A new study by Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth, confirms something we've all suspected: most of us are mentally checked out a good portion of the time.
This study shows that just under half the time, 46.9 percent to be exact, people are doing what's called "mind wandering". They are not focused on the outside world or the task at hand, they are looking into their own thoughts. Unfortunately, the study of 2,250 people proposes, most of this activity doesn't make us feel happy.
The study was designed to find out what kind of activities people did throughout a day, and which made them happiest. Mind wandering was just one of 22 possible activities people could list.
Researchers found that people were at their happiest when making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation. They were least happy when resting, working, or using a home computer.
People reported that they mind wandered no less than 30 percent of the time, during everything except love making. And here's the kicker: people report being unhappy during mind wandering. Something that we do nearly half the time makes us unhappy! No wonder there are so many spiritual and religious traditions trying to implore people to live in the present.
Whether people are mind wandering turns out to be a better predictor of happiness than the actual activities people are engaged in. Think about just one implications of this finding: it explains why one person's hell on earth (say, filling in forms) can be another person's heaven, if they find themselves focused on the task.
This finding, for me, connects back to the whole idea of the narrative circuitry, versus the circuitry for direct experience, that I wrote about in an earlier post, called The Neuroscience of Mindfulness. I think it's worth re-posting some of this here, as it's so relevant.
Mindfulness and the brain
A 2007 study called Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference by Norman Farb at the University of Toronto, along with six other scientists, broke new ground in our understanding of mindfulness from a neuroscience perspective.
Farb and his colleagues worked out a way to study how human beings experience their own moment-to-moment experience. They discovered that people have two distinct ways of interacting with the world, using two different sets of networks. One network for experiencing your experience involves what is called the "study by Kirk Brown found that people high on a mindfulness scale were more aware of their unconscious processes. Additionally these people had more cognitive control, and a greater ability to shape what they do and what they say, than people lower on the mindfulness scale. If you're on the jetty in the breeze and you're someone with a good level or mindfulness, you are more likely to notice that you're missing a lovely day worrying about tonight's dinner, and focus your attention onto the warm sun instead. When you make this change in your attention, you change the functioning of your brain, and this can have a long-term impact on how your brain works too.
Why we need to keep being reminded about mindfulness
John Teasdale, recently retired, was one of the leading mindfulness researchers. Teasdale explains, "Mindfulness is a habit, it's something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort... it's a skill that can be learned. It's accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn't difficult. What's difficult is to remember to be mindful." I love this last statement. Mindfulness isn't difficult: the hard part is remembering to do it.
Practice, but you don't have to sit down and breathe.
So practicing mindfulness is important, as you're more likely to then remember to do it. The key to practicing mindfulness is just to practice focusing your attention onto a direct sense, and to do so often. It helps to use a rich stream of data. You can hold your attention to the feeling of your foot on the floor easier than the feeling of your little toe on the floor: there's more data to tap into. You can practice mindfulness while you are eating, walking, talking, doing just about anything, with the exception of drinking a beer in the sun, which works for only a limited time before your attention leaves to go and party (the neuroscience of all that will have to wait for another book.)
Building mindfulness doesn't mean you have to sit still and watch your breath. You can find a way that suits your lifestyle. My wife and I built a ten second ritual into the evening meal with my kids, which involves just stopping and noticing three small breaths together before we eat. The added bonus is it makes a great dinner taste even better.
What ever practice you do develop, practice it. The more mindful you become, the more of the world you perceive, and the better decisions you make as a result. On top of it all, being mindful means doing less mind wandering, which means you will feel happier as a result.
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Our time and attention are limited. Everything we do takes time and attention away from something else.
Is our time better spent focusing on our breathing or thinking about all the interesting things we want to share at the dinner table? Do we want to recall fun details others might enjoy or focus on our navels?
Many of us prefer living lives of exuberant zeal, enjoying fascinating ideas over emptying our minds of meaningful thought. For many, mindfulness means mindlessness.
It's how and where we focus our time and attention that ultimately determines our happiness. See: http://Creating-Happiness.com
I have developed a similar wristband for those who want to lose weight and keep it off. It is called WWASPD or What Would a Skinny Person Do? (available at wwaspd.com), and the basic idea is to be more mindful of the food choices you make throughout the day, and to chose more healthful options. Brian Wansink wrote a book called Mindless Eating that reports research he and others conducted on how people eat and the environmental mechanisms that affect them and he found that each day we make hundreds of decisions (mostly unconscious) about what to eat. Being more aware of these decisions is a good first step towards making better ones.
I am very much a novice on the overall concept of mindfulness, and articles like these are most helpful to "remind" me to focus on being more mindful throughout the day (as I notice the tactile feel of the keyboard and the metal my wrists are writing on... hey it's a start!).
http://www.mindfulnessinfo.com/exercise-2-the-raisin/
http://sandrahanksbenoiton.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/memo-to-self-its-a-day-live-it/
I'm a big opponent of mind control - to me, that's like investing my living experience in a dying outer person. My mind should have free reign to find its own way, and I should be a counselor to it in that effort.
One little quibble - people report that their minds wander EXCEPT during love making? If your mind isn't going to great places during love making, you're not making love.
I don't know if I am multi tasking or not. I am aware of any danger on the road in front of me but don't know where I am and will do a recheck every now and then. I find it relaxing.
It has very little to do with philosophy, which represents complexity of thought, with a strong language component.
Keep working mind scientists, you'll get it sooner or later.