Jul
24
The emotional cost of a wandering mind
We all spend a lot of time thinking about something other than what is going on right now. Our minds wander, they wander to the past and contemplate what could have been, or what might happen in the future, and then there is the thoughts about things that may never happen at all.
Where Is My Mind by Andrea Costantini
Apparently we are so good at mind-wandering, that scientists believe that it’s our brains “default mode” because we spend so much time there. It is however, an important cognitive function that allows us to plan, learn, reason and create. But mind-wandering moves our attention from the present moment, the thing we are doing or thinking about right now, and does, lead to distraction.
With mindfulness we learn to pay attention to this wandering, to observe it, and then bring our attention back to right now, the present moment. And with practice, over time, we may wander less and less. You see the suggestion is that a wandering mind is actually an unhappy mind, and that we are more likely to be happy or satisfied by our moment-to-moment awareness.
The researchers in this study wanted to investigate if this is true. To do so they needed to get real time responses from a very large group of participants, so they designed an app to do just that. The ‘track your happiness’ app (only available for iphones) is still available to download so that you can participate in this ongoing research. I’ve signed up, but more about that experience later.
Matt Killingsworth, the researcher, released a report on this first round of findings in 2010. So here’s what they wanted to know, how it works and what they found:
The objective was to find out how often people’s minds wandered, what topics they wandered to, and how the wandering mind affected their happiness.
The app sends a survey notification via the phone at random times during the day, and the response data is collected and for further analysis. At the time of Matt’s 2011 TEDx talk they already had over 650,000 data samples from over 15,000 people, in more than 86 occupational categories, from over 83 countries! I imagine these numbers have grown further since.
For the 2010 study, the questions used in the analysis of data from 2,250 adults (58.8% male and 73.9% living in the US), are:
- A happiness question: How are you feeling right now? (a sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100))
- An activity question: What are you doing right now? (a selection one or more of 22 activities)
- A mind wandering question: Are you thinking about something other than what you are currently doing? (one of four responses; ‘no’, yes something pleasant’, ‘something neutral’, or ‘yes something unpleasant’)
Here’s what they found
- People’s minds wandered frequently regardless of what they were doing, in fact 47% of the time. Mind-wandering is so prevalent that it happens at least 30% of the time regardless of the activity, except sex, then it only happens 10% of the time.
- People are less happy when their mind is wandering than when they were focusing on the task at hand, a finding consistent across all 22 activities. In other words, people were happiest when thinking about what they were doing. So doing the dishes and thinking about a clean kitchen causes you to be happier than thinking about your holiday while doing the dishes.
- What people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing. It didn’t particularly matter what people where doing, what mattered most for happiness was matching thought with action (moment-to-moment experience or mindfulness)
Matt suggests that, “when our minds wander the the tendency is to wander to unpleasant things….our worries, our anxieties, regrets”, which if you really think about it is right. Matt goes on to say that because they have so much data from the same people they can conclude that, “mind-wandering appears to be the cause, and not merely the consequence of unhappiness.”
The report concludes this:
A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.
Interesting stuff! So although you might think day dreaming can take you away from the humdrum, actually it is likely to make you less happy. So better to get present and try mindfulness.
If you are new to meditation and mindfulness you may be thinking, “ah, but mind-wandering happens even in meditation…very often actually,” and of course you would be right, which is why it is suggested that when the mind wanders we notice it, and then come back to our moment-to-moment awareness as it is right now. One simple way to achieve this is by returning to the breathe and following the sensations of the breathe in, and out of the body.
The Centre for Investigating Healthy Minds has an interesting breathe counting tool which was developed to investigate how breathe counting may contribute to more self-awareness and less mind-wandering. Researchers suggest it is a new way of scientifically measuring mindfulness. Richard Davidson PhD, one of the first neuroscientists to investigate the neurological benefits of contemplative practice, including mindfulness, suggests that the breath counting tool is a more accurate behavioral measure of mindfulness. You can try the tool for yourself here.
My experience with the track your happiness app:
I’ve only been using the app for three days but I am already finding it quite effective in noticing my state of being as I answer the survey questions.
I’m prompted to take the survey by a notification on the iphone three to four times throughout the day. You can also choose to take the survey at anytime yourself. The questions are varied in number and the theme for each survey. Sometimes there are only three questions and at other times there are many more, so it does appear to be quite random. I haven’t received any mind-wandering questions so far, perhaps that part of the research is over.
I am able to look at all my previous responses on the app and over time I think this will be quite useful to see if a pattern arises in my happiness or satisfaction level at different times of the day.
I’m happy to be contributing to important research on what it is that makes us happy or satisfied with life. Are there similar such research projects you’d like to share?
