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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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We spend billions of dollars each year looking for happiness, hoping it might be bought, consumed, found, or flown to. Other, more contemplative cultures and traditions assure us that this is a waste of time (not to mention money). ‘Be present’ they urge. Live in the moment, and there you’ll find true contentment.
Sure enough, our most fulfilling experiences are typically those that engage us body and mind, and are unsullied by worry or regret. In these cases, a relationship between focus and happiness is easy to spot. But does this relationship hold in general, even for simple, everyday activities? Is a focused mind a happy mind? Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert decided to find out.
In a recent study published in Science, Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered that an unnervingly large fraction of our thoughts - almost half - are not related to what we’re doing. Surprisingly, we tended to be elsewhere even for casual and presumably enjoyable activities, like watching TV or having a conversation. While you might hope all this mental wandering is taking us to happier places, the data say otherwise. Just like the wise traditions teach, we’re happiest when thought and action are aligned, even if they’re only aligned to wash dishes.
The ingredients of simple, everyday happiness are tough to study in the lab, and aren’t easily measured with a standard experimental battery of forced choices, eye-tracking, and questionnaires. Day to day happiness is simply too fleeting. To really study it’s causes, you need to catch people in the act of feeling good or feeling bad in real-world settings.
To do this, the researchers used a somewhat unconventional, but powerful, technique known as experience sampling. The idea behind it is simple. Interrupt people at unpredictable intervals and ask them what they’re doing, and what’s on their minds. If you do this many times a day for many days, you can start to assemble a kind of quantitative existential portrait of someone. Do this for many people, and you can find larger patterns and tendencies in human thought and behavior, allowing you to correlate moments of happiness with particular kinds of thought and action.
To sample our inner lives, the team developed an iPhone app that periodically surveyed people’s thoughts and activities. At random times throughout the day, a participant’s iPhone would chime, and present him with a brief questionnaire that asked how happy he was (on a scale from 1-100), what he was doing, and if he was thinking about what he was doing. If subjects were indeed thinking of something else, they reported whether that something else was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Responses to the questions were standardized, which allowed them to be neatly summarized in a database that tracked the collective moods, actions, and musings of about 5000 total participants (a subset of 2250 people was used in the present study).
In addition to awakening us to just how much our minds wander, the study clearly showed that we’re happiest when thinking about what we’re doing. Although imagining pleasant alternatives was naturally preferable to imagining unpleasant ones, the happiest scenario was to not be imagining at all. A person who is ironing a shirt and thinking about ironing is happier than a person who is ironing and thinking about a sunny getaway.
What about the kinds of activities we do, though? Surely, the hard-partiers and world travelers among us are happier than the quiet ones who stay at home and tuck in early? Not necessarily. According to the data from the Harvard group’s study, the particular way you spend your day doesn’t tell much about how happy you are. Mental presence - the matching of thought to action - is a much better predictor of happiness.
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11 Comments
Add CommentRead this on the NYTimes bowt three weeks ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article assumes that happiness comes as a RESULT OF ones level of mental engagement. But what if the mind disengages as a RESULT OF already being unhappy? The causal relationship here is unclear, and can go both ways.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps it would be better to steer clear of implying that if one focuses harder on the dull tasks of their lives, they will become happy, before evidence of such is actually found. Sure there is a correlation, but what is its nature?
Dopamine is the key.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis was on BOTH the NY Times and Sci Am last week. Not sure why they bothered to put it back up. Terrible study by the way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have to disagree with this article, from my own experience as well as the experience of many others I have spoken to on the subject, the wandering mind is a very peaceful, happy one. The problem with sampling on this subject is that distraction is an art and is satisfying only for the skilled practitioner. For those who have not made peace with these proclivities it can be frustrating and guilt ridden. For others who have come to terms with the nature of the wandering mind, distraction is a source to strength and inspiration.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think easterners have already discovered this truth and named it Zen. Individual mind is most in peace when it is fully aligned with its environment and loses its distinction between self and otherness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe most significant failing of this study is that it assumes that the participants answered honestly. If something keeps pestering me I will tend to eliminate it or if I can't eliminate it, deliberately mess with it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think Trelanea made a very good point about the causal relationship as well.
Definitely an important point. Correlation v. causation is always tough to determine, especially in a study like this. In the paper's defense, the authors did do a 'time lag' analysis to address this very issue. They found that the degree of mind wandering at a given time, T, strongly predicted the level of happiness measured at the next sampling, T+1, but not vice versa. That being said, it's tricky to draw too strong a conclusion since T and T+1 could be pretty far apart. Ideally, we'd want to know how someone felt immediately before and immediately after a given episode of mind wandering. There are probably some clever ways of doing this to resolve the issue. We'll have to wait and see.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOK, there is a correlation between wandering minds and unhappiness. But which is the cause and which is the effect? Could both be effects of other factors?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI kind of agree with you. I think thinking is an art. But I think, that thinking or having a "wandering mind" is not accepted very well in society as it usually doesn't lead to immediate results and affects production. I think that the negative consequences of the wandering mind is what leads to associating it with negative feelings about it. Being present leads to results and production with makes you feel good about it. I don't think the act of thinking itself is what makes u unhappy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a well written expose on the science of happiness. Many of the discoveries and fundamental principles found in this article can be found in the philosophy of Zen; namely acceptance of your current reality and living within the present. Whether we are mentally engaged, or not is not the issue, it is finding space within our reality and being grateful for it that matters most when searching for happiness, or what I prefer to call excitement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn article that I found the other day explains this space beautifully, "Find out what happiness is to you. Work out your true values in life (I'm not talking about what society expects of you) and then remind yourself everyday what they are. This will help you navigate the challenges of your daily life and stay focused; after-all as the great philosopher Seneca once said, "If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable."" Taken from: http://www.breathemagazine.com/article/self/happiness-in-a-nutshell-your-personal-happiness-project
What this Scientific American article talks about alignment, in my opinion this is representative of being grateful and conscious on every task that you perform. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this as it shows the correlations between science and mystery.