I don't think there is a person in this world who hasn't wishful thinking. We all tend to dream about our future or the things we would like to do. According to research, we spend about 10%-20% of our time daydreaming about what we want.
Why does wishful thinking happen, and how does it benefit us?
We dream because we may face some difficulties in real life or we can't, and as a result, we take refuge in the imagination. Wishful thinking is a form of escapism that can help us build our goals, strategies, or find solutions to various problems.
In this way, brain activity does not slow down during wishful thinking and daydreaming as others believe. On the contrary, they become more intense, which means that we focus more on problems or goals. This subsequently leads to a clearer understanding of the steps we need to take.
In fact, it's even recommended to allow yourself to daydream at work, they say. British explorers from the University of Lancashire, quoted by the Daily Mail. A study they recently published shows that daydreaming helps us become more creative and lighter.
In addition, wishful thinking helps us regulate our emotions, becoming more empathetic and patient.
But there are also negative consequences of wishful thinking.
There is not much scientific data on the advantages and disadvantages of wishful thinking, as this phenomenon has not yet been studied.
How often it is normal to be in an imaginary scenario of a new day is not exactly known, but a warning sign should be given when we start building. alternative life in our minds. The imagined life can profoundly affect our professional and personal lives. We can no longer see the difference between realistic and unrealistic plans. A person becomes significantly more vulnerable to the behavior of other people due to high expectations that he built in his head.
Professor Eli Somers, an Israeli psychotherapist, argues that in such situations we are talking about adjustment disorder, but it is not yet recognized by the medical community.
Uncontrolled wishful thinking can lead to depression and anxiety episodes where the person struggles to find the motivation or resources to cope with problems.
Who tends to wishful thinking and daydreaming?
It would be unfair to point the finger at certain type people who will wishful thinking. However, there are some personality traits that can increase the chances of this happening.
Intuitive Introverts
Intuitive introverts sometimes find it difficult to express their thoughts and feelings, let alone describe their plans for the future. In this way, internal conversation or a few minutes of daydreaming is what helps them put their ideas in order and prepare for possible problems.
Empaths
Empaths are very sensitive to their environment and to people's personal problems. As a result of their ability to absorb energy, they often experience stress, anxiety, or depression.
When reality is too harsh for them and they cannot find joy around them, they tend to escape to their imaginary world, where nothing interferes with their peace.
daffodils
Most of the narcissist's time will be spent creating scenarios in which his grandiosity will help him gain power or become famous for those unique qualities. In their opinion, there is no room for failure or enough time to focus on real problems or the people around them.
An alternative reason why narcissists often fantasize may be due to their poor stress management skills.
Melancholy
Melancholics are never satisfied with superficial things, and therefore there must be something really special and interesting to bring them out of their shell.
When a conversation or event does not satisfy their interest, they hide in their minds, where they either analyze the past or contemplate the future.
neurotics
Neurotics are known to be wary and obsessed with problem solving. However, the researchers noticed that they are also very creative thinkers.
The explanation is given by their hyperactivity in the prefrontal cortex, which processes threat-related thoughts. That is why the neurotic will spend so much time daydreaming.
How to stop wishful thinking and just dream?
If you find yourself lost in thoughts or imaginary scenarios more often than you should, try to understand the pattern or reason. Is it a pain from the past that you can't heal? A goal that you passionately want to achieve? Whatever the reason, stop daydreaming about it and find solutions to help you overcome your problem/achieve your goal.
If you can't find joy or circumstances are emotionally weighing on you, try to find ways out that could solve problems or help you distance yourself from them.
If you don't see a way out, seek professional help. There are many people and organizations that are ready to support and guide you.
There are people who are obsessed with the desire to appear before others in a more favorable light, to stand out at any cost. As a rule, they tend to exaggerate or distort real events. And sometimes they get into the role so much that they themselves hardly distinguish what is true in their life and what is fiction. What are the motives for this, according to psychologists, personality disorders? Does it interfere with a full-blooded life?
Many people living near us have learned how to get what they want and have achieved real success. Most of them are not necessarily super-rich and, but are satisfied with what they have achieved. But there are others - such passive observers sweet life in the movies and on TV, who only wonder why they are deprived of such joys as prosperity, successful career, creative growth, love, enjoyment.
Not knowing how to realize their desires, being disappointed and believing that such a life is available only to the elect, they begin to wishful thinking, to draw the attention of other people to the significance and importance of their own person. By creating the illusion of success and believing that by doing so they are raising their “rating” with others, they ultimately believe this themselves. And think about devastating consequences they simply do not want such self-deception. The policy of the ostrich hiding its head in the sand.
If in childhood cheating is one of the ways psychological protection and a completely natural mechanism, when a child begins to hide his fears, secrets, misconduct, problems and unseemly deeds behind a lie, then for an adult, with already more room for imagination, this method ceases to correspond true needs. Rather, they create conflict situations, a frivolous attitude towards a liar is formed, even more than that, the trust of others is disastrously melting, and in their own eyes - their own dignity.
In adults, a lie performs the function of hiding an imperfect inner world masking the state of anxiety, discomfort and dissatisfaction. Due to a number of reasons - illness, short stature, physical weakness, low level education, real or imaginary failures, inattention of relatives or their excessive guardianship, rejection by loved ones ... and you never know what else - a steady feeling of one's own inferiority may appear.
As a result of the impossibility or inability to overcome the cause and solve mental problem it is forced out into the area of the unconscious, forms the so-called complex, which remains long time and dictating compensatory behavior to its owner. A person becomes uninteresting to himself as he really is. Therefore, starting to embellish something in his life - inventing a different origin, the presence of talents, famous friends that he does not have and did not have - he, let's say, borrows self-esteem. 
Childhood fantasizing and deceit are almost always motivated, and people with low self-esteem, knowing that lying is bad and realizing the perniciousness of their habit, still take the risk of being deceitful. But the so-called mythomaniacs (or, as psychiatrists also call them, pseudologists) experience a pathological desire to compose all kinds of fables about themselves, often without having any specific purpose and without any particular benefit. Their lies are disinterested and not designed to be believed.
Mythomaniacs are more likely to be fascinated not by the desire to mislead others, but by getting pleasure from the very occupation of myth-making, as they say, the very process of presenting incredible fables. This is a scam pure love to art." However, by their behavior, such liars greatly undermine their reputation. They are exposed very often.
People usually suffer from pseudology hysteroid type personality, i.e. those who need to constantly be in the center of attention of others, cause their admiration and worship. If they cannot achieve this with their virtues, then they invent them, wishful thinking, resorting to lies and boasting. Typical example- the eccentric Baron Munchausen.
How to understand who is in front of you - a pathological pseudologist or a "normal", "non-clinical" lover of lying? Yes, it’s very simple: everything is fine until the lie does not interfere with the life of the deceiver himself or the people around him. If a person realizes that his deceit is a problem and wants to be treated himself, a psychologist or may well help him.
Lokatskaya Liliana
A few examples of wishful thinking.
1. A man is sitting in front of me. He passionately wants to have a wife. But his relationships with women do not add up totally ... The reason?
He is looking for a wife, not his woman. He is not ready to meet his woman, because he will not see her point-blank. He makes a substitution of illusion, fictional reality instead of real assessment yourself and the situation. After all, his woman-will have like puzzles-his characteristics. Only not fictional characteristics, but real ones.
2. A woman is sitting in front of me. She wants to get married. But not only does her husband not come, she is unhappy.
She wants to get married, but does not think about what kind of person will go through life with her? To marry means to enter into long term relationship with a person. Real. By this. different. She's not ready to meet a real person. That is, she essentially does not need a person ... She already needs final goal"married". What will this marriage be like (after all, it depends on the person, she does not think about it). Thank God that it does NOT reduce her to her own desires ....
3. A girl is sitting in front of me. She can't get along with her mother. The girl does not want to see that the mother she expects is not the mother who is present.
Opening your eyes and accepting your mother means seeing that your mother is a living, real person. With their problems, troubles, complexes, injuries, negativity, etc.
The girl is crying. It's hard to accept reality. But without it, there will be no liberation.
4. My mother is sitting in front of me. She wants her son to be "all right". In order for the son to be really good, you need to see that the son is a real person. And in order for him to be good, he needs to be allowed to breathe. Let him go his own way, make his own choice and not pull him with anxiety into his illusory happiness created for him.
Mom gave birth to real person but a toy. She created clothes for this toy, and is trying to dress it. Not noticing that the clothes are toys. And it doesn't work for a real person.
5. There is a man in front of me. He is sure that his wife is happy. He is so sure of this that he does not notice that his wife is left alone in her reality. She decides for herself real questions, she herself struggles with the demons of the mind, she herself tries to justify him, persuading herself, well, he loves me ...
He loves... But how? Real or illusory? If it’s real, then he should look into the eyes of his woman, and be able to see in these eyes a request for help. Be able to see what is pressing issues requiring a solution.
6. There is a woman in front of me. She is looking for love .... She finds partners, lives great novels, and then they part.
She is looking for love .... But not a person. She doesn't really care who she "loves" with. She wants to experience the feeling of love. She tests everything as ordered.
The most important thing that should be understood, but what is impossible to understand simply because this function of perception just doesn’t work, is to understand that the predicted reality is not an accomplished reality, and becomes it only because of the existential effect. In other words, when we define the future as one in which we already see war, then all the actions of today's present are an existential action directed towards war, which thus, as it were, is a confirmation of the belief in forecasting.
But attention! How can a person make an accurate forecast for the future if he positions himself as a pragmatist, a rationalist? But for forecasting, the opposite quality is necessary - the ability to develop creative imagination and rich mental representations.
And here a logical paradox arises:
The pragmatist does not predict, he predetermines.
Suppose the pragmatist believes that the increase wages Will corrupt you. In other words, he predicts, projects the present into the future. However, deprived of mentally rich representations and fantasies, he extrapolates his own rationalism into the future. For him, the word and its meaning are practically a direct information pointer. And therefore, if you say what you want, then it is seen as such, regardless of whether the words are used in the past, present or future tense. Perfectly, such people feel able to control time itself, simply by using speech. If they talk about the past, then they are in the past. If they talk about the present, then they are in the present. If it is about the future, then they do not realize that words can serve the psychic reality, not the real one.
If such a person has a conviction that they want to somehow hurt him in the future, then this is a reason for him to start fighting this today, since he does not realize, I repeat, that words can have multiple representational properties, painting our fantasies with incredible colors non-existent ideas.
So, rationalism sees its own fantasies as a fact that has come true. His "I" is not capable of abstraction in a function that is expressed by self-observation. This function is simply atrophied, not developed, degraded in the course of the development of the personality's mental apparatus.
A curious phenomenon arises, it would seem so beautiful, known to us under the guise of a noble - a man said, a man did. However, the bottom line is that if a man said absolute heresy, then he did it anyway, because "the man said, the man did" becomes automatic process. A kind of stupid machine that will grind everything that gets into it, be it millet or a baby. As Yitzhak Adizes wrote in his book, some companies have become so effective that their own customers have begun to interfere with them. And if we consider state management in this paradigm?
It must be understood that foresight is based on a completely different principle of perception and its path lies through a wealth of representations and fantasies, in a completely different sphere. mental properties, opposite to rationalism, but directly indicating and connecting a person with feelings.
The essence of foresight is not to predict exactly what events will occur, but to in general terms to form an understanding in the deviation or correlation of the purpose of human culture and the purpose of life itself. Do you feel the difference?
But what kind of person can predict the future in such a way as an inevitable event, which, as it were, has already happened?
I don't think even God knows.
Imagine, I will make a statement that you want to beat me in the future. Based on this statement, I take action in the present, so that this does not happen, that is, I break your hands or try to attack you myself. After all, I cannot avoid what must happen, and therefore, in a mental sense, I have nowhere to go. In the nature of mental reactions, the first is flight, the second is defensive aggression if there is nowhere to run.
Are you starting to understand what it's all about?
So, to repeat: I predicted in the future that you would beat me. Therefore, this cannot be avoided. Therefore, in the present, I attack, which provokes exactly what I predict as the future, stating the fact that you are the aggressor.
Let us add to this phenomenon what I have described in relation to a psyche depleted of mental representations and fantasy. And we inevitably get a provocation of aggression, in which we perceive the aggressor in an opposing logical form- it was he who attacked us and beat us, as we predicted.
The most important thing that psychiatry would say is that this clinical act misses the moment of reflective self-criticism. Only always opposed aggressors are visible, but the one against whom the aggressor acts - the victim herself - is always excluded from the conflict.
Own actions are all logically and behaviorally justified in relation to the level of prediction.
I can jump on you and beat you, because in my head there is an image of the future in which you strangle me. That is, their own fantasies about what the wife could change are sufficient to beat her hard.
Imagine a class sitting in a lesson, everything is calm. Suddenly, the student gets up, takes a sawn-off shotgun from his satchel and blows off the teacher's head. Later he is asked: - Why did you do it?
And he replies: - I realized that this teacher is a pedophile.
How did you understand it?
I just saw him rape me in the future.
The child is clearly not all right with the mental apparatus. But the fact that the teacher may not be involved in any way, I hope this is understandable?
It is impossible for many people today to explain that their beloved wife did not cheat on them, but is under the paranoid supervision of her own jealous husband, which provokes her to change relations with him. By the way, often just in the void. It’s just sometimes easier for a woman to find temporary support in order to take a step and break free, and then leave this temporary refuge, supposedly because of which all the fuss is made.
There are also two important points:
- Mental, informational pressure
- The ability of the psyche to withstand a certain mental pressure.
And then comes operativeness - a "quantum" leap of the mental decision about degradation, in which the unconscious loses the ability to transmit. And this means that information process between consciousness and unconscious processes is deeply disturbed, it has become not afferent, but one-sided.
The body functions as an automaton, and there is no mechanism that would mark the excess or shortage of information material.
Loss of feelings. How to make a choice towards the goal of life, if all external environment neutral? He put his hand into the fire - but she does not feel. He cut off his finger, but you don’t feel how the blood flows out.
You come to work because you have to. Married because you have to. Children, car, cottage. In short, everything is like everyone else, and so am I.
Although, it saves many that they still have depression and torment. This is reassuring. And for those who are at the "helm", so to speak, these mental properties have long been gone. That is why there is such a gap in the achievements of culture between the poor and the super rich. To do this, it was necessary to uproot one’s soul, as one pulls out a root from a tooth, no matter what a piece is left, otherwise the tooth will then begin to hurt under the filling.
We put a seal and it's ready - for many years the body will serve a person in his culture.
And after all, the most interesting thing is that the closest ones are brought to the ceremony of uprooting the root of the soul from their own body.
But it's probably already separate story life.
