Why We Lose Touch With Our Imaginations…
Sarah Brent
Training coaches to help clients break free from anxiety, using our proven Anxiety Breakthrough Formula, achieve life-changing client results, & grow through your business through word-of-mouth referral
Sadly, so many of us have lost our imagination.?
Lost might be the wrong word, though. We don’t lose our imagination as much as we lose touch with it. It’s still there, of course, but we don’t tap into as much as we should, nor do we trust it as much when we do.?
Why??
Good question! Different people lose their connection with their imagination for different reasons, but most fall into these reasons.?
Why We Lose Touch With Our Imaginations…
It’s Drilled into Us
From an all too early age, we have people stopping our attempts at imagination. While playtime and wonderment are a part of your earliest school years, it isn’t too long until you are snapped out of a daydream by an adult who wants you to pay attension.?
Your parents might not help much either. While they smiled and laughed at your unrealistic ideas as a child, they might tell you to have more realistic ideas about your future by the time you are a teen. How many times did you hear things like:?
Our childhood and adolescence are full of people trying to mold us into adults who do what society expects when it is expected. While this may help prepare us for the “real world,” it also helps to squash our imagination and creativity.
Unrealised Dreams
It isn’t always other people’s fault that we lose our touch with imagination. As we grow older and realise that many of our wildest hopes and dreams likely won’t come true, we develop a certain bitterness, or some would say – a more realistic outlook,
This realistic outlook usually leads us to cut off our imagination in its tracks. Why should we trust our imagination when it was so wrong in the past? Imagination didn’t help me create the life I wanted; how will it help me now??
Shaking off failure or disappointment is never easy, and our imagination makes for an easy scapegoat.?
Vulnerability
We often care too much about what others think. To avoid being judged, our vulnerability leads us to act in ways that are more socially acceptable. We know that as adults we are supposed to be realistic. Imagination is best left to children. What will people say if they see or hear me engaging in imagining a life full of health, wealth and happiness?
Our obsession with other people’s opinions certainly hurts our imagination and creativity.?
We Know It All?
It is kind of natural that our increase in knowledge leads to a decrease in our imagination. After all, we know it all (or at least we sometimes we might think so.) Why should the flight of a bird fill me with a sense of wonderment? It’s all aerodynamics. Why should I imagine flying like Superman? That’s not possible??
We naturally become realists as we age, and it’s hard to embrace our imagination when we can’t let go of everything we think we know.?
We Are Busy
Many of us are caught in the cycle of working our job(s), taking care of our family, going to sleep, and repeating that daily. Where would we find time to be imaginative?
If we constantly think about our next task, how can we justify wasting time daydreaming about a different life???When you have responsibilities and people to take care of, you lose the desire to engage your imagination.?
You might even be so busy that you aren’t getting enough rest. Lack of sleep can significantly hurt our ability to use our imagination.?Many studies have confirmed?the correlation between our REM and creative problem-solving.?
We Are Distracted
If we don’t find ourselves unbelievably busy in this fast-paced society, we certainly find ourselves distracted.?
Never have we lived with such a wide variety of distractions. Why would people rely on their imagination when they can be distracted by:?
On the bright side, we have never had a collection of media and mediums this large to pick from. The bad thing about that is …?we have never had a collection of media and mediums this large to pick from.
With unfettered access, we rely on these services to fill a void rather than needing to call upon our imagination.?
Our Memory Declines
Most of us know (or even deal with) that memory wanes as we age. There are plenty of reasons for this:
Regardless of why we have accepted that parts of our memory are affected as we age. What you might be wondering is what the heck this has to do with your imagination.?
In an?interesting study published?in the?Association for Psychological Science,?scientists examined older individuals to see a link between episodic memory and imagining future scenarios. Their work showed a direct link. It seems like our imagining of future events is directly tied to our ability to remember past events.?
While this may seem dire, remember that there are many steps to keep your memory sharp as you age, and you should consider these steps helpful to the imagination as well.?