Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Matt Killingsworth

American Happiness Researcher, Doctoral Student at Harvard University

"People are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they?re not. Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they?re mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn?t very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. Nope. As it turns out, people are less happy when they?re mind-wandering, no matter what they?re doing. For example, people don?t really like commuting to work very much. It?s one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet they are substantially happier when they?re focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. So how could this be happening? I think part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things, and they are enormously less happy when they do that, our worries, our anxieties, our regrets, and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral, they?re still considerably less happy than when they?re not mind-wandering at all. Even when they?re thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they?re actually just slightly less happy than when they aren?t mind-wandering. If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars, 20 dollars or one dollar. Right? You?d never want to play."

"A wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

"Even if you?re doing something that?s really enjoyable, that doesn?t seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander toward negative thoughts."

"Mind-wandering causes unhappiness, but all I?ve really shown you is that these two things are correlated. It?s possible that?s the case, but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy, then they mind-wander. Maybe that?s what?s really going on. How could we ever disentangle these two possibilities? We?re lucky in this data we have many responses from each person, and so we can look and see, does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness, or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering, to get some insight into the causal direction. As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy. In contrast, there?s no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. In other words, mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness."

"If you are like the average person, your mind wanders about 47% of the time you are awake."

"Mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous ? it pervades everything that we do."

"The data seem to suggest that people are still a little bit happier when they focus on the present, even when they are mind wandering about something nice."

"Trackyourhappiness.org"

"What we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness. Yet they're the very factors that have been [difficult] for scientists to study."

"What are the big causes of happiness?... Maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of the moment-to-moment experience?"

"We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering."