Episode 68: Daydreaming Is Good for You!

Welcome to wisdom from the aerial view, the podcast for those who want to find meaning and purpose in their lives. And in fact, that is what we do here. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, Dr. Klein, how are you?

Hello, Enid, good to see you as always.

It's good to see you. And we did another podcast. You did one without me. And I know you missed me because I know I missed you. And I was sorry I wasn't on that podcast with Ed Hagem, but it was very, very interesting. And I thank you for doing a solo engagement. I missed it.

Well, I actually, was very lonely. When you're used to doing something with somebody and all of they're not there, it's a very strange thing. let's try not to do that again. But I'm sorry you were ill. I'm sorry you weren't feeling well.

Yeah.

I I was ill ill, I had dental surgery and I couldn't talk.

Yeah, yeah, that's hard in a podcast when you can't talk. So, yeah.

or when you can't talk. But you know, it leads me to the next thing, which is our thoughts and what we're doing and we think about things. And that's something I wanted to talk about a little bit today, about thoughts and daydreams and things like that. And you know me, I found another article that I think is relevant and I wanted to talk to you about it today. Let me start by reading you just a little bit from the article. At any bus stop or while waiting in line, most people will have their heads down looking at their phones and you and I know that very well. Recent research found that many people check their phones at least 50 times a day. But studies suggest that if you resist that urge and let your mind wander instead, there would be some serious benefits. Giving yourself time to daydream seems to be good for your wellbeing, for problem solving, and maybe even for your relationships. Daydreaming has been a subject of scientific research for decades. We spend as much as half of our lives awake daydreaming or listening to our own thoughts, but it isn't always a pleasant experience. In one famous study, participants preferred to get an electric shock rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. This is one explanation for why so many people reflexively reach for their phones during any moment of downtime. let's talk about that. Are people afraid of being with themselves? What thinks you, doc?

I just want to make sure you don't plan on giving me a shock during this episode. I saw that actually, forget where I saw that. Actually, I think it was the men that wanted to get shocked, believe it or not, if I recall that. Because I remember seeing that, but rather than seeing it You know, it's just so interesting. am like, this is a great topic because this is the kind thing we don't talk about with other people, like our own private thoughts and what happens when we're alone.

This is a shocking revelation, you know?

You know that my mind is generally on full speed ahead, right? I like I have two speeds, right? Stop or sleep and then full speed ahead. And I agree with you that if you let your mind wander and you let your mind go and you don't have to fill it with something, you'll get a lot of you get a variety of stuff. You'll get some great ideas. You'll get some revelations.

Yeah.

you'll get yourself very, very anxious sometimes because you can't really control them. You can't say, oh, today it's two o'clock in the afternoon. have 15 minutes before I have to do my next thing. I think I'll let my wine wander and whoa, you don't know what's coming in, right? There's no advance reservation. So I guess it's an interesting, it's a double edged sword in a way because some people can't prevent having negative thoughts, especially people who have different kind of illnesses or things like PTSD or things like that. they're, you know, so control. So it's one thing we can't get, it's the opposite of the Viktor Frankl rule. You Viktor Frankl rule, we get to decide how we feel, but we don't get to decide what thoughts come into our head. We need, yeah. Well, what do you think? Because you're a daydreamer.

Right, and that's why I want to talk about that today. Yeah. I am a daydreamer and I enjoy daydreaming because it's an escape for me from the everyday whatever and I can become something else in my daydream and I do that. In fact, I will do that a lot before I go to bed. I will start thinking just of other things and what if, what is if I played second base with the Washington Nationals, that kind of thing and I do daydream about that.

Well, they'd be better. They'd be better if you were playing second base.

Well, they might be our first base because we really have a problem with our first basement. But it's true. I think what made me think that we should talk about this is because my fear is that we're afraid to be with ourselves. We spend so much time. You look at Facebook and you look at TikTok and Instagram. We're looking at what other people are doing. And are we comparing ourselves to other people? Are we putting ourselves in their place or are we hiding from ourselves? And that's a scary notion that we are actually hiding from ourselves. Do we not like ourselves? I don't know.

You know, if we back up and we start with our premise or on this podcast, really, that we're here for a purpose and there's a reason we're here. We have a purpose in our lives. We have a mission to accomplish. Then you want to you want to try and have as many things in your life. I took a course when I got my forever graduate MBA. I decided I needed to know something about business during my career. I took the slow boat to an MBA. took one course a semester for six years. That's true. I took one course that has stuck with me my whole life. It was taught by a small business attorney. He was a wild man. Unfortunately, he's no longer with us. Super interesting. But the whole course was denied. rules of business, right? And one of the rules was everything you do in your business should be focused on the desired outcome. In other words, don't get distracted. I can sum it up like that. Don't get distracted by things that aren't important. Always make sure that when you're spending your time and your money, it's towards the goal of what you want your business to succeed at, no matter what it is. But I think you can sum up saying don't get distracted. And I think... In this topic that you're talking about, I think that is very important because when you are on Facebook or TikTok or even watching a lot of TV or things that don't require you to be necessarily in the moment or in your own head, I'm not saying we should never do any of those things, but it does distract you. I'll tell you about my personal... life, which you know a lot about, but I'll just tell our listeners, I tend to not watch very much television. I don't, the only time I ever get on Facebook is when you call me and you say, hey, something happened in our high school, your book page or Facebook page. That's the only time I ever look at it. And when you call me and tell me that I don't get on, I don't spend time on Instagram or Tik Tok. But what I do do is,

create new activities for myself. So, you know, I play piano and then I have, started playing guitar in college, although I never took any lessons. was, but I wrote music. I started writing songs immediately. And now, at one point, my wife many years ago bought me as a surprise an electric guitar, long, long time ago. And it kind of sat, I played for a while, and then it kind of sat in a closet somewhere and about a year or two, a couple of years ago, I said, you know, I should take that thing out. So took it out. It needed work. I took it to the shop. They repaired it. And then I, instead of putting it back in the closet, I left it in my office, actually sitting just to my left at the moment. And my amplifier is sitting to my right. And In this last couple of weeks, I've been playing it more. I'm still playing piano, but I used play it more. So if I have downtime, instead of picking up my phone or scrolling on Instagram or all those kinds of things that people do, or even watching Netflix series, I'll pick up a guitar or go to the piano or do something else. And the reason I do that is because I'm very jealous of time, meaning I don't want to waste it. You know how I feel, the gun goes off when you're born and you better keep going, not as fast as you can, but you should keep moving forward because you only get one life and let's make something out of it. And for me personally, that's how I look at it. Now, while I'm doing that, even like playing piano or playing one of the problems I have playing music is that my mind, I daydream while I'm playing, right? Which is very interesting because all of a sudden I'll be messing up the piece I'm playing and I go, because I'm thinking about something else. Maybe I'm thinking about the podcast, maybe I'm thinking about the family, maybe I'm thinking about something, know, something at my company, whatever, you know, and

huh.

Yeah.

And sometimes I'll just stop because a good idea will come into my head and I'll go, okay. I'll walk away from the piano and follow through on that idea. So anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying, yes, if you give your mind the opportunity, it can do wonderful things. I think the thing we have to figure out, and I don't know how to figure this out, is how to make sure that the things that pop into our mind are positive and not things that drag us down like anxiety.

Yeah, and how would you do that? mean, let's talk about the area of view versus the street view in terms of distraction, because we live in the street view, but your hypothesis is that if we were in the area of view looking basically down on it, on what's happening in the moment, Is that a distraction? we trying to undistract ourselves? Tell me what role the area of view plays in this whole notion of thought process and in fact, even alienation and distraction. Does the area of view come into play?

I'm so glad you brought that up because I think you've hit on something that I wasn't thinking about until you just said it. So which is why it's so great to talk with you about these things now that you can talk again. Yeah, you know, the aerial view is. Is the ultimate, it is the ultimate, because I give you an example, let's say that you do get distracted by thoughts that are unpleasant, right?

Now that I

Yes.

And what that means is that you're firmly rooted in the street view and you're stuck in the street view and you're only seeing what's in the street view. And there's a lot of stuff in the street view that's very distressing. All the things we've talked about that a lot of the negative things in the world that we despise and bring everybody down, right? But you have this ability to escape from that. And it's not even an escape like you're cheating. It's putting it into perspective. That's why the aerial view is a perspective. It's just another perspective. And so when these thoughts do come into your head, it's very, it's super helpful to then become the disinterested observer, to get to the aerial view and understand, to see this in context, realize, okay, this is a small part of what's going on. This is a part of my history and the repetitive story of human history that everybody goes through. I need to take it a little less seriously and remember why I'm here and refocus and understand my mission and then kind of recalibrate and then head back to the street view with a different attitude. So I think that is to me, you you've heard me say this a million times that the most important thing I ever learned in my life was how to, how to. ascend to or access the aerial view. It changes everything. It gets you out of every single mess you could possibly think of. So in that sense, when you do have these thoughts that are the unpleasant ones or the distra... What you might call it the negatively distracting ones, there's a solution to that. There is something you can do. don't, know, but...

Yeah.

we have the really good thoughts, right? really, I wake up in middle of the night, not infrequently, this happened to me, with like a song in my head that I wanted to write, right? And now it's like, yeah, it's like two o'clock in the morning, my wife is sleeping, I'm thinking, well, I can't go downstairs to the piano. I can't, I do have a keyboard actually with headphones. It's also sitting to my left, right next to the electric guitar. But I have done that. But the point is, I hum this thing in my head and...

Really?

And I think if I don't get up now, I'm gonna lose it and nine out of ten times I don't get up and I lose it right but I get other ideas like whether it be related to Things I'm working projects. I'm working on sometimes those things will just pop into my head at two o'clock And I have absolutely gotten up. I think I told you the story I was thinking about writing a sequel to my novel Franklin Rock at some point. We'll see if it happens And it was like two o'clock in the morning and I woke up and had this, what I felt was this really cool idea. And I went, and I'm playing it through my head. Now I'm wide awake. It's like 20 minutes are going by. I'm wide awake. thinking, okay, if I don't get up now and write this down, it will be gone by the time I wake up in the morning. So I actually got up, came down to my office, turned on the light, went to the computer, and then wrote the outline of what I was thinking about. So I up probably for like a half an hour or something like that.

Hmm.

But it was great because I got it out of me and I was able to very calmly go back to sleep, which I did. So yes, allowing your mind to wander. I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about how scrolling through Facebook and things like that is it keeps you from opening your mind and getting these positive distractions. I think you're spot on. Do you have that kind of similar experience?

I mean, I didn't realize I was doing a podcast with Elton John. This is very terrific. You get up in the middle of the night. No, I guess what astounds me, to be honest with you, when you look at people, people are, they're not inward focused, they're outward focused, which is what I think Facebook is. Facebook is about me finding out what everybody else is doing. And then it becomes inwardly focused when you become jealous of what somebody else is doing.

Hardly.

And that again, gets me back to your book about inward versus outward focused. I do get up a lot in the middle of the night, not with ideas, but I have to go to the bathroom. I must have prostate problems. I'm like, sure. would that I did get up and have ideas and write novels and whatever, but I think that's important. It gets to the point that...

You

our thoughts, our daydreams are not necessarily bad if they're positive, but they're bad if they're negative. And that's where, again, I get back to the aerial view, making sure that we look at if the ones, if we're having these negative thoughts to understand that we are in control of those thoughts, we are a disinterested observer looking at it and changing our attitude, changing our mind, and therefore changing those negative thoughts.

Yeah, you asked me earlier how to get negative thoughts. thinking, well, I don't know. But then I realized when you brought returning us to the area, I said, oh, God, that's obvious. Why didn't I? What's the matter with me? I'm not paying attention. Of course, you're 100 % right. That is the way to get out of I think we've narrowed this down so far to two types of thoughts. The first that we want, the positive thoughts, the interesting ideas, and then the negative thoughts.

Yeah.

The brainstorming of a book, and that's an idea in the middle of the night. Doesn't matter when that idea or that thought came to you, but that it came to you is what's so important.

You know, it is. And then the negative ones, that's when you have to understand, put it in context of the world. The other way to put it in context is to get out, is to get off the street and go into the area. You know, this is why you know I have friends, you all over the political spectrum, everywhere, right? Because I don't have that kind of affiliation that I'm not tied to anything. And so I'm more than happy to listen to anybody's opinion. And I don't care. I don't really care what side of the aisle somebody's on because For me, in order to understand our lives in context, you have to let go of these things. You have to release your team memberships, whatever it is. And where do you release yourself to? To the area of view, to the place that you are just an observer. You don't have a horse in the race. You're not tied. And then you get to see things in context and you realize, A, most things are not that important. Now look, I don't mean to minimize. There are things that are very important. Hunger, homelessness, trauma, violence, cruelty. These things exist in our world and they are terrible. And I never mean to minimize them. Believe me, I don't like, I'm with you on this one, Edith. Every one of those things gets me, you know, makes me sad. But there's but there's but when you get to the air of it and you see them in context and realize everything is temporary in one way and everything is permanent in another way, meaning everything is temporary, only here for a limited amount of time on this earth. Right. And every story you go through personally has been gone through before by other people and will be gone through by people that come after us. That this is a repetitive story. It's not unique to you. You are not unique in the sense that you're the only one who has these thoughts, who has who has these hurts and sorrows and or joys and happiness. Everybody has them, has always had them from the dawn of man.

and we'll always have them until the end of man. So these things are not unique. And when you understand that and you see your life in context, it's a little easier to take. It's a little easier to take, understand, okay, I can't control everything, but I can control how I feel about things and I can control how I behave. And that's what you need to focus on. that's the real advantage of the aerial view. In terms of the conversation about our thoughts, I think we've talked about this, and I know I've written about it. When you talk to artists, if you interview artists, whether they be painters or authors or musicians, whatever, very often you'll hear the same thing when you say, well, how did you how did you write that piece or how did you write that, that story? Or how did you paint that picture? Where did that idea come from? Very often you will hear this. I don't know. It's as if it came from outside of me and it just came through me. My job was to put pen to paper or put the notes on the page or whatever. I was I was merely the conduit for this creative process. You'll hear that. a lot from creative people. It's fascinating. The first time you hear it, go, oh, that's interesting. And then we've heard it like 25 times, go, well, there's a commonality here. What's going on? It's a sense that we are, that there is something, we've talked that there is something else out there that we can't put our fingers on, but we all know it exists. And we are often the conduit for these things, especially in the creative arts. But it's true in all areas of life. We have the ability, we can be creative in so many ways. And if we're open, if we're not sticking our head in a phone or doing something that's just wasting our time, we will get these opportunities. You mentioned in that article, the bus stop, people standing at a bus stop. So when I get, I'm in a place like that, I will generally start talking to people, right? And most people will love it. It might be one or two people who go leave me alone, but most people will love it because people want that connection. And then they feel, because we all know we feel a part of something, we just can't get away from it. And this is all part of that same story. So as relationships, as you know, I feel are the most important thing in the world.

Yeah.

And if you open yourself up, not just to these thoughts, but to relationships, so you get your head out of the phone and so on, great things happen. And you almost always feel better. The other person almost always feels better. You never know what's going to come of it. You may create a new friendship. You just told me a story before we got on the air about exactly that. You met somebody serendipitously, ended up becoming great friends with them. So.

All

I think you're a point that we have to allow ourselves the ability to get thoughts, but also relationships. I think that's part of the same thing. Get back into the world and spend less time with your head on a phone or things like that. I think that's an excellent point.

Well, you know, so I have spent about 40 years of my life in the anti-hunger movement. And in the beginning, going into community after community of seeing poverty and seeing people at their worst, my thoughts were... I couldn't sleep at night. It was very difficult for me to take what I had done during the day and put it aside and try to sleep. Because those thoughts, those inner thoughts of I'm privileged, they're not, what can I do? And I took those inner thoughts, those negative inner thoughts and turned them around, I think. because the thought then became, what can I do to help those people? It wasn't just me going to a trailer park and delivering a meal to someone who had nothing in his life. It was me helping him do that. And I think you can take... those inner thoughts that are negative. And if you rationalize what you can do to change those, to alleviate poverty, to alleviate hunger, or even to alleviate your own negative thoughts, your life does become somewhat better. I think that those, and I daydream sometimes about what can I do to do it better? because I'm not ending the hunger problem. It's not, it's ever growing. So what do I do to change it? How can I make it better? So I take the negative that is hunger and try to find a positive. What can I do to change it? So instead of being inwardly focused on the negative, I try to outwardly focus on what do I do? What's the solution to the problem that confronts me? And that's having read your book.

Well, that's perfect.

Then when I read your book, I became even better at it and there's no hunger in America anymore. Thank you, done.

Well, look, you know I feel about you and what you've done. Most people are not going to be in it, Borden, unfortunately, but you're 100 % right. You we talk about, my wife and I talk about this, you'll see a group of people protesting this or that, whatever. And the real question is, okay, what are you going to do about it? If you really feel strongly about this and you believe you're on the right side of a cause and you see this, You know, what are you going to do about it? Right. Do something, whatever it is. Like you said, you couldn't cure hunger yourself, but you've had a huge impact on. probably millions of people in your life, know, through all your work and your nonprofits. So I think that's number one. That's the first thing people should do. We talk about this. You want to feel better? Go help somebody else, right? When you do it, you've done it on a quite large scale, more than most people. Most people are not going to do it. everybody can do something. You can just help the person next to you. Even just listening to people, kind thought. You don't even have to cure things. You just have to listen to them and pay attention. That's a thing. And when you're feeling really badly,

Right, right.

Yes.

sad and you can't, and you feel like you can't fix it. You want to, but you can't. That's where the aerial view comes in. You do the best you can and then get the right perspective, what I consider the correct perspective of the world. The fact that our lives are finite is such an important clue. It's the most important clue. And the fact that we all go through the same things, every single person, every society, we all go through the same things. This is very comforting in the sense that you're not alone. It's not unique. And that tells you why you're here. Right. You're here to make that evolution from selfish to selfless, from inward focus to outward focus, help as many people as you can. But when you're in a situation where you can't do anything, rather than just crawl under the covers, I like to say lock yourself in the bathroom, you know, get to the aerial view, right? Get to understand what it is. Understand what this life is about. Understand what this world is about. You'll never fix everything. You're not going to live forever. You have a limited time. Make something of your life. Do as much as you can for other people and don't worry about the rest of it. Don't beat yourself up. Don't torture yourself. Just that's where the aerial view is very helpful. Be in it, Borden, when you can. That's number one. And when you can't, don't torture yourself with it. And I think that that combination, I think, can be very helpful.

Right. I agree. When I get back to this article again, we talk about, we sort of laughed at the fact that particularly men would rather have electrical shock. I mean, my goodness, that's a statement, isn't it? I mean, isn't that, to me, that's a frightening statement.

What I saw, yeah, what I saw, you know what made me think of? You're gonna laugh. Well, maybe you'll laugh. So when I was a kid, even probably even as a young adult, so if I was eating like a bowl of cereal, right, I would always read the cereal box, right? And I'd read the cereal box 400 times, but I'd still read the cereal box. It's something that says that your senses need to be engaged to a certain degree. So what you were talking about, the flip side is just sit there and eat and let your mind wander. And I do that too. But I think a lot of people have trouble with that. It's a little bit uncomfortable. And so they read the cereal box.

Yes. Yeah, if you go to a restaurant and you see someone eating alone, yeah, I do, but I'll tell you, you go to restaurant, you see somebody eating alone. They're not sitting there. Most of the time they're reading something. They bring a book or they'll read the menu 100 times. You're right. That's what we do because we're afraid to be alone with our thoughts. We're afraid to be alone with ourselves. Does that mean that we don't think much of ourselves? Maybe.

You see my point? Great.

No, think, think, look, the world, you know, I said this many times, so many of us live as if we're balanced on a single stone and a brisk wind will blow us over. So unless you're set, each leg is set in concrete, so no matter how big that wind is, you're not blowing over. you're going to have trouble. So the thing is to evolve, become that person of substance that is very well firmly situated, that has a firm foundation. And the way you do that is to, back to one of our podcasts a couple of ago, is that idea of the Stoics, living a virtuous life. Create a persona that isn't going to get blown over so much. And how do you do that? Focus on the virtues, focus on kindness and justice and helping other people. you're cleaning up your own life, behaving in a way that will make you proud. that once you do that, then you have a lot more ability to let your mind wander. That's when you really can do great things. you're not so fragile, that a word, the wrong word from somebody or the wrong event will knock you over, then that's when you're able to open your mind up and then have that ability to get those creative thoughts or new thoughts. And you're not, and by, being, you don't have to read the cereal box. You can, you can be there unworried that whatever thoughts come into your head, you can either handle or they'll be positive and move you forward. So I think that's, that's, that's what we want to build. Now we live in a society, a country right now where people are, you know, super fragile, right? because everybody's a victim, everybody's entitled, everybody, you know, it's a mess. know, people, need people, we need a country or a world full of people who are the exact opposite, who are firmly, who do have that firm foundation, who are firmly rooted that a single word or event isn't going to knock them over.

And we talked about this at that time. We need to have an education system and a culture that builds that in each individual. So we have a society filled with people of substance who are available to help other people, who can then entertain creative thoughts and build things and create new things. And that's what we want. People who are fragile, it's very hard to do it. And it's hard to explain. We can't really expect them to do that. It's too frightening for them.

I agree. And I looked at the clock or at a time I want to end with again from this article about this research that was done. And she said, we live in a social world. A lot of what's happening when we're daydreaming is that we're simulating social interactions or planning out how we would handle social situations in the future. Since conducting the research, this particular researcher said he's tried to resist taking his phone at when he has a few minutes waiting for a bus or for an appointment. It's actually quite refreshing, he said. I feel a kind of ownership of my thoughts when I entertain myself. Kind of interesting. I'll leave you with the final word, doc.

I think he's right on. But you can only do that when you're not scared to death, right? When you're not super fragile. If you're super fragile, even fragile, they don't have to be super fragile. Thoughts are scary because you're afraid some bad thought or scary thoughts get or where some self-evaluation, some negative self-evaluation, I'm terrible, I'm stupid, I'm ugly, whatever is going to come flying into your head. So it's easy to do that when you have already built a foundation. You got to get that foundation first. And then it's very easy to put down your phone and look around and talk to people. people, then once you reach that level, and that's what we need to focus on. If we really want to help people, which is what we're after, you and I in this podcast, is to understand you have to build that foundation. And I think we've talked a lot about how to do that. So I'm glad you brought up this topic. It's really, really interesting. I think hopefully we'll have more and more people get away from their phones and get out of themselves. And as you said, turn that camera around and focus on other people.

Right. Particularly doing it in schools now, they're asking the kids, no phones in the classroom. How important is that? We're beginning the process of taking the phones and using it simply as what it was meant to be. Not to hide, not to be fearful of ourselves and look at other things, but to use it as a phone to call someone. And by the way, call your mother. Anyway, I thank you for this conversation.

Ha

I enjoyed it and I wish you all a happy and healthy today.

You are the best. You are the best, Enid. You are the best. Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Peace.