@EndogenousRebel
So, maybe you should revisit that notion about fantasy. Let me share a perspective with you that I've developed over time. I did, in fact, come to a point where I thought fantasy was holding me back, but I did end up finally changing my mind about that.
Fantasy, from what my research suggests, is one of the most powerful human motivators. If we can fantasize a goal, it is much, much easier to obtain said goal without having to exercise rigorous, consistent discipline. Fantasy is also what drives us to learn. We experience fantasies in various fashions. We fantasize about being able to play a musical instrument, we fantasize about being "popular" (some of us anyways), we fantasize about having money. Our fantasies instill the sensation of desire within us that feeds our ambition, motivates us, and very importantly - determines to what degree we receive positive biological feedback for successes along the way. Ie: Dopamine, and the like.
So to nurture a fantasy, and feed it, is to create a template for a hormonally balanced, ambitious life.
Fantasizing also increases our ability to visualize, which is one of the most powerful tools for problem-solving, especially when it comes to spacial relations, I think. This capacity to visualize, and to creativity manipulate our visuals, also gives us the ability to understand extremely large, macro-scale concepts, that cannot easily be expressed in words or simple pictures. I'm sure Einstein, for instance, was a very skilled visualizer.
Here are some things that fantasy accomplishes (imo):
- Demonstrates our morals and values, and continues to imprint the emotion that helps us to sustain them
- Expresses our deeper dreams and emotionally imprints desire and an association for higher degrees of positive and negative biological feedback, which encourages ambition.
- Improves our ability to visualize, and creatively manipulate our visuals.
- Improves our ability to abstract, and to understand complex, large-scale problems in a way that extends beyond the human's physical, practical means of representation
- Helps us to cope with stress, understand and relieve pain, and disassociate with situations that are more than what our body is equipped to handle.
- Developing fantasies and visualizations most likely has a structural affect on the brain, (need to research), and can possibly lead to lucid dreaming, and a heightened ability to have out-of-body experiences.
The downsides of fantasy:
I think, in particular, fantasies which take the form of dreams (bits of images and memories shifting in and out of focus in a piece-meal fashion, scattered with phrases and the like...) are not helpful to us. At least, I have found that they are not helpful to me, and I've seen nothing in my research to suggest that they would be helpful.
These types of fantasies most often seem to fall into the realm of "escapism", and can seem to become somewhat addictive. They can dominate the brain, causing the limbic system to be overly-active, and provide us with a reactive, animalistic, emotionally-inspired state. These are the kinds of fantasies you would have when you have to do something you normally procrastinate, or when you're afflicted with boredom (such as sitting in church), and I think people who have them regard them as something of a drug. It's a way to drug yourself into getting through something that deprives the brain of stimulus. Brains can't stand to be deprived of stimulus (a brain without action is braindead). We have a degree of fear, I think, in fact, when it comes to letting go of these tendencies.
Letting go of them, though, I think is something that many INTPs may benefit from. Here is why I think that for me, personally:
"Waking dream" fantasies....
- I lose things more
- I forget what I was doing
- I can take unnecessarily long "thinking pauses" when I should be working
- I get out of focus
- I do tasks much more slowly
- I procrastinate tasks much more often
- I fixate on past events I should not be concerning myself with
- I fill my brain up with "clutter" that can sometimes keep me up at night
- I fail to keep my "mental list" in the forefront of my brain, so I end up not accomplishing everything on the list
- I become noticeably more "scatterbrained"
- When this happens on a long-distance drive, I can miss my turn/highway exit
I learned how negatively these fantasies were affecting me once I started applying mindfulness meditation. It is a way of doing tasks, while meditating, and it focuses on quieting the brain and being in the present. It was very difficult for me.
Here was the payoff...
- I procrastinated less
- I rarely made mistakes
- I got my work done twice as fast
- I enjoyed my work much more than I actually enjoyed the fantasies
- I found it easier and easier to focus
- I rarely forgot anything, or lost anything
- I was hyper-attuned to what was going on around me
- I found creative ways to become more methodical and skilled with my actions
- After mundane work, my brain was uncluttered and felt refreshed, ready for proactive thinking and progress
- I became more creative
- I became better at developing ideas and solving problems
- I started to sleep better
- I was much happier, and far less stressed
- I had a significant improvement in confidence
- Little things no longer upset me or made me irritable.
I did periods of sitting meditation as well, so that may also have influenced the pay off. At any rate, this stage of my personal learning made me begin to realize that being "trapped in my mind" all of the time was unhealthy for me. The healthy approach was to balance this tendency with actively practicing being a more "extroverted sensing" sort of a person - and learning to clear my mind, and live in the moment.
Research appears to back this up. There is a wealth of research discussing the positive biological impacts of meditation and how it can permanently change the structure of the brain to increase focus, and more.
My conclusion:
Indulging fantasies as a means of entertainment, and actively choosing which "stories" to live, is a positive thing. Allowing the brain to decide for itself when to serve up piece-meal fantasies as a replacement for having to engage in reality, is a negative thing.
Again, these are my opinions.
The reason I post them is that I had to go down this road, and it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that the mental escapism I was using to stimulate myself when I was forced to do things that were boring to me, was not actually beneficial to my growth as a person, and was only holding me back, and making me more scatterbrained. If any of our other INTPs come across my post and identify with my assessment, hopefully they can take this advice as something of a shortcut, and try the things I eventually ended up trying a lot sooner than I did!
