studies on Daydreaming

How long do daydreams last? Eric Klinger ran a study in which he trained a group of participants to estimate the duration of their thoughts, daydreams or otherwise. What he found was that the average ...

In a 2010 study called “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” (gulp), Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert developed an iPhone app to survey the thoughts, feelings, and action...

In a study at UC Berkeley conducted by Adrianna Jenkins and Ming Hsu, it was discovered imagination may be the pathway needed to uncover patience. The study found when we imagine possible outcomes, it...

Neuroimaging has shown that as we age, our cognitive center of gravity shifts from the imaginative right brain to the logical left brain. At some point, most of us top living out of imagination and st...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

Why do my best ideas come to me in the shower? I feel like my IQ is at least twenty points higher while lathering up than at any other time of the day. And I’m not alone in finding my light bulb momen...

In a study conducted by Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, researchers discovered what most of us already know: people do not like to be left alone with their own tho...

In the midst of an experiment to become more attuned to darkness, author and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor decided to spend time outside as dark sets in: According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, eve...

Desire is part of what it means to be a child, as implied in Jesus’ words to his disciples when he tells them, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never ente...

Part of our experience of waiting is cultural, and how time elapses while we wait can vary from person to person and context to context. We wait differently and we have different expectations that are...

Studying your own failures as well can make them seem less earth-shattering. One researcher suggested in a 2010 article in Nature that people maintain a “CV of failures,” a written list of the things ...

What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connect...

In the desert outside of Tucson, scientists dreamed up an experiment to re-create the conditions of earth for space, when and if the earth could not be made great again. The biosphere was a little wor...

Rest has never been one of America’s greatest strengths. According to one study, only one in seven adults (14%) have set aside an entire day for the purpose of rest. For those who do set aside an enti...

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

I ask people to anonymously write their worries on sticky notes. We post them to a wall and look at them together. Participants are often surprised by the raw honesty of what is shared and the private...

In this excerpt from Jay Y. Kim’s book, Analog Church , the author shares about an experience at a local restaurant after being convicted of his own smartphone use at home, keeping him from being p...

A 2014 study by Wendy Wood found that approximately 40% of people’s daily activities are performed out of habit. According to Wood, “an important characteristic of a habit is that it’s automatic…We fi...

Social media addiction also changes our neurochemistry: our slumped posture produces cortisol; the backlit phone and blue light can suppress melatonin (needed for sleep); and a recent study with “hard...

We rationalize to make life with ourselves possible in a morally challenging world. Often the motivation for rationalization, though, is quite different. In recent decades, psychologists have argued c...

Social scientists define procrastination as “delaying a task for a maladaptively long time,” and it bedevils almost all of us. One study found that more than 70 percent of university students procrast...

True rest seems elusive for most Americans. Only one in seven adults (14%) set aside a day a week for rest. And on that one day a week, what do they do? Mostly, they work. More than four in ten say th...

Have you noticed how difficult it is to remember someone’s name when you meet them? Within seconds of a person telling me his name, I’ve forgotten what he said. I may have even repeated it to myself. ...

Psychologists and mental health professionals are now talking about an epidemic of the modern world: “hurry sickness.” As in, they label it a disease. Here’s one definition: A behavior pattern chara...

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addic...

The robbing of our lives occurs when the core story of who we are—created as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and never downgraded, and “beloved” of God (1 Jn 3:2)—is taken through specific memories and twisted...

Research by Gallup shows that the more hours per day you spend doing what you’re good at, the less stressed you feel and the more you laugh, smile, and feel you’re being treated with respect. Eric Ba...

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicia...

Groundbreaking work by Dr. Uri Hasson has shown that the brain of an individual listening to a story actually synchronizes with the brain of the individual telling the story—an event known as neural c...

Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...