A smartphone study of 2,250 people found their minds were wandering almost half the time, and it made them less happy
What makes people happy from moment to moment? In 2010, two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, tried to answer that question by asking people directly, at random times, through their phones.
In the study, published in Science, they built an iPhone app that contacted volunteers at random moments during the day. Each time, it asked three questions: How are you feeling right now? What are you doing? And are you thinking about something other than what you are currently doing?
Using responses from 2,250 adults, they found that people’s minds were wandering 46.9% of the time. Mind wandering happened during almost every activity, at least 30% of the time, with one exception: making love.
People were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were focused on what they were doing. This was true even when they were thinking about pleasant things, which did not make them any happier than focusing on the present. Thinking about neutral or unpleasant topics made them noticeably less happy.
Because the app asked the questions repeatedly over time, the researchers could look at timing. Mind wandering tended to come before unhappy moods, not after them, which suggested that the wandering itself was likely a cause of unhappiness, at least in part. In their words, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
Strikingly, what people were thinking about explained more of their happiness than what they were doing. The activity itself accounted for only a small share of the differences in happiness.
The study helped fuel interest in mindfulness, which trains people to notice when their attention drifts and bring it back to the present. A growing body of research suggests mindfulness practice can reduce mind wandering and improve mood for some people.
There are caveats. Mind wandering is not always bad: it is linked to creativity, planning and problem solving, and a mind that never wandered would struggle to imagine the future. The volunteers were people who chose to download a happiness app, mostly in the United States, so they may not represent everyone.
Still, the main message is easy to test in everyday life. The next time you are washing dishes or walking somewhere, notice where your mind goes, and how you feel when you bring it back.
Source
Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” Science, 2010.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439
