When Your Mind Drifts, Your Happiness Drops

To be happy, be here now. It’s not just for Sanskrit-chanting hippies anymore — science says so.

I love this new finding from Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness and deliverer of a really fun TED talk), published in Science magazine. It’s simple, powerful, and immediately useful in everyday life. And it affirms something that I deeply believe to be true (isn’t it nice when science has your back?).

Plus, Killingsworth and Gilbert get points for writing one of the shortest, clearest scientific abstracts I’ve ever seen:

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

John Tierney describes the study in detail in the New York Times. The researchers got more than 2,200 people around the world to download an iPhone app, trackyourhappiness. Then they pinged them at random intervals to ask what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how they were feeling.

A quarter-million responses later, Tierney writes, they crunched the numbers and determined that “whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.” Especially if their minds were wandering to unpleasant places. The kicker: even those daydreaming about pleasant topics were not quite as happy as those whose minds were in the moment.

This rings incredibly true to me. I can over-think, over-analyze and worry with the best of ‘em. My mind is constantly moving. Yet in the past few years as I’ve learned the practices of meditation and yoga, I’ve found what peace can come with quieting what yogis call “the monkey mind.”

Of course, my mind is still scratching fleas, swinging from branches and throwing bananas most of the time. I have a long way to go. But the more I practice, the more often I can catch the monkey in the act and calm him down.

(Musical interlude: check out this clip from Willy Porter’s song Be Here Now. Then you can contemplate the present to a nice little bass groove.)

Just how often do our minds wander? It depends what we’re doing. We’re at our most focused when having sex. (Good sex, I would add. Ahem.) Here’s Tierney’s summary of what Killingsworth and Gilbert found:

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

Across all the responses, minds were wandering 47 percent of the time.

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize that half the people aren’t really there,” Gilbert told Tierney.

To totally sink their shot, the researchers even found evidence that drifting thoughts cause unhappiness, not just accompany it. Mind-wandering generally preceded unhappiness for their study participants — but not the other way around. Over several months, more-frequent mind wanderers were less happy than others.

Gilbert summed it up elegantly. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, he said, “The heart goes where the head takes it.”

Meditation Tips From One Beginner to Another

I’m taking this moment to share a little tip sheet that I wrote on meditation last year that was only partially published. Here you go — I hope it’s useful.

Like many of you probably are, I’m a thinker. My mind normally runs around like a rambunctious puppy at a dog park, chasing after every ball that sails through the air. A thought (“I wonder if I said the right thing in that staff meeting.”) pops into my head, and I scamper after it, pursue it to the far end of the field, until another thought (“What am I going to have for dinner?”) pops up and instantly has me bounding off in another direction.

Because of this, I’ve always assumed I’d be no good at meditation. But over the past few years, I’ve learned that it’s totally feasible and helpful, even for thinkers like me. Through mediation, I teach my mind to calmly sit, stay, and let each of those balls bounce away.

After meditating, my mind moves more slowly, yet purposefully. My thoughts linger longer wherever they happen to land. I’m acutely aware of my surroundings. I notice posters I’ve walked by dozens of times and never really seen. I hear the sound of my feet meeting the ground and notice the change when I step from pavement onto wood. I can focus on my writing with little effort.

The feeling might last 30 minutes or two hours, depending on the demands of the day. I hope that, the more I do it, the more I’ll be able to carry that serenity into other hours.

I’m not an expert, just a student. But I can share what I’ve learned. Take
15 minutes and try this:

1. Sit comfortably in a quiet place. You can sit cross-legged on the floor, sit on a pillow, kneel, or sit on a chair — whatever you prefer, as long as the position allows you to keep your back, neck and head straight and tall.

2. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Notice the faint breeze in your nostrils as you inhale, the warm air across your lips as you exhale. If you like, pick a spot in your chest, neck, back or belly, and pay attention to how it moves with each breath.

3. Focus on your breathing. When you find your mind chasing a thought, gently nudge it back to your breathing. Again. And again. You can try labeling your thoughts as you let them go: past, future, worry, planning. It’s interesting to see which themes arise most often.

4. Forgive your mind for struggling. This kind of concentration is hard. The idea is not to do it perfectly, but to keep trying and training yourself to do it better. Remember: meditation is called a practice for a reason.