Mind Wandering
A “cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost”?
Every single one of us does it and it pretty much does what it says on the tin: it’s when our minds wander from the present moment onto other things.
Our ability to do this has helped us to survive and thrive as a species. It allows us to think about the past, the future and to imagine hypothetical scenarios.
We know that we do this: we replay events from before, we plan or worry about the future and we daydream, imagining fictional scenarios e.g. thinking of a really witty reply we should’ve used and how great that would’ve been.
While we know we ‘wander’ we might not realise - I definitely didn’t - 1. how much we do this and 2. how much it impacts our wellbeing.
Studies suggest that our minds wander A LOT. One study by Killingsworth and Gilbert - link at the bottom of the article - found our minds wander about 47% of the time. Forty. Seven. Percent.
This means we spend around half our lives not paying proper attention to what we’re doing, not being present and not properly experiencing our lives. This is wild. The impact this seems to have on our wellbeing is even wilder…
Low mood is known to cause mind wandering. Seems logical. It’s classic escapism. If you feel like shit, wouldn’t it be better to think about something else? This seems to be our brains’ solution. Well, apparently not. Killingsworth and Gilbert found that mind wandering seems to be the cause, not the consequence, of low mood.
This isn’t surprising when the mind is wandering onto negative or unpleasant topics; like ruminating on the past or worrying about the future. I don’t think anyone would expect that replaying a painful experience or imagining something awful happening would make you feel good, despite how irresistible it seems to be to do this.
What is surprising is that their study also found that when our minds wander onto neutral topics, this also negatively impacts our mood - even when the activity we’re doing isn’t pleasant or enjoyable. So thinking about what to have for dinner during Alan’s* boring presentation apparently makes you feel worse than if you were to pay poor Alan some attention.
What’s even more surprising is that they found that when our minds wander off to think about pleasant things, this does nothing to improve our mood compared to just remaining present and focusing on the task at hand. Again, this was the case even when the task was unpleasant.
Some specific mind wandering does make us feel good and can have positive effects on our mood - such as thinking about an exciting upcoming event or holiday, or thinking about the day we’ve just had as part of a gratitude practice. In addition, newer studies, such as Baird et al.’s 2015 research, suggest that mind wandering might help creativity. However these examples only examine short periods of mind wandering. Given that it seems to be a chronic tendency of ours, the overall impact on our wellbeing doesn’t look good.
It seems that overall, our brains’ subconscious tendency to go elsewhere in our day-to-day lives at best, does nothing to make us feel better, and at worst, makes us feel worse; even when we feel low, or are doing something unpleasant.
So it makes sense that learning to limit our mind wandering, through practices like mindfulness and meditation, seems to improve wellbeing.
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*No offence to any Alans, it’s the first name that came to mind
Killingsworth & Gilbert’s 2010 study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1192439
Baird et al’s 2015 study on creativity: www.researchgate.net/publication/230786381_Inspired_by_Distraction_Mind_Wandering_Facilitates_Creative_Incubation
Above image is taken from Killingsworth & Gilbert’s 2010 study.