The Wandering Mind
What I read: Mind-wandering may be the cause of your unhappiness by Kevin Dickinson. Published October 4, 2022.
Our minds wander. We daydream. All of us. It’s part of the human condition.
Your mind is a wanderer, and it’s not alone. As many as 96% of Americans claim to experience mind-wandering daily, and studies have shown the habit to be common across cultures. So common that some have theorized it to be the brain’s default process.
Some research points to mind wandering being good for us as stated in numerous articles such as 6 Reasons Why Daydreaming and Mind Wandering Are Essential For Your Creative Brain and How Mind-Wandering May Be Good For You.
Maybe mind wandering is good for us, but it’s worth considering that perhaps it’s not always.
Kevin Dickinson suggests that it appears we resort to mind wandering often when we’re trying to escape boredom, stress, anger, and other alienating emotions. Whether it’s falling into a daydream to escape a boring college lecture or putting off starting a new project, our mind can wander to alleviate the boredom or pressure. In these cases, mind wandering is associated with unhappiness, or at least not pleasant experiences.
Some research points to mind wandering not always being a healthy mental escape from unhappiness but rather the cause of it. That’s an interesting proposition I’ve not heard before.
If this is true, that mind wandering can be the cause of unhappiness, perhaps reducing how much our minds wander can increase our happiness levels. Even a small percentage of happiness increase would be a huge benefit.
Matt Killingsworth wrote in Greater Good Magazine (highly recommended, I subscribe to their newsletter) that his research is founded on the idea that the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences have more to do with determining our level of happiness than do whatever the overall current conditions of our life might be at the time. On its face, this makes some sense.
Killingsworth wrote a science paper in 2010 when he was working in the happiness lab (yes, there is such a thing) at Harvard University. He was trying to determine the emotional impacts of mind wandering. After analyzing the data gathered from 2,250 study participants, Killingsworth and his team came to three conclusions.
Our minds wander a lot, perhaps as much as half our waking lives. I love that the one activity that consistently kept people’s minds focused in the moment was sex. Go sex!
We’re less happy when our minds wander. Even during normally mundane activities like commuting to work or doing the dishes, a focused mind was a happier mind.
There is evidence that mind wandering can be a precursor to moments of unhappiness.
All told, what people were thinking, not what they were doing, had a much greater influence on their happiness. As Matthew Killingsworth & Daniel Gilbert conclude:
‘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.’
Of course, much more research is needed to replicate these conclusions. I don’t take this at face value as the absolute truth. There have been study conclusions that run counter to this take on mind wandering. But in my own life it aligns with my experience.
When I’m commuting on a train or bus, I’m much more likely to feel happy when reading a book or doing something in which I’m mentally engaged rather than staring out the window.
During my daily walks that are mind-wandering-palooza events for me, I enjoy the randomness of where my mind goes, but I tend to enjoy them more if I undertake solving a problem or tossing around an interesting idea I read about earlier.
I’ve often said I don’t do idle well. My friends will attest to that. Maybe this is why? Perhaps if my mind wanders too much, something I’m likely to do when idle and untasked, I’m setting myself up for a less than happy outcome.
All that said, I believe and evidently some studies conclude that mind wandering is also an essential part of creativity and other important aspects of our lives. I use a strategy that’s worked well for me for years. I set an intention before mind wandering. If I need to solve a stubborn problem or am ideating on the next thing I want to write or project I want to undertake, setting that intention prior to what I expect will be some mind wandering, my daily walks being the most prominent example, seems to help. Is that truly mind wandering? Not sure. It is for me.
“But there are times when a freely wandering mind can also be beneficial,” Julia Kam, a cognitive neuroscientist and study co-author, told Inverse. “In letting your mind wander, it potentially frees up attentional resources and also the structured way of thinking that limits creative outputs.”
Mind wandering is with us forever. It’s what we all do. Often. If we’re intending to be focused on a specific task and our mind wanders, our mood may darken a bit. It’s all about balance. We know are minds will wander. Maybe it’s more about how we strategically use that mind wandering and how much of it we do that matters.
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