A wandering mind
We all like to daydream now and again, but a 2010 study from Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert identified mind-wandering as a major cause of unhappiness.
The researchers collected data from 2,250 volunteers, who used a specially developed iPhone app that contacted them randomly to ask how happy there were feeling, what they were doing, whether they were thinking about what they were doing, and, if not, whether they were thinking about something pleasant instead.
They discovered that our minds are wandering about 46.9 percent of the time in any given activity and that people's feelings of happiness had much more to do with where their mind was than what they were doing. Only 4.6% of a person's happiness could be attributed to what they were doing, but 10.8% of it was caused by what they were thinking about at the time, and people consistently reported being happiest when their minds were on what they were doing.
To investigate whether unhappiness caused mind wandering or vice versa, the Harvard psychologists compared each person’s moods and thoughts as the day went on. They found that if someone’s mind wandered at 10 in the morning, then quarter of an hour later that person was likely to be less happy than at 10, perhaps because of daydreaming. But if people were in a bad mood at 10, they weren’t more likely to be worrying or daydreaming at 10:15.
"We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering," the report found.
The findings are backed up by age-old philosophy that living in the here and now leads to greater happiness.
"Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment. These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and his team note.