Why Letting Your Mind Wander Could Boost Happiness

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After a wave of research and articles arguing that mindfulness is important to mental health and happiness, it may seem like the issue is decided. It may feel like any time your mind wanders away from what you’re doing at the moment, you need to snap your attention back to give it a present focus. Even if what you’re doing isn’t particularly pleasant or engaging, focus on it anyway.

However, aren’t there times when you take pleasure in a little bit of mental time travel? Maybe you are in the middle of a physically demanding but mentally unchallenging workout. Some random thought floats into your head, and you’re reliving one of your happiest days from your high school years. Before you know it, the workout is over, and you’re feeling recharged and ready to move on to the rest of your day.

Because focusing on the past or future is sometimes painted in a bad light, this may seem like a paradoxical way to boost your mood. But is it?

Mind-Wandering vs. Mindfulness

According to University of California Santa Barbara’s Madeleine Gross and colleagues (2024), even though some mind wandering can lead to you dwelling on happier times in the past, “there is a prevalent view that, on average, one’s mood is more negative when mind wandering as compared to a present-focused state.” This prevalent view includes the maxim: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

One big problem with this apparently definitive statement is that the research on which it was based, note Gross et al., only measured emotion while participants were being mindless, not mindful. The findings leave open the possibility that people are already in a worse mood when they start to mind wander, not that the lack of mindfulness causes them to feel sad. In other words, the wandering mind may wander because it is unhappy.

Returning to the example of your mindless workout, although in this instance your thoughts turned to happier times, if someone measured your mood before and after, you most likely would have shown a boost from boredom to positivity. This would support the idea that escaping from a situation that is less than enthralling to one that is more entertaining could have some adaptive value.

Testing the Emotion to Mind-Wandering Link

So, you can engage in mind-wandering for more than one reason. Gross and her coauthors believed that the true test of the emotional consequences of mind-wandering would depend on the nature of the person’s thoughts. To investigate this simple idea, the UCSB research team designed a study using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to track their college student participants six times a day for seven days. Although the average age of the sample was 21, they did range from 18 to 44, allowing for age analyses to be conducted. This became important in looking at the results.

At each prompt, participants reported on what they were doing (to a prompt asking them to be honest) and rated their momentary experience according to pre-defined categories. See how you would rate yourself right now using these indexes:

• Attention state: present vs. mind-wandering
• Mood: very bad to very good on a 7-point scale
• Thought nature: Inner speech (talking to yourself) of inner experience (not talking to yourself), and whether the inner speech was about bodily sensations, emotions, environment, music/sounds, visual imagery, another person, blank mind, or “other.”
• Clarity: not very clear to very clear on a 7-point scale
• Thought valence: very negative to very positive on a 7-point scale
• Interestingness: not at all to very interesting on a 7-point scale

To categorize their activities, participants reported whether what they were doing was social, physical, restful, task-oriented (household chore), or cognitive (studying, homework, solving puzzles, in class).

It may seem like an intense process to be a participant in this study and, indeed, the majority of the sample actually did drop out before the week was up, and some didn’t take it seriously. The 337 who were left might, therefore, differ in some systematic way from the almost equal number who dropped.

The main statistical analysis was a test of the model in which attention state served to predict thought valence which, in turn, would predict mood. Consistent with the maxim that mind-wandering is associated with a more negative mood, the findings showed that this was accounted for by the valence of the thoughts themselves.

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These relationships were more pronounced in the older participants in the study (i.e. those over 30). It's possible that greater life experiences somehow are more likely to draw people into thinking about something other than what they’re doing, or maybe older college students are just busier than younger ones and have more on their minds. You might be able to relate to this idea if, when you looked at the experience rating categories above, your own mind drifted off to what else you should be doing at the moment.

The findings also showed that the ratings of interestingness and clarity modified the role of attention state in mood. This supports prior research showing that “off-task thoughts rated as more interesting during daily life are associated with a better mood." When you’re bored, as in going through your daily exercise routine, a return to interesting times may not be such a bad idea.

Making Mind-Wandering Work for You

Although the UCSB study supports the idea that a wandering mind may be an unhappy one, it seems that this is only true if the wandering mind drifts off to unpleasant thoughts. The remedy would not be to focus on the present, the authors believe, but to focus on the nature of those thoughts. As is emphasized in cognitive-behavioral therapy, changing your thoughts can change your mood.

It's the nature of the thoughts, not the mind-wandering, that seems to be the culprit here. Indeed, as the authors further go on to suggest from prior research, mind-wandering can offer the benefits of entertainment, feelings of social bond and connection, emotional respite, and creative thinking. Listening to positive music can be one way of stimulating this travel through your thoughts.

To sum up, the next time you catch yourself focusing on something other than your present experience, don’t assume you need to throw yourself into the details of the moment itself. If your thoughts make you happy, there’s no reason not to indulge in them, even for the momentary diversion they provide.

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