list. It carves out a realm where we are not measured by output, where our interiority can breathe. The mind drifts, not aimlessly, but in concentric spirals around what matters most to us: our hopes, our losses, our longings. These inner excursions are acts of soul-tending.
As a child, I intuitively understood these rhythms. After school, on days I didn’t have sports, I would sit on the living room couch, turned backwards to face the window and simply stare at the old maple in our front yard. For hours sometimes. I would disappear into a daydream so deeply, my mom would have to shout in my ear to get my attention. To this day, I find that things don’t feel quite right in my world unless I allow myself the luxury of unstructured, ‘unproductive’ time.
Going with the Flow
One of the most exquisite states of consciousness we can experience is flow, a deeply immersive state in which the sense of self dissolves and time seems to vanish. In flow, the inner observer is suspended, and we become one with the unfolding of the task at hand. Painting, writing, running, playing music, even gardening or kayaking can be portals to this timeless sense of absorption.
As Csikszentmihalyi (1990) describes, flow is an “altered state of consciousness in which the moment blurs into a continuous stream of activity.” Unlike meditation, which emphasizes awareness of the self in the present, flow involves a complete absorption that effaces self-consciousness. This is why, as some have argued, flow and mindfulness can be experientially incompatible (Sheldon et al., 2014).
Daydreaming and flow may at first seem opposed: one passive and receptive, the other active and immersive. But they share common ground. Both offer release from the relentless grasp of the analytical mind. And both are states where insight flows freely, where the unexpected arrives without summons.
For years I started my day with a four-mile run that almost always settled my mind into a state of flow. I did my most creative thinking and mind-clearing during those early-morning sojourns. Walking or jogging are physical rhythms that lull the conscious mind into a softened state. With each step, another constraint loosens. With each breath, the world within finds new articulation. The mind, left to its own poetic logic, often knows what we most need to gently attend to. These runs have now become forest walks but serve the same purpose.
The Inner Critic and the Art of Redirecting
Still, not all inner wandering is benign. For those burdened by trauma or depression, the mind may default to self-recrimination. The inner critic, the voice of old wounds and outdated beliefs, can hijack your daydreams, turning them into spirals of shame or despair. Here, the art lies in awareness.
We must learn to recognize the critic as just another player in our inner cast of characters, not a truth-teller. This voice is often shaped in childhood as a way to protect us from familial rejection or chaos, making us the bad one as the alternative, the truth, is too scary. As independent adults, this idea no longer serves us. With imagination, we can meet our critic, name it, have a conversation with it, argue with its point of view. We can assign it a new role. I often suggest clients envision an inner cheerleader, a wise friend, or a guardian who steps in and says, “Enough.”
Our brains are wired with a negativity bias. This once kept us safe from predators, but now it keeps us entangled in self-doubt. By engaging in imaginal dialogue with these inner figures, we can reshape the landscape of our minds and make space for more helpful, generative voices. (I have a lot more to say about this, but it will have to be another story.)
The Craft of Constructive Daydreaming
It is possible to cultivate daydreams that nourish rather than deplete. It begins with intention: a gentle question, a curiosity, a wish whispered inward: “What do I need to see?” “Where does my imagination want to take me?”
Just as we can incubate a dream before sleep, we can seed a daydream with purpose. Research supports the idea that the most fruitful reveries arise when we are lightly engaged, doing things like walking, gardening, showering or anything that requires minimal attention. This allows our minds to wander without forcing it (Baird et al., 2012). In these states, the brain’s creative centres activate, weaving together distant ideas and unconscious impressions.
Constructive daydreaming does not require sunshine and rainbows. It may lead us through grief, memory, longing. But it also opens the possibility for transformation. It helps us rehearse difficult conversations, envision futures, and connect with lost parts of ourselves. It allows us to listen, not just to thoughts, but to images, symbols, atmospheres of meaning.
We can become caretakers of our inner ecology. By learning to redirect from worry to wonder, from critique to curiosity, we shape the weather of our interior lives.
Night Dreams, Too, Are Allies
Dream researcher Ernest Hartmann described cognition as a continuum: focused waking thought at one end, dreaming at the other, with daydreaming in the middle. If we want to cultivate our creativity, we would do well to tend all three states.
In sleep, the executive mind recedes, and imagery, memory, and emotion take the lead. Dreams offer not only metaphor and mystery but also novel combinations of thought. Research has shown that we can quite deliberately ask our dreams for answers to creative conundrums. Deirdre Barrett (2001) has written a lovely book on dream creativity called The Committee of Sleep. This inner council has given rise to scientific breakthroughs and works of art, from the structure of DNA to the melody of Yesterday. More current research has corroborated the notion that our dreams and daydreams help us come up with creative ideas that elude us if we try too hard to harness them.
What might our wandering, dreaming mind offer us, if we simply ask, and then take the time to listen?
A Closing Invitation
Let’s stop pathologizing the natural movements of our minds. Daydreaming is not a waste of time. It is the place where time softens, and truth whispers through. When we switch off our tasking mind, we do not go dark. We illuminate a different light. A quieter knowing. A place where something new can emerge because we have stopped running our thoughts along familiar tracks.
So when your head feels full, or your heart uncertain, go for a walk without your phone. Let your gaze soften, your thoughts meander. Allow your inner landscape open up to new terrain. Ask a question. Then wait.
The answer may already be forming.
References
Andrews-Hanna, J. R., Smallwood, J., & Spreng, R. N. (2014). The default network and self-generated thought: Component processes, dynamic control, and clinical relevance. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1316(1), 29–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12360
Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612446024
Barrett, D. (2001). The Committee of Sleep: How artists, scientists, and athletes use dreams for creative problem-solving—and how you can too. Crown/Random House.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
Kimmelman, N. (2023). What About Daydreaming? Harnessing a Wandering Mind for Creativity and Improved Mental Health. Conference presentation, IASD, June 22, 2023, Ashland, US.
McMillan, R. L., Kaufman, S. B., & Singer, J. L. (2013). Ode to positive constructive daydreaming. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 626. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00626
McVay, J. C., & Kane, M. J. (2010). Does mind wandering reflect executive function or executive failure? Comment on Smallwood and Schooler (2006) and Watkins (2008). Psychological Bulletin, 136(2), 188–197. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018298
Sheldon, K., Prentice, M., & Halusic, M. (2014). The experiential incompatibility of mindfulness and flow. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(3), 276–283.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.
Singer, J. L. (2009). Daydreaming and fantasizing: Thought flow and motivation. In K. D. Markman, W. M. P. Klein, & J. A. Suhr (Eds.), Handbook of imagination and mental simulation (pp. 117–134). Psychology Press.
Zedelius, C. M., & Schooler, J. W. (2016). The richness of inner experience: Relating styles of daydreaming to creative processes. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 2063. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.02063