Your Wandering Mind is Making You Sad

Use your creative time to create, not ruminate

Daye Lindsay
3 min readSep 10, 2022

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Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Everyone Daydreams

Many creatives daydream as part of their creative process. Humans may be the only creatures capable of imagining the future and reliving the past at will. This study done by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert concluded that most of its 2000 participants daydreamed on average about 47% of the day. So it’s normal to escape into a daydream when your coworker complains about her client…again!

The Problem with a Wandering Mind

Focused, creative thinking allows you to come up with new ideas, resolve problems in different ways, and learn new ways to express yourself. Working with a plan during your creative time is productive.

But allowing your mind to wander without direction is unproductive and leads to unhappiness. Like muscles, the mind needs the discipline to produce its best work. Left to its own devices, it will work against you.

An Idle Mind is The Devil’s Playground-So be Careful

Anytime you’re not focused on a task, a noise gently plays in the back of your mind, like a radio in the next room. This noise is called your Default…

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Daye Lindsay
Daye Lindsay

Written by Daye Lindsay

I'm a book reviewer and aspiring author dedicated to building a community by sharing my love for books and offering tips for new writers and creatives.