Is it bad that my mind wanders?
· Source: Killingsworth & Gilbert, Science, 2010
Saturday morning, the kitchen is full of sun, and you’re cutting a lemon for tea. Your hands are in the kitchen, but your head is not. It has already gone to Monday’s meeting, back to something your sister said in June, and on to whether you locked the bike. Then the knife slips a little, and you’re back at the counter with no idea where the last five minutes went.
It happens on the bus, in the shower, halfway down a page you then have to read again. Sooner or later most people wonder whether this is a problem. Is a mind that keeps leaving the room a sign that something is off?
How the researchers caught thoughts as they happened
Asking people later how often their minds wander doesn’t work well, because nobody remembers. So Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert asked in the moment. They built a web app for the iPhone that contacted volunteers at random times while they were awake and asked three short questions.
How are you feeling right now, on a scale from very bad to very good? What are you doing right now, chosen from a list of 22 activities? And are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing? If the answer was yes, people said whether the thought was pleasant, neutral or unpleasant.
The published paper analysed answers from 2250 adults. Each person answered several times, on ordinary days, in the middle of whatever they happened to be doing.
Almost half the time, somewhere else
The first finding is the one most people remember. Minds wandered in 46.9% of the samples. That’s close to half of waking life spent thinking about something other than what’s in front of you.
It also wasn’t limited to boring moments. During every activity on the list but one, people’s minds wandered in at least 30% of the samples. The researchers found that what people were doing had only a modest effect on whether their minds drifted.
So if your thoughts slip away while you cut a lemon, you’re in very ordinary company. Going by this study, a mind that wanders is a normal human mind.
Less happy while away, with one exception
The second finding is less comfortable. On average, people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they weren’t, and that held during all of the activities, including the least enjoyable ones.
The details matter, though. Minds went to pleasant topics more often than to unpleasant ones: 42.5% of the samples against 26.5%, with 31% neutral. When people drifted to something pleasant, they were no happier than when they stayed with what they were doing, but no less happy either. The dip in mood came with neutral topics and, most of all, with unpleasant ones.
That’s a useful correction to the headline. The trouble wasn’t daydreaming as such. A wandering mind looked costly mostly when it went somewhere gloomy or flat.
A pleasant daydream did as well as staying present. The unpleasant ones were the problem.
Which came first?
It’s tempting to read all this as “wandering makes you unhappy”. This was not an experiment, though. Nobody was told to let their mind wander. The researchers observed people as they went about their days and saw that the two went together, so the finding is a link.
The authors went one step further. They compared each answer with the ones just before and after it, and wrote that this timing “strongly suggested” wandering was generally the cause of the unhappiness rather than only its result. In the same paper, they point out that bad moods are known to set minds wandering. It’s fair to say the timing points one way, and also fair to say the question isn’t closed.
One more thing to keep in mind is who took part. These were volunteers who signed up through a website, using their own iPhones. That’s a large and varied group, but not a random slice of everyone.
What you think about, more than what you do
The third finding is perhaps the most interesting for everyday life. What people were thinking predicted their happiness better than what they were doing. The kind of activity explained 4.6% of the ups and downs in a person’s happiness from moment to moment, and mind wandering explained 10.8%.
Put simply, the same walk to the shop can feel quite different depending on where your head is during it. We usually try to feel better by changing what we’re doing. This study suggests it’s at least as worth noticing where our thoughts went while we did it.
A wandering mind has its uses
Before deciding that drifting is always bad, it helps to look at a different kind of study. Baird and colleagues gave people creative problems from a test called the Unusual Uses Task, and then a break before they tried the same problems again.
People who spent the break on an easy task, one that left plenty of room for the mind to wander, did substantially better on the problems they had already seen than people who did a demanding task, rested or had no break at all. The easy task went with more mind wandering, not with more deliberate thinking about the problems.
So there’s a time and place for it. A wandering mind on a slow walk may turn up an idea. The same mind drifting to an old argument while you cut lemons mostly just costs you the morning.
Noticing where it went
What follows is our suggestion, not something these studies tested. The goal isn’t to stop your mind from wandering. That would be fighting half of your waking life. It’s to notice where it goes, especially when it keeps going somewhere unpleasant.
When you catch yourself drifting, a short question helps: is this pleasant, neutral or unpleasant? That’s the same question the participants answered. If it’s a good memory or a plan you’re looking forward to, there’s no need to pull back. If it’s the old argument for the third time today, you can bring your attention back to the knife, the lemon, the smell of the tea.
The evening is a good time to look back. Here is an invented example. Tom thinks over his Sunday and picks the best moment: an hour fixing a shelf with his daughter. He asks himself what he was doing and where his head was. It was right there, on the screws and the level and her bad jokes. The worst moment of the day was a quiet walk home, when his mind went to work again.
He doesn’t analyse it further. He simply notices which moments he was present for, and which ones his head spent somewhere else.
When it’s more than ordinary drifting
Everyone’s mind wanders, and this study shows how normal that is. It’s a different matter when you can’t keep your attention on anything for long enough to work, read or follow a conversation, and this has been true for months or since childhood. The same goes for when your thoughts keep going to the same dark place and your mood stays low for weeks.
In those cases, talk to a doctor or a psychologist. Problems with attention and long spells of low mood are both things they can assess properly. Evening notes about where your mind went can be handy to bring along, but they’re a record, not a diagnosis.
Try it tonight
- Tonight, recall the best moment of your day.
- Say what you were doing then, and whether your mind was there or somewhere else.
- Do the same for one moment your thoughts went somewhere unpleasant, and leave it at that.
Say your best moment out loud in Halflight before bed. It writes it down under today’s date, so over a few weeks you can see which moments you were really there for.