You’re lying back on the emerald lawn, staring up at the night sky with only your thoughts and a few trillion miles between you and the stars. It’s a gorgeous evening and you feel lucky to be alive. Then after a few minutes, you drift from excited daydreaming to more concerning thoughts and a mounting to-do list. An innocent daydream shifts into negativity. The lawn beneath you needs to be mowed, your kids shouldn’t be up this late and you shouldn’t have eaten that second helping of spaghetti at dinner.
Thinking is a funny thing because research has shown that we’re the only species that can do it aimlessly. While other species are capable of solving complex problems and sophisticated analysis, humans are also uniquely wired for daydreaming and withdrawing into our thoughts. We also seem to value it as a civilization, seen in famous statues like Rodin’s The Thinker. But most of us don’t do it enough. In one survey, just 17 percent of Americans said they had spent any time in the last day daydreaming or thinking for fun. In fact, many of us find it rather boring and even painful.
