A large-scale research study into mind wandering during everyday activities and happiness levels has shown that
– Mind wandering occurred 46.9% of the time, regardless of what activity people were engaged in.
– People were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not (even during the least enjoyable activities).
– What people were thinking was a better
predictor of their happiness than what they were doing.
What conclusions can we draw from this? Here are mine:
1. Our minds wander almost half of the time during any activity and if we want to stay focused on the task at hand we need to cultivate our attention skills.
2. Being able to focus is not just important for productivity and personal effectiveness but integral to our mental wellbeing.
3. Happiness is less a function of external situations or activities but a mental achievement: it’s not what happens to us that matters most but how we think about it.
Through meditation we learn how to relate differently not only to external reality but also to the very content of our minds. We learn to focus our attention and fully inhabit our lives, the good, the bad and the ugly. We can thus start cultivating what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, a wellbeing that is not contingent upon pleasant experiences but is sustainable throughout the course of our lives.
