# A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind #### (2010) Matthew A. Killingsworth, Daniel T. Gilbert Link:: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1192439 Related:: Tags:: #📜 ### Abstract 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. # Summary [[When we aren't actively attending to something the mind defaults to mind wandering]] [[Three ways how you mind wandering during an activity determines how you feel]] <h1>Annotations (11/18/2022, 8:39:12 AM)</h1> “U nlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. Indeed, “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation (1–3)” (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010, pp. -1) “To find out how often people’smindswander, what topics they wander to, and how those wanderings affect their happiness, we analyzed samples from 2250 adults (58.8% male, 73.9% residing in the United States, mean age of 34 years) who were randomly assigned to answer a happiness question (“How are you feeling right now?”)answeredona continuous sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100), an activity question (“What are you doing right now?”) answered by endorsing one or more of 22 activities adapted from the day reconstruction method (10, 11), and a mind-wandering question (“Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?”)answered with one of four options: no; yes, something pleasant; yes, something neutral; or yes, something unpleasant.” (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010, pp. -1) “Surprisingly, the nature of people’s activities had only a modest impact on whether their minds wandered and had almost no impact on the pleasantness of the topics to which their minds wandered” (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010, pp. -1) I wonder why the nature of the activity would have almost no impact on what the mind wandered to because the context and state that memories are encoded in plays a massive role in when they will come back up again. “Second, multilevel regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not [slope (b)=–8.79, P &lt; 0.001], and this was true during all activities, including the least enjoyable. Although people’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity (b = –0.52, not significant) and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics (b = –7.2, P &lt; 0.001) or unpleasant topics (b = –23.9, P &lt; 0.001) than about their current activity (Fig. 1, bottom)” (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010, pp. -1) “Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering (13), time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in our sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (12).” (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010, pp. -1) “Third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing. The nature of people’s activities explained 4.6% of the within-person variance in happiness and 3.2% of the between-person variance in happiness, but mind wandering explained 10.8% of within-person variance in happiness and 17.7% of between-person variance in happiness. The variance explained by mind wandering was largely independent of the variance explained by the nature of activities, suggesting that the two were independent influences on happiness.” (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010, pp. -1) In other words the nature of how you are thinking during an activity plays a larger role in how you enjoy the activity than the activity itself. This could give evidence for why people find it easier to enjoy work more than leisure. It's harder to mind wander while doing it as you have to be extremely focused.