A shared universe › Blog › Being where you are · Español
You are in the shower and, without realising it, you are already at tomorrow’s meeting, thinking about what your sister said or about the shopping list. The hot water keeps falling, but you are not there. It happens to everyone, and a good deal more often than we think.
In 2010, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, of Harvard University, came up with a new way of studying it. They created a mobile phone app that, at randomly chosen times, asked three things: what you were doing, whether you were thinking about that or about something else, and how you felt. 2,250 people aged between 18 and 88 took part, and they gathered some two hundred and fifty thousand responses.
The first result was a surprise: people spent 46.9% of their waking time thinking about something other than what they were doing. In every activity the mind wandered at least 30% of the time, except one: making love.
People felt less happy when their mind wandered than when it was on what they were doing. Even thinking about something pleasant did not make them happier than attending to the task, and thinking about neutral or unpleasant things left them clearly worse off.
More striking still: what people were thinking said more about their happiness than what they were doing. The activity explained 4.6% of the differences in happiness at a given moment; whether or not the mind was on it, 10.8%. And when comparing responses over time, the authors saw that the wandering mind tended to come before the unhappiness, and not the other way round. Hence the title of their article, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”.
Later studies paint a less gloomy picture. In 2013, Giulia Poerio, Peter Totterdell and Eleanor Miles did something similar over a week and measured mood before and after the mind wandered. Sadness tended to come before the distraction, and wandering only left people worse when what they were thinking about was negative. Their conclusion was that a wandering mind is not bad in itself.
That same year, Michael Franklin, Jonathan Schooler and their colleagues, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, saw that when the mind went off to something the person found interesting, their mood was better even than when they were on the task. The same group has found that a good part of those thoughts look to the future and serve to plan, and that letting the mind wander while doing something simple helps to find new ideas for a problem that had been left half solved.
Letting the mind go, then, is not a failing. The question is where it goes and whether that leaves you better or worse.
Poerio’s study found something else that helps us understand ourselves: low mood pushed the mind towards the worries of the moment and towards the past. That is why, in a bad patch, it is harder to be in what you are doing. It is not a lack of willpower: the mind goes to what worries it.
If those thoughts keep coming back the same, and above all when you go to bed, it may help to read about night-time worries.
The first thing that comes to mind is to try not to think, and it works badly. In 1987, Daniel Wegner asked some volunteers not to think about a white bear for five minutes and to ring a little bell every time it came into their heads. They did not manage it, and afterwards they thought about the bear more than those who had not had to avoid it. A review of many later studies confirmed that this rebound exists, although its size is small or moderate.
Wegner himself saw something useful: for those who were given a specific thought to focus on, the bear came back less afterwards. In other words, rather than throwing out what comes, it helps to give your attention somewhere to go: what you hear, what you touch, what is in front of you.
This is the basis of mindfulness practice: noticing that you have drifted away and coming back, without scolding yourself. In 2013, Michael Mrazek and his colleagues, also of Santa Barbara, put it to the test in a trial with participants assigned at random. A two-week mindfulness course reduced distracting thoughts and improved reading comprehension and working memory.
If worries stop you being present in anything for weeks, or your mood is low almost every day, talk to your doctor.
Reading a star and choosing a phrase to keep it company asks you to be there, even if only for a minute. And if today you have had a moment of being truly present, you can keep it on a star with “What I’m grateful for”.