Spiritual masters have long held that we are happiest when our minds are situated in the present. They note that suffering occurs when our minds wander to the past or future. But is this empirically true?
We solved this problem by developing a Web application for the iPhone (Apple Incorporated, Cupertino, California), which we used to create an unusually large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily activities.The application contacts participants through their iPhones at random moments during their waking hours, presents them with questions,and records their answers to a database at www.trackyourhappiness.org.1
Here’s what they found:
Figure 1. Mean happiness reported during each activity (top) and while mind wandering to unpleasant topics, neutral topics, pleasant topics or not mind wandering (bottom). Dashed line indicates mean of happiness across all samples. Bubble area indicates the frequency of occurrence. The largest bubble (“not mind wandering”) corresponds to 53.1% of the samples, and the smallest bubble (“praying/worshipping/meditating”) corresponds to 0.1% of the samples.
First, people’s minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing.
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Second, multilevel regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not [...] and this was true during all activities [...].
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Third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing.
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In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.
What are the implications for living well? Be here now. ✸
Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science 2010;330(6006):932. PMID: 21071660.
I took Induction to Non-Western Religions during my first semester of college in 1988. Here’s the description from the course catalog:
An introduction to the study of non-Western religious traditions in south and east Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto). Open to everyone but especially appropriate for first and second year students. Fall semester.1
I have three memories of the course. First, our classroom was in Old Main, a gorgeous stone building dating back to 1889. It looked and felt like college in the movies.
Second, one of my classmates was a Theravada Buddhist monk — shaved head, orange robe, sandals — from Sri Lanka. Dr. Laine would banter with him in another language (Sinhala? Pali?) during class.
The third and most important memory is a lesson that took decades for me to internalize. This is part of an e-mail that I sent to Dr. Laine in June 2020:
I remember bits and pieces [of the course] including a parable that you shared during class. The details are probably distorted by time, but it involved someone escaping a tiger and a cliff. The person, despite great personal peril, was able to pause to enjoy some succulent berries growing on the side of the cliff.
Dr. Laine helpfully replied:
The story you allude to has many versions and interpretations. Tolstoy learned of it from the Tale of Barlaam and Josaphat, a medieval Christian tale whose origins are in fact Buddhist (Josaphat being a garbled version of bodhisattva). Gandhi, I believe, learned the tale from Tolstoy. So a Buddhist tale went west, turned north and came back east. Who knows, maybe Gandhi passed it on to Martin Luther King or Mandela or Cesar Chavez, all of whom he influenced.
With that lead, I was able to track down this version of the parable:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!2
This parable wound up being the most important thing that I learned in college, although I didn’t know it at the time. It took years of subsequent seeking and suffering for it to become lived experience.
There is just the eternal now. The tigers of the past and future are memories and imagination:
Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now.
Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.
What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace—and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.3
Be here now. ✸
1988/90 Catalog. St. Paul, MN: Macalester College, 1988, p. 159
Paul Reps.Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1957, pp. 28–29
Eckhart Tolle.The Power of Now. Vancouver: Namaste Publishing, 1997, pp. 41–42
Endnote.Be Here Now, which was published in 1971, consolidated these earlier materials into a single volume.
I’m scheduled to appear on WCCO 4 News This Morning on Monday, June 22nd, at 5:45 a.m. The subject will be happiness. I’ll be representing Allina Health
We’ll be discussing a recent NORC at the University of Chicago study that found a historic decrease in happiness. NORC has been surveying Americans since 1972 with the following question:
Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?
Only 14% of people reported feeling “very happy,” which was a sharp drop from the usual run rate. In contrast, 23% of respondents indicated that they are “not too happy.” Both findings are unprecedented (red oval)
Norc at the University of Chicago
Correlation does not imply causation, however, the investigators pursued some provocative Covid-19-related explanations dealing with viral hotspots, loneliness and income. And while George Floyd was not mentioned in NORC’s report, his senseless death on May 25th occurred right in the middle of the survey period. I’d speculate that tragedy and the national reckoning which has followed was also on respondents’ minds
Regardless of the causes, what are some ways to improve happiness?
I generally recommend making peace with the present. This perennial wisdom that has strong, contemporary scientific support. For example, a seminal study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert tracked happiness in real time using iPhone surveys. They found that people were happiest when their minds weren’t wandering—that is, when they were totally present in the now
In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost
Present moment awareness is sometimes called mindfulness, a trendy, frequently misunderstood word that I’ve avoided up until now. If you’re intrigued, I suggest snagging a copy of The Power of Now, the classic book by Eckhart Tolle. I often point people to “Wherever You Are, Be There Totally” (section), which starts on Page 82 in Google Books
I’ll try to mention other tips and tricks on the air, and hope to add them to my profile page at Allina Health later this week. ✸
