Where is my mind?

You sitting at your desk , supposedly busy with an important project but your mind is elsewhere, you picturing your next holiday staying at the beach, enjoying the summer sun and sipping cocktails .
Sounds familiar?
 
About 47% of our waking hours are spent thinking about something else besides what they are busy with.¹ 
The average person spends up to one third of their life engaging in thoughts that are not related to the task at hand².

Despite being physically confined to the present, it has been estimated that humans spend up to half of their waking lives in an introspective state decoupled from the external environment, inhabiting an ‘internal world’ which transcends time and space (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010).³
We either mind wandering to the past or the future, or think creative or wishful thoughts when doing something.

What is mind wandering?

Mind-wandering (sometimes referred to as task unrelated thought, or, colloquially, autopilot) is the experience of thoughts not remaining on a single topic for a long period of time, particularly when people are engaged in an attention-demanding task.⁴

People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. This is according to, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University^5:

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,”

Killingsworth and Gilbert

“The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Killingsworth and Gilbert

Mind-wandering is a common everyday experience in which attention becomes disengaged from the immediate external environment and focused on internal trains of thought. In our current times we live in it is not easy to stay focused. There is always something coming up that we need to prepare for or anticipate, and our lives are so well-documented that it has never been easier to get lost in the past.

We mind wander all the time; we think about everything else other that what we are doing in a specific point in time. We are normally in a past experience or thinking about the foreseeable future and never really in the moment because of Mind Wandering.

Given the fast pace and hectic schedules most of us keep, a base level of anxiety, stress, and unhappiness is the new norm especially in the challenging times we face. You may not even notice it, but this tendency to get sucked into the past & the future, while living inside your head, can leave you worn out and feeling out of touch with yourself and lead to unhappiness.

What happens in the brain when we mind wander ?

It is commonly assumed that the default mode network is known to be involved during mind-wandering. The default mode network is active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest because experiences such as mind-wandering and daydreaming are common in this state⁶. It is also active when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future⁷ However, recent studies show that signals in the default mode network provide information regarding patterns of detailed experience in active tasks states⁸.

Benefits of mind wandering

But is it all that bad? Researchers have also found a relationship between creative thinking and mind wandering. In many situations, minds that wander more are better at creative thought than those that maintain more unerring focus.

In one study⁹, researchers pinged participants on a regular basis to see what they were doing, whether or not their minds were wandering, and how they were feeling. In an earlier experiment¹⁰, people tended to be in a negative mood when they were mind-wandering. But when researchers examined the content of people’s thoughts during mind-wandering, they found an interesting caveat: If participants’ minds were engaged in interesting, off-task musings, their moods became more positive rather than more negative.

Another study¹¹, researchers concluded that feeling sad or being in a bad mood tended to lead to unhappy mind-wandering, but that mind-wandering itself didn’t lead to later bad moods. Earlier experiments may have conflated mind-wandering with rumination—an unhealthy preoccupation with past failures that is tied to depression.

As a more recent study found, mind-wandering improved people’s creativity above and beyond the positive effects of their reading ability or fluid intelligence, the general ability to solve problems or puzzles¹².  

As mentioned, mind-wandering seems to involve the default network of the brain, which is known to be active when we are not engaged directly in tasks and is also related to creativity^13.

So mind wandering is not all that bad, but how can you be more focused?

Be in the here and now

During the upcoming week , notice when you are busy with a task and when your mind wanders, when you notice your mind wandering , practice on stopping, bringing your awareness to the present moment , take a breath in and then out , focus your attention to the sounds around you, focus your senses back to the here and now, and focus back to what you are busy with and continue again. Practice doing this throughout the day and notice when your thoughts wander and work on bringing yourself back again to the present moment by repeating the simple steps above. Journal your experiences, when your mind did wander, where you thinking about something pleasant or something unpleasant or where you focused on your task you were busy with.

How can you be more focused & be more mindful?