By Self Help Books Author Denise Turney (www.chistell.com)

Stop daydreaming if you want to experience real life success. Admittedly, daydreaming feels good which might be why you do it so much. There could also be brain benefits associated with daydreaming. According to studies, including those shared in a Harvard Medical School article, daydreaming may improve brain plasticity. More specifically, “Based on the results of the study, the researchers suspect that these daydreams may be actively involved in brain plasticity.”¹

Can Daydreaming Become Addictive?

Furthermore, Smithsonian reports that “psychological research is beginning to reveal that daydreaming is a strong indicator of an active and well-equipped brain.” Smithsonian goes on to share that a “wandering mind correlates with higher degrees of what is referred to as working memory. Cognitive scientists define this type of memory as the brain’s ability to retain and recall information in the face of distractions.”²

Memory and brain plasticity benefits aside, if you daydream to the point that daydreaming becomes addictive, you might be surprised to find yourself stuck in life routines that you hate. It could range from relationships to work to creative pursuits to your inner journey.

Before you know it, you’ve invested 15 years in a job that sucks the happiness out of you. Or you’re going home to a relationship that you haven’t felt good about for a decade. Each time the pain of staying in the situation gets too intense, you start daydreaming, pretending that your life is different.

Stop Daydreaming If You Really Want It

You daydream that you’re in a loving relationship with someone who makes you feel loved and deeply appreciated every single day, even as you roll your eyes each time your “real” lover kisses or touches you. And you daydream for hours at work, pretending that you’re doing entirely different work in an entirely different city with entirely different business partners.

Even if you delve into exploring a new job, relationship, fitness routine, etc., you won’t go as far as you could if most of your efforts are limited to daydreaming. On top of this, if you’re merely daydreaming, do you really want what you say you want?

Do you really want it?

How To Replace Daydreaming With Action

If you do, stop “only” daydreaming. Replace daydreaming with action.

• Create an action plan. For example, if you want to start a business, start building your board of directors. Research licenses and certificates that the business you want to start is required to have. Work with market research organizations to learn about the best places to launch your business. Also, get up to speed on effective marketing and promotion strategies in the industry you want to work in. And set deadlines for when you will complete each action in the plan.
• Learn and learn. Enroll in postsecondary courses that help you stay aware of industry trends and market and product cycles. Stay abreast of technology, marketing pros, and product designers who are shaping the future of your industry.
• Take smart risks. Don’t play it safe. That’s what daydreaming is for. Break old industry habits and patterns. Be the courageous creative who does the thing that hasn’t been done before. Have the courage to stand alone for a while. If what you take a risk on takes off, you can best believe that there will be lots of people who will try to mimic what you just did.
• Keep it new. Continue to develop and create new products and services. This one is important, because if you don’t keep releasing new products and services, your offerings may start to feel stale to consumers.

Daydreaming Habits

Should you have slipped into the habit of daydreaming for hours a day, use a tool (e.g., spreadsheet, daily planner) to track your actions and the return on your efforts. This simple activity can keep you from falling prey to magical thinking.

Even more, it can protect you from lying to yourself. Tracking your actions and return on efforts can prevent you from believing that you’re doing things that you actually aren’t doing. Unfortunately, this is what happened to me when I decided to pursue freelance writing full-time, and not just pursue freelance writing, but pursue freelance writing as the Great Recession was kicking off.

Poor timing, I know. But that wasn’t the bad part. What hurt was daydreaming versus putting more of my plans into action. How I turned it around was to get out a spreadsheet and start recording my actions.

How To Give Yourself a Chance

The payoff was huge. Money that I generated from freelance writing increased significantly. Confidence that I could make it as a writer strengthened. To this day, the single act of tracking my actions and the return on those actions is one of the smartest moves I’ve made.

So, give yourself a good chance to experience real life success. Commit to taking smart actions. Avoid believing that success is rooted in luck. To speed up your success, set aside time each day to use your imagination (a great time for daydreaming) to surface new ideas, innovative ways to grow your business.

Just a few days investing in idea creation could see you come up with more than 100 ways to grow your business. The number of ways you could strengthen your business might even shock you. Give it a try!

Deepen Relationships In Real Life, Not In Dreams

After you stop daydreaming about what you want (in place of taking smart actions), build healthy connections. After all, no one knows everything about anything. Despite how independent you might be, you need other people to support and partner with you to experience long-term success.

To build and deepen these relationships:

• Join industry associations
• Sponsor events that appeal to your target audience
• Attend conferences and cultural festivals that attract business leaders and consumers your products and services aim to improve the lives of

Visualize Your Success

Not only does that strengthen important connections, but it also reinforces your brand. Speaking of strengthening connections and your brand, make keeping what you do in the human consciousness a priority. Ways to do that include:

• Designing a logo with colors and an image that generate positive emotions
• Ensuring that your logo is on all of your products and promo items, also known as “swag”
• Interviewing in media outlets that appeal to your target audience, guiding your responses to your products or services.

During times when you don’t see your efforts paying off as much as you’d like, visualize yourself succeeded – not later – now! See and feel yourself achieving what you want to achieve – not later – now!

Your Success Won’t Be a Daydream

Feel the success. Allow it to become part of your identity while you love yourself as you are. Continue growing by looking at your spreadsheet or daily planners, revisiting your start, noticing how far you have come.

Set new goals. Keep challenging yourself while loving yourself as you are. If you keep taking smart risks, making good connections, deepening relationships, and enriching your brand, and improving the return on your efforts, one day you’ll look back and wonder how you achieved as much as you did. And it won’t be a daydream. It will be real!

Resources:

1. What Happens in the Brain While Daydreaming? | Harvard Medical School
2. The Benefits of Daydreaming | Science| Smithsonian Magazine