Science Says You’ll Be Much Happier If Your Mind Wanders Less
Our minds
are a wandering machine. A study found that almost half
of our thoughts are not related to what we are doing.
If that
isn’t a telling statistic, then I don’t know what it is. This raises questions:
“How does this brain activity affect our happiness?” and “Does it make us
happier (or not)?”
Much of
the research on the factors that contribute to happiness has focused on factors
like income, gender, education, and marriage, but as Harvard Psychologist Matt
Killingsworth mentioned in Greater Good, “Factors like these don’t seem to have
particularly strong effects.”
It seems,
according to Killingsworth, that fleeting aspects of our everyday lives—such as
what we’re doing, who we’re with, and what we’re thinking about—have a big
influence on our happiness. And yet these are the very factors that have been
most difficult for scientists to study. This drove Killingsworth and Daniel
T.Gilbert to test the influence that such factors have on happiness.
The Research
The
Harvard study titled “A
Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind”, made use of an unconventional technique known
as experience sampling – where people were interrupted at various intervals
during the day. This technique is extremely powerful. It allows you to find
large patterns in human thought and behavior, develop a portrait of someone and
find distinct correlations between thoughts, actions, and happiness.
The
psychologists developed an iPhone app to
sample ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions. At intervals throughout the
day, people were sent a brief questionnaire asking them about their experience
at that moment just before the signal.
They were
asked how they felt (on a scale of very bad to very good), what they were doing
(22 activities including watching tv and eating were provided) and whether they
were thinking about something else. They could answer yes or no to this last
question. If they were thinking about something else, they were asked whether
the feelings were neutral, unpleasant or pleasant.
A diverse
group – ages 18-80, representing a wide range of incomes, education levels and
marital statuses and nationalities – of 15000 people formed part of the sample.
This allowed the researchers to gather over 650 000 real-time reports.
Our
Mind Wanders Toward Unhappiness
The study
found that 47% of the time people were thinking about something other than
their current activity. This
varied across the 22 activities – from 65% when taking a shower, 50% when
working, 40% when exercising, all the way to 10% while having sex. Aside from
sex, people’s minds were wondering at least 30% of the time. Our minds then
wander a considerable amount of the time, even when we are resting and
following instructions to think about nothing in particular.
According
to psychology, if your mind wanders often, there is an 85% chance that you are
subconsciously unhappy with your life.This
study supports this notion. It was found that people were significantly less
happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not and the size of
the effect is considerable. In the words of Killingsworth:
“…how often a person’s mind
wanders, and what they think about when it does, is far more predictive of
happiness than how much money they make, for example.”
This holds
true for all 22 activities and regardless as to what the person is doing, even
if what they are doing is not enjoyable, for example, commuting to
work. This can be explained by the fact that when our minds wander, we
often think about negative and unpleasant things – our worries, our anxieties,
and even our regrets. These, in turn, have a big impact on our happiness.
How
Mental Presence Affects Happiness
The data from the Harvard Group study also
points to the fact that your happiness is not determined by the way we
spend our day. Rather it has to do with engaging in the present.
Mental
presence then, where we match our thoughts to our specific actions, is a
massive predictor of our happiness and should be cultivated for a happier life. However, as Killingsworth said, “The lesson here isn’t
that we should stop mind-wandering entirely—after all, our capacity to revisit
the past and imagine the future is immensely useful, and some degree of
mind-wandering is probably unavoidable.”
What is
suggested is that we cultivate ways to reduce mind wandering (e.g. meditation practice) as this
ultimately will improve the quality of your life, help us more effectively cope
with bad moments, achieve greater enjoyment from the good ones and become
happier.
BY NICK DARLINGTON
http://www.lifehack.org/411032/science-says-youll-be-much-happier-if-your-mind-wanders-less?ref=mail&mtype=daily_newsletter&mid=20161012_customized&uid=687414&hash=707e797f7e757e6d794c856d747b7b3a6f7b79&action=click
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