How is mind wandering affecting us?

Know this moment when you are in a meeting or class and your brain decides "OK I am shutting down" and you start losing your focus and getting your mind wandering? Yeah, we've all been there, there is an interesting study that shows how mind wandering really affects us.

About the study

In November 2010, A study was published by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert aimed to check in what activities people's minds wandered and how it affected their happiness [1].

They took 5,000 participants and had an app downloaded on their phones, every time the app made a notification the participants needed to write what they were doing and if they thought about something during the activity. They recorded more than 250,000 answers!!!

The results

After analyzing the results, the researchers came to 3 conclusions:

First- people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not: people who let their minds wander experienced less pleasure during every activity they did.

Second- people’s minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing: almost half of the answers included mind wandering and this was a surprising result because it was the first research that had that large statistic for mind wandering.

Third- what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were doing: How amazing is that?! If a person did something that he hated and thought a pleasant thought his overall happiness increased, think about activities can you use this trick to make them more joyful?

To summarize

People are mind wandering a lot, and they can be unhappy because of that, but there is one loophole: to think happy thoughts, that's the only way mind wandering can be fan and beneficial