Intriguing new research from Harvard has used trendy technology to learn that daydreaming makes people unhappy. “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” says Matthew A. Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard—who was happy to focus on sharing the results of his research when I called him recently.
In 2009, Killingsworth and his colleagues launched an iPhone Web application, “Track Your Happiness” (http://www.TrackYourHappiness.org/), to study the causes of happiness in everyday life. At random intervals, they contacted 2,250 volunteers (average age 34) to see what they were doing at that moment… what they were thinking about (specifically, whether they were thinking about their current activity or something else)… and how happy they were (on a scale of 0 to 100).
Killingsworth and his team were surprised to discover that people spent nearly half their time (47%) daydreaming or thinking about things other than what they were doing. In an analysis of 250,000 responses, they also found that…
The rate of mind wandering was clearly lower during more enjoyable activities, but whatever people did—whether it was having sex or commuting—they were happier when focused on the matter at hand rather than thinking about something else. The psychologists found that if someone’s mind wandered away from the task at hand, a short time later (say, 15 minutes) he/she was apt to report being less happy. Crunching the numbers further, the investigators estimated that mind-wandering status was responsible for nearly 11% of a person’s state of happiness, and the nature of the current activity for only 4.6%.
These findings were published in the November 12, 2010, issue of the journal Science.
Mind wandering is an excellent predictor of people’s happiness, says Killingsworth—in the vast majority of cases (outside of sex), it was a better indicator than the activity they were engaged in. Given this conclusion, I asked him what advice he had for my readers. Is this, in simplest terms, a wake-up call that if you want to be as happy as you can be, you really should try to “live in the moment?” The study results suggest that this is the case, Killingsworth replied, but more research is needed to know for sure and to know how best to do so. In the meantime, the study is continuing. More than 5,000 people are now using the researchers’ iPhone Web app, and anyone with an iPhone can participate.