There’s a good chance—hell, a great chance—that your mind will wander off while reading this article. Maybe it will happen in the next paragraph. Maybe it’s happening now. Whenever it does occur, though, you won’t even realize that your mind is elsewhere since your eyes will still be looking at these very words across your screen.

Did I lose you already? OK, good! Let’s continue.

As Reddit user RGesusIII asked in the Explain Like I’m Five community: “What is actually happening when we ‘zone out’ for a few seconds?”

Well, you’ll be relieved to know that you’re not the only person that is having trouble staying focused.

Even writers—who spend their days navigating words—are not immune from zoning out when they read.

As author Nicholas Carr famously wrote in The Atlantic:

“Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.”

Carr is not alone—and although he blamed his wandering mind on the Internet (oh, the horrors of Twitter!)—We seem to be biologically disposed to alternate between paying attention and thinking about something else, writes University of Auckland emeritus professor of psychology Michael Corballis in the The Wandering Mind.

“Our minds are designed to wander whether we like it or not,” Corballis explains.

As you probably experienced, you can get lost in thought at any time, even when you’re watching a movie. However, it often happens while we’re reading, according to a 2005 University of California, Santa Barbara study.

Corballis wrote:

“Jonathan Schooler and colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara had students read the opening chapters of Tolstoy’s War and Peace for 45 minutes and asked them to press a key whenever they caught themselves ‘zoning out’. They caught themselves an average of 5.4 times. The students were also interrupted six times at random intervals to see if they were zoning out at the time without having been aware of it, and this caught, on average, a further 1.2 times.”

(On a side note: Who knows why the researchers decided to go with such a cerebral book such as War and Peace? I’m not hating on Tolstoy, but of course more people are going to zone out while reading this when compared to something a little more lighter and contemporary. Fifty Shades of Grey, anyone?)

Corballis suggests that zoning out—although stigmatized in the modern world—may be advantageous (unless you’re driving, of course. Please pay attention while you drive). And his findings are corroborated by 2015 Bar-Ilan University study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, volunteers were asked to perform repetitive tasks while researchers zapped their scalps with electrical currents. (Don’t worry. This isn’t the dark ages. The currents were harmless).

Why? To stimulate different regions of the brain to see which ones were involved in daydreaming.

But here’s where things get interesting: The researchers found that participants daydreamed the most when the frontal lobe region was activated, which is the part of the brain that allows us to organize and plan for the future. This is the last place you’d think would be involved with the preferred activity of slackers everywhere: daydreaming.

In fact, Corballis suggests that some of our greatest and most creative ideas may be born during that time when we’re zoning out.

He explains:

“In adapting to a complex world, we need to escape the here and now, and consider possible futures, mull over past mistakes, understand how other people’s minds work. Above all, mind-wandering is the source of creativity, the spark of innovation that leads in the longer run to an increase rather than a decrease in well-being.”

Okay—so daydreaming allows you to think about the future. But will that stop you from doing work in the present? Probably not, according to the study.

The researchers observed whether or not daydreaming effected the subjects ability to complete a computer task. Surprisingly, the subjects who daydreamed the most were slightly more efficient at performing the task.

So to sum it up, mind-wandering is good for our imaginations, which goes against everything our teachers taught us about paying attention.

“Maybe we should stop feeling guilty about mind-wandering and learn to revel in our Mitty-ish escapades,” Corballis says.