I recently came across a TED talk by Matt Killingsworth on the topic of happiness and mind-wandering. This led me to his research. You can go check out his research in detail – “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind (reference section below). He basically created an online app to track happiness and gathered data in the process and some of his findings is the basis of this blog post. He concludes his published article with the finding – “…a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
Mind wandering is something so fundamental to us that often times we don’t even know when it is happening, that we were completely lost in our own pool of random thoughts. This reminds of something I learnt in school and has stayed with me forever. In the Mahabharata a conversation takes place between Yaksha, a crane and Yudhishtira (obviously you can google the story about the encounter as it occurs in the Mahabharata). To cut a long story short, Yaksha, the crane asks Yudhishtira to answer its questions before he could drink water from the beautiful lake that the crane was at.
The Yaksha asked, “What is faster than the wind?”
Yudhishthira answered, “the mind is faster than the wind.”
Our minds can wander all over the world while we are just sitting at our desks at work, trying to focus on the whatever it is we are doing. Our minds consciously and unconsciously wander around, while doing something, unfortunately for us as our minds conveniently do their context switching, they also do bring us back to reality.
Killingsworth’s findings suggest that the kind of thoughts that people were thinking about as their minds wandered from their present reality, good or bad, did not make much of a difference as far as causing unhappiness goes. Meaning I could be watching TV right now and let me mind wander to some pleasant thought or to an unpleasant thought, regardless overall the mind wandering still would leave me unhappy. I guess reality is always harsher than our imaginative thoughts and no matter what unfortunately at some point we do have to get back to reality, leaving us unhappy. Almost feels like we were lost in our wonderland and someone just slapped us across our face and brought us back to the present moment. The emotional cost for cognitively taking our mind elsewhere away from what is currently happening could be a loss of happiness. So I guess at the end of the day, staying grounded in reality is better than letting your mind wander, after all.
So if mind wandering leads to unhappiness, what do we do about it? As I wrote that sentence, my mind wandered straight to mindfulness. The concept of Mindfulness comes from Buddhism, but in modern western society, mindfulness is more or less becoming a very commonplace word even without fully understanding what it is in actuality as defined by Buddha centuries back. So what is mindfulness for a lay man ? Thich Nhat Hanh states, “I define mindfulness as the practice of being -fully present and alive, body and mind united.” In other words – Being fully in the present-moment after present-moment. I would never discount cultivating mindfulness through meditation and serious practice, yet in my humble opinion, it is something we should constantly be striving for even in little things that we do. For instance as I was writing this post, my monkey mind kept trying to wander all over, but I made a conscious effort to just bring it back to my present reality, my keyboard and wordpress.com. Any cue can automatically bring our minds back to the present moment, but oftentimes we let our minds wander for extended periods of time and mindfulness helps us get back to the present moment without that slap across the face feeling.
Talking about mindfulness in a single paragraph is a mighty injustice to the whole concept and there are tons of books, different buddhist practices, meditation techniques, retreats dedicated to vipassana and the list goes on all which are dedicated to try to teach us mindfulness. Personally for me, though it is not easy, but mindfulness starts by consciously bringing myself back to reality every time it goes wandering and noticing and not criticizing my mind for wandering, for that is the nature of our minds. For instance while eating, our mind may wander somewhere, we can stay grounded by trying to focus on the food itself, the flavors, the taste, the smell etc so we could mindfully enjoy the food and feel good. While I can’t promise that mindfulness will bring you a sudden miraculous joy, but it certainly can help you in handling unhappiness and happiness all the same. With the right practice mindfulness will help you appreciate happiness (and unhappiness too) and stay grounded in the reality that is now, this moment, which is why it is called –present.
Reference
Killingsworth, Matthew. A., & Gilbert, Daniel. T. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science, 330(12), 932.
