A wandering mind is a lonely mind

runaway trains

Our brain’s evolved to constantly contemplate the past and plan for the future. This allows us to learn, reason, and navigate the complex and ever-changing world.

However this ability comes at an underrated cost: mind wandering.

The paper ‘A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind’ sampled 2250 adults throughout their day using their phones and asked three things:

• What are you doing right now?

• How happy are you right now?

• Are you thinking about something other than what you are currently doing?

The results were:

• People’s minds were wandering in 46.9% of samples.

• People were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were present.

• Even when minds wandered to pleasant topics, people were not happier than when they were focused on what they were currently doing.

What’s interesting is that what people were thinking about predicted happiness better than what they were doing.

If one’s attention and focus matter more than the activity for happiness, the modern ‘attention economy’ is likely a significant factor contributing to the current loneliness epidemic. Unfortunately we’ve built a world that monetises the very thing we need to be happy.