The Death of Daydreaming

Sitting on public transport looking out of the window not your phone and listening to music is ok but probably not podcasts.

Also showers are very good for the right state of mind.

All my good writing ideas come to me in the shower. I don't know why, but at least I don't smell.

The shower, every time. No idea what the difference is if I stand in the shower or sit on the couch in my living room. Sometimes I end up looking like a prune.

I suspect the shower is more relaxing than the couch. When I sit on the couch I'm just anxious... I know there are things I should be doing other than being lazy sitting on the couch. When I'm in the shower, I know that I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And it just happens to be something pleasant.

Not very many of our ancestors were eaten in hot springs, I guess? It’s hard to hunt when the ground is so slippery. Then our body feels safe and allows attentional resources to be diverted away from safety and towards ideation?

Same thing happens for me, and that’s my working theory.

In the shower, you can't be doing anything else, so it quiets the inner critic in your mind that says "You should do something productive right now instead of daydreaming."

I was going to say shower too. Also walking the dog.

I think being naked is a factor as well. Have not been able to A/B test that part of it in an office environment yet though.

IP67+ on your phone is bad for mental health

Water is a vitalizing factor as well. Gets the blood flowing, more oxygen to the brain ..

This has been my experience for optimal creativity tasks:

- Best: walks, running, walking in circles, walking in circles talking over the phone (1:1 planning), walking in circles talking out loud to myself

- Good: showers, daydreaming in place, daydreaming on trips where I'm not driving, "pair program" white boarding with one other (exceptional) person

- Okay: white boarding by myself, trying to put ideas to pen and paper by myself, meetings with the right people in a physical space

- Bad: at the computer, on the phone, walking or running to podcasts, walking or running to the wrong type of music, video conference meetings, and generally all other meetings

- What are you even doing: YouTube, Netflix, or podcasts on in the background at any level

That's how I pass my (2x a week) trips from work in the office. I just put away my phone and look out of the train at one of most beautiful sights I've ever seen in my life - huge (by my standards) clear Geneva lake with boats and Swiss & French alps in the background, and if weather is clear also Mont Blanc and surrounding peaks towering above it all. I've proposed to my wife on top of it some time ago during a grueling and dangerous ski tour - one way to forever change a look at some sight.

Walking in some easy nature is great too, somehow relaxes subconsciousness so I end up with few todos marked in my phone after each such walk. When I occasionally smoke weed at such walks somehow this feed becomes a firehose and sometimes struggle to note it all. Nature is amazing in any form, recharging, healing and somehow at lowest level that connection just feels right.

You can listen to podcasts in the shower easily enough by putting your device outside of the shower, or having a waterproof Bluetooth speaker. It's not true that you can't do anything in the shower besides showering.

Yeah my lifehack in that department is assuming that the seals might not be perfect anymore. Plus a brief brush with seawater splashes made my iPhone speaker sound like crap for a few days a few years ago so I've decided it's not worth the risk!

These kind of evolutionary theories often make for captivating and plausible stories, they are also pretty much universally false. Similar trains of thought were used in the middle ages for example to rationalize male and female roles in society, all of which have been debunked many times over at this point.

Seawater destroys everything you ever loved and cared for, no IP rating will defend against that for long.

I agree but what is the root cause? Which things are generally bad for the brain? Because if it was social, meetings would be good. And if it’s reality escape, going to the movies would be bad.

> Similar trains of thought were used in the middle ages [...]

The theory of evolution was conceived way after the middle ages, so that seems beside the point.

I used to get this from smoking cigarettes. I'm convinced that half of the relaxation was being forced to take a break and concentrate on your breathing.

I think it was more that you CAN do nothing else, guilt free. If you are down are yourself because you're not efficiently multi-tasking during your shower, that might be a deeper issue.

don't discount sitting vs. standing, even if it is under a stream of deliciously hot water for longer than you probably should.

Combined with the social aspects (though these days it's single smokers getting their fix asap) I think there probably IS a benefit here, just not outweighed by the smoking part.

Similar does not mean the same. A good example is the story of prudism and genitals, where women were expected to be prudent with the rationale that god hid their genitals away.

It is unlikely hot springs were omnipresent enough across the environment to have an impact on overall human evolution.

The problem with the Middle Ages explanations though is that the framework they used to explain things was false.

A false framework producing false explanations does not falsify frameworks in general.

That's very funny. My first guess would have been the womb. Probably the safest environment most of us have ever been in.

The safety instinct complex likely has components shaped in pre-human and even pre-ape and perhaps even pre-mammal ancestors.

Pressure comes from duration as well as frequency of encounter. A feature encountered infrequently but consistently across many millions of years can exert a pressure equivalent to a feature encountered more consistently for a shorter period.

Also note that the effect size to be explained here is not that large - just a nudge towards relaxation in what seems to be a subpopulation of humans.

What do you think about that?

Perhaps it's in putting the brain in a place where the body is on autopilot and the verbal / spatial centers of the brain can be free to wander in and out of focus.

Podcasts kill this mode for me, so you can't have the brain thinking about other people's thoughts or words.

Playing a video game doesn't work, so I think your spatial thinking has to be free too.

It's as if distracting the brain's non-verbal/spatial modes or burning some amount of calories from those centers gives the "thinking" parts of the brain some "alone time". That's an incredibly non-scientific and unserious hypothesis though.

Sure, but this reasoning you are using could justifying saying just about anything we have encountered in human history, no matter how infrequent or minor, could have influence our evolution. It is incredibly hard to falsify such claims and easy to make them. I don't really know how to respond.

Listening to podcasts isn't really doing something.

The part of your brain that's like "you should be fixing the leaky faucet right now" will be quelled when you're in the shower because, I guess aside from consuming audio media, there really isn't much else you can do.

Swimming. And showers (water touching/passing skin) is essensially lymphatic drainage.

Yeah I personally don’t think such speculation should be treated as “science”, per se.

But, if the science minded shy away from such areas completely, they will be (and are) filled with explanations from people with completely unscientific worldviews and values.

The Dawkinsian selfish gene framing is unfalsifiable. Even Darwin is practically unfasifiable. It kind of comes with the territory.

I think the degree to which such an explanation is a just so story depends on how many aligning aspects we can observe in reality. An example in this case - the more a shower shifts from utilitarian to luxurious, the more it happens to resemble a hot spring. What would be the most luxurious shower? To me, natural stone walls in a natural looking pattern (impractical to clean), no obvious drain, instead the water drains into crevasses in rock (which is mimicked even in run of the mill shower designs), some natural light but not too much, etc.

If my phone gets dirty watered, i ensure I rinse it with fresh water; really confuses the onlooker.

But it is an example where applying a framework doesn't make something more accurate. We can't just rationalize whatever we want because it seems to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. I also don't know that we should believe that our framework is true. I'm not arguing the truth of evolution, but rather how we apply the fact that it occurred to possibly irrelevant aspects of our life.

ha, rue the day your brain realizes your phone is waterproof

I would also add toilet, without phone obviously.

I have never had a (smart)watch damaged by seawater. (I am not a sailor though, I guess keeping exposure fairly short matters.)

> The Dawkinsian selfish gene framing is unfalsifiable.

Disagree. The whole thesis rests on genetic determinism, which was hypothesized early on - around the time the book was written - but discredited later.

> Even Darwin is practically unfasifiable. It kind of comes with the territory.

Which thesis in Darwin do you think is unfalsifiable? The null hypothesis of the time was that nature was created the way it is and variety was evidence of god's handiwork, and he proposed, argued and in my opinion convincingly established how a well structured system of rules could indeed lead to change and variety.