While mind wandering can be associated with negative outcomes such as poor performance and reduced attention to external tasks, it still has the ability to be beneficial. The negative side of mind wandering includes impairment of comprehension during reading and lectures, limited ability to delay self-gratification, and increased irresponsibility while driving which can lead to accidents. Although these examples show the negative side of mind wandering, we should not be so quick to judge it as a defect as there are several positive features that can arise from engaging in mind wandering.
Prospection
One advantage that mind wandering creates is prospection. Since self-generated thoughts that occur during mind wandering are usually focused on the future, this can cause a person to begin planning for the future and allows them to think about the obstacles they will face, ways to overcome those obstacles, and how they will benefit from completing a goal. It can help a person find the motivation they need to achieve a goal and can elicit positive emotions such as happiness and satisfaction.
Creativity
A second advantage of mind wandering is increased creativity as it allows people to think about and generate new ideas. This helps people when it comes to problem solving because, like mind wandering, finding a new solution to a problem involves generating mental content that differs from the current reality. Finding a new and creative solutions means that the old solutions are not working, and a new way needs to be created.
Finding Meaning
A third benefit of mind wandering is that it can enable people to find meaning in their experiences. Uncovering meaning in one’s experience can promote a sense of well-being in a person and enhance their health. Thinking about past memories or future events has been found to help increase a person’s self-reported meaning in life.
Mental Break
A fourth advantage of mind wandering is that it provides people with mental breaks. It allows people to break away from whatever boring task is in front of them and focus on something of more interest and pleasure. Researchers have shown that mind wandering that focused on the future could help decrease a person’s negative mood.
Dreaming?
The fifth and final advantage of mind wandering is that it may play a similar role as nocturnal dreaming. One perspective benefit of this is that mind wandering can help prepare us for potential future daily threats.
These five advantages show why mind wandering should be considered a benefit instead of just a defect in human information processing. Without mind wandering our mental and emotional health could suffer as we would not be taking the time to focus on our internal self-generated thoughts and would always be constantly focused on the external task at hand.