Functional Reverie

Mind Wandering for Health and Performance

Wanderlust

“All who wander are not lost,” is usually an easily ignored bumper sticker on a dirty Subaru Outback. The unfortunate fate of this classic quote from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings aside, there are some layers of deep truth to this and if analyzed through the lens of performance longevity, we may even find practical information hidden in the analogy. In today’s world the prevailing and counter advisory narratives of ultra productivity along with technologies of which the pilfering of our attention is the product yield an interesting cohesion in outcomes, at least along one metric. That is, our attention is often directed towards external areas of focus. 

Whether that’s directly on a project, a social interaction, a Google search, or the ever present and distracting world of social media we constantly seem to be just finishing up with a task or on our way to another one. Little time is structured for the mind to simply wander. You might ask why it is necessary to segment time for this. Before the last twenty years of inundation with smartphone technology and social media we’d find ourselves naturally in moments of doing nothing. Moments for engrossement and contemplation. Now we constantly ingest information without proper time to digest that same information. Instead of stomach cramps though, we get seizing of the mind itself.

Rapt

This is not to say our lives should be made of only daydreams disconnected from reality and engrossed in the imagination alone. Not at all. Instead we need a reconciliation of true focus and  time built in for simply allowing the mind to dance. This article and the Personal Health Experiment to which it is attached is not centered around deliberate and/or porlonged task attention. That’s for another time. Here we’ll take a look at how segregating time for the purpose of attention dispersal is essential for learning as well as emotional and social health. There is good evidence that portions of the brain necessary for converging ideas and developing self-reflection skills are highly activated during periods of time where we are not externally focused and instead allow our thoughts and feelings to meander.

Listening to an idling engine is an important part of the diagnostic process. Just allowing the pistons to fire as they will without the additonal workload of getting somewhere can give us crucial feedback about whats going on and sometimes “just letting er’ run” helps the system normalize itself. So too with the mind. For our purposes I don’t even mean mindfulness, meditation, or prayer. In those cases there is still and intentional aim of the mind although to varying degrees. In the case of functional reverie we abandon psychological technologies altogether whether to receive information or direct attention. Here we simply let the mind do its thing. There is not explicit choreography to speak of just twirling around the backyard the way a five year old “dances”. 

Wandering Off The Rails

Of course, wandering is not all there is to the mind but more often than not we neither productively focus our attention nor do we allow the mind to wander. It’s like we don’t want to go out into the ocean deep enough for swimming nor do we want to walk on land. We’d rather trudge through thigh deep shorebreak fighting the current the entire time. Some time at sea can help us appreciate firm ground and vice versa as well. 

That may be an unnecessarily poetic way of saying this. Allowing the mind to wander off into states of discontiguous reverie in the most literal sense supports the kind of devoted focus and cognitive attention we all claim to revere. This is so true that Joe Rogan and Aubrey Marcus made fortunes off of a supplement that serves that exact purpose catapulting us into a market of nootropics. This while engaging in behaviors that directly interfere with that exact outcome. I digress.

The point is that the various capable states of the brain whether directly focused on external tasks or wandering without particular aim serve mutually benefical purposes that serve our greater psychological and emotional health. Deep intentional focus coupled with states of deactivation are essential for neuroplasticity in adults especially. While younger brains can learn with more passive strategies development of the skillset early will serve them for most of their life - as an adult.

Daily Decrease

Accomplishing this necessary dispersal of attention in the midst of so much cultural friction can be a task that requires an unfortunate amount of planning that is uncharacteristic of times long gone. Well for most of us. Those who hike, back country hunt, or engage in other hobbies that land them alone in quiet places this is still very much a part of life. For the rest of the modern world we have to reengineer what was once a natural occurrence. The way to do this, or at least to get started is not by trying to add time. As it is with most new habits trying to find time to execute is the first and often most insurmountable first step. To reduce any potential friction in this endeavor instead of trying to create new time we’ll use found time. Found time will be times in your day when you might add in distractions or external items of focus that are unnecessary in the truest sense of the word. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what that means. The exact how of this execution will actually depend on you and your life. I do have some suggestions you’ll find in the instructions for this first personal health experiment. 

Please do go to the Personal Health Experiment entitled REVERIE to participate in the real learning which can never be done through a page but by the actions taken thereafter. 

Thanks for reading,

Rob