{"id":2528212,"date":"2021-03-05T12:17:05","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T17:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=2528212"},"modified":"2021-03-05T12:18:59","modified_gmt":"2021-03-05T17:18:59","slug":"daydreaming-pleasant-thoughts-cognition-2528212","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/daydreaming-pleasant-thoughts-cognition-2528212\/","title":{"rendered":"Why aren’t people good at thinking just for fun?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you find it harder to be pleasantly lost in your thoughts or daydreams these days, you’re not alone.<\/p>\n

“This is part of our cognitive toolkit that’s underdeveloped, and it’s kind of sad,” says Erin Westgate, a psychology professor at the University of Florida.<\/p>\n

The ability to think for pleasure is important, and you can get better at it, Westgate says. The first step is recognizing that while it might look easy, daydreaming is surprisingly demanding.<\/p>\n

“You have to be the actor, director, screenwriter, and audience of a mental performance,” she says. “Even though it looks like you’re doing nothing, it’s cognitively taxing.”<\/p>\n

Another obstacle Westgate’s research revealed: We don’t intuitively understand how to think enjoyable thoughts.<\/p>\n

“We’re fairly clueless,” she says. “We don’t seem to know what to think about to have a positive<\/a> experience.”<\/p>\n

Daydreaming benefits<\/h3>\n

Westgate wants to help people recapture that daydream state, which may boost wellness and even pain tolerance. In a study published today in the journal Emotion<\/em><\/a>, Westgate and colleagues Timothy Wilson, Nicholas Buttrick, and R\u00e9my Furrer of the University of Virginia and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University instructed participants to think meaningful thoughts.<\/p>\n

Westgate anticipated that this would guide the thinkers into a rewarding experience, but they actually found it less enjoyable than their unguided thoughts.<\/p>\n

“I was so confused,” she says. Then she took a look at the topics the participants reported thinking about. “It was heavy stuff. It didn’t seem to occur to them that they could use the time to enjoy their own thoughts.”<\/p>\n

When we’re nudged to think for fun instead of meaning, we tend to default to superficial pleasures like eating ice cream, which don’t scratch the same itch as thoughts that are pleasant but also meaningful. But when Westgate provided participants with a list of examples that were both pleasant and meaningful, they enjoyed thinking 50% more than when they were instructed to think about whatever they wanted.<\/p>\n

That’s knowledge you can harness in your everyday life by prompting yourself with topics you’d find rewarding to daydream about, like a pleasant memory, future accomplishment, or an event you’re looking forward to, she says.<\/p>\n

Daydreaming can be an antidote to boredom, which Westgate’s work has shown can induce people to bully, troll, and show sadistic behavior. In one experiment, participants opted to kill bugs with a coffee grinder to alleviate their ennui. (The bugs weren’t actually hurt, but the participants didn’t know that.) In another study, 67% of men and 25% of women preferred to give themselves an electric shock than be alone with their thoughts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sure, our devices provide an endless stream of distraction, but in certain situations, electronic entertainment is unavailable or unsafe. (“If you’re at a stoplight, I’d much rather you reflect on a nice picnic you once had than reach for your phone,” Westgate says.)<\/p>\n

How to get better at thinking for pleasure<\/h3>\n

Aside from its boredom-fighting abilities, thinking for pleasure can be its own reward. “It’s something that sets us apart. It defines our humanity. It allows us to imagine new realities,” Westgate says. “But that kind of thinking requires practice.”<\/p>\n

Here’s how to master it.<\/p>\n