Feeling Meh? Boost Your Happiness Levels by Being More Focused
A wandering mind is an unhappy mind
Confession. I get distracted way more than I would like. Heck, it took me several attempts to finish this article. And as it turns out, I’m not alone. Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert experience it too. Are we crazy, they wondered, or is it just very difficult to be present constantly? And what effect does mind wandering have on our wellbeing
We’re distracted half of our lives
To find out how often mental wandering occurs and what it does to our happiness levels, the researchers developed an app. At random times, they sent push notifications to 2,250 volunteer participants who then dropped everything to answer three questions:
- What are you doing?
- Are you present? Are you focused on what you are doing?
- How happy are you right now, on a scale of 1 to 10?
The results were astonishing. Not one respondent was distracted less than 30% of the time. On average, respondents thought about something other than what they were doing 46.9% of the time. Loosely translated: we are distracted almost half of our time! Rather than focusing on the present, we’re daydreaming, making to-do lists…
