Is Your Mind-Wandering Robbing You Of Happiness?

Karl was a brilliant but unhappy man.

A multi-millionaire who retired from a successful Internet business at the age of 37, Karl nonetheless had a teenage son who didn't respect him and a wife who was ready to divorce him. He couldn't get around to calling back his friends for social engagements, he neglected his hobbies, and most of his post-retirement investments had proven unsuccessful.

Eventually Karl, who didn't spend his millions on household staff, couldn't even find the motivation to pick up his clothes from the bedroom floor and would leave lunch simmering unattended for hours on the stove, until the smoke detector went off. 

Ironically, Karl would later tell his therapist that he had a very active life. But his wife would interject that he had "the attention span of a flea."

The Paradox of Prosperity

Since the 1950's, North Americans, and more recently, people in Europe and even in the formerly developing world, have seen an incredible increase in material wealth. Conveniences that for centuries were not available to kings and queens are commonplace. Incomes are 10 to 50 times higher, in real terms, than they were in 1900.  People live longer than at any other time in recorded history, and diseases that once were always fatal can now be treated with a shot or a pill or painless surgical procedure.

People in almost all of the world have more personal freedom than ever before, too, but the net result of all this change has not been an increase in happiness. In fact, griping about the vicissitudes of life on the Internet is almost as common as kitty videos. In 2008, a Harvard doctoral student in psychology named Matt Killingsworth set out to find the reasons why.

Does a Wandering Mind Make People Unhappy?

Killingsworth came up with a novel approach to researching the determinants of happiness. Using an iPhone app, he recruited 15,000 people aged 18 to their late 80's from all walks of life in over 80 countries, in 86 occupational categories, married and single, high-income, low-income, and in between, to report their degrees of happiness in real time.

Making the app available for free download, Killingsworth asked participants to complete a short survey and then to choose the number of times per day the app would ask them to rate their happiness on their phones. The app sent signals at random times of day asking participants three questions.

• On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?
• What are you doing right now? Participants could choose among 22 different options options including working, commuting, interacting with children, eating, talking, and having sex, among many others.
• Are you thinking about something other than what you are doing right now. People could answer no, they were focused on the activity at hand, or yes, they were thinking about something else, and it made them feel good or bad or their feelings were neutral.

The Harvard student's initial hypothesis that people's minds wander a lot of the time turned out to be true. Matt Killingworth found a clear trend in 650,000 real-time, in some cases, minute-to-minute reports of happiness from the 15,000 people in the study:

• People reported an average happiness of 6.4 when they were focused on present activities, and 5.2 when their minds were wandering.
• People were less happy when their minds were wandering even when the activity at hand was unpleasant, such as driving in rush hour traffic while late to work.

• Even when people allowed their minds to wander to think about something pleasant, they were still less happy when their minds were focused on the activity at hand.

So what do these findings really tell us about how to be happy?

Is It Always Best To "Be Here" Now?

Nearly all of us have heard the injuction to live our lives mindfully, to "be here" now, because the present is the only moment we really have. On the other hand, maybe what we believe to be a uniquely human ability to project our minds to other places makes our lives more pleasant even when can't change the physical constraints in front of us, allowing us to escape depressing realities to let our minds float to a happy place.

Comparing consecutive reports of happiness, Killingsworth found that reports of mind-wandering tended to precede reports of unhappiness, but reports of unhappiness did not precede reports of mind-wandering (on average).

People aren't just less happy when their minds are wandering, no matter what they are doing. Killingsworth theorizes that most of the time when our minds wander, we rehash unpleasant experiences or we rehearse our justified or irrational fears about our lives or we indulge in fearful anticipation of future problems. Even when we let our minds float to that happy place, we are still slightly less happy than we are immersed in the present moment. If mind wandering were a slot machine, Killingsworth says, it would be like having a change to lose $50, $20, or $1. You'd never want to play.

So How Can We Make a Habit of Being in the Present?

The term for the kind of "delusion" mentioned in the philosophy literally translates as "memory," but this is more than just a memory of the past. In Buddhist philosophy, delusion is anything that takes away from awareness of the present moment. 

That's all very well and good, many of us might say, but you really can't chant and meditate while driving the kids to their soccer game. However, you can still take a moment, with eyes still open, to focus on the breath.

• When beginning a new activity, take a deep breath.
• When in the middle of an ongoing activity, take a deep breath. (If you are in the middle of a conversation, however, you may not want to utter a sigh.)

What does deep breathing do for us?

Taking just a breath or two won't send you to a mental nirvana in which you might be dangerously out of touch with the real world. And it's important to understand that this exercise is physical, not mental. You don't want to send your mind anywhere other than to the here and now. But taking just a moment to live in the present helps your physiology to ground you in the present so you are more focused, more productive, safer, and happier.