I found, as a kid up through college, that I was happiest when my mind was wandering. As a kid, I also had no expectations about what I should be doing - I basically decided that homework was bullshit as a young teen, so I could do whatever I wanted and not feel guilty about it.
That changed once I got into the working world and suddenly was responsible for my own success. Now, whenever my mind wanders, there's a little voice that goes off in my head and says "But you're not being productive! Nobody cares what you think about, they only care what you do."
It seems like a reasonable hypothesis to say "people are happiest when they're doing whatever their internal value system says they should be doing." And it's consistent with the data. People were least happy when resting, working, and using a home computer, which are also the times that social expectations are highest that you actually should be working. They were most happy when having sex, exercising, and conversing - but nobody expects you to do a job while having sex.
I'd like to see the data broken down by age group and cultural values, and in particular, I'd like to see if it holds true for cultural groups that do not have the same focus on productivity and achievement as middle-class Americans.
Although I think having a dozen different characters living in my head probably exempts me from inclusion in a study on happiness.
I didnt not have such worries and wanders of the mind when i worked at the cable company(i hated that job; mindless). There my mind wander in a imaginative way of finding greener pastures and how to get out and or try to make my mark on the world.
nope, only if they get out of your head.
Simply its a more formal definition of 'the zone'. Yeah, the same zone as in sports, music, or coding sessions. Basically, the idea is that almost any activity can be experienced in the flow, and the further away from flow characteristics we move, the less satisfied we are. Thinking about something else while doing the current task is about as far from flow as you can get (unless the other thing you are thinking about is an flow experience thing).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM
The speaker argues that that freedom and choice are held as unassailable virtues by Western cultures, but in fact research shows that too much choice leads to unhappiness.
If you think of mind wandering as perhaps a product of too much choice for the mind, the two ideas are complementary.
>Even more intriguingly, they discovered 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.
However, what I'd suggest is that the happiness associated with an activity isn't 100% a function of the activity in and of itself, but whether or not you're in the right mindset for that activity at the time. Thus it would be possible for the wandering mind to be an effect and not a cause and still be more strongly correlated with happiness than the nature of the activity itself.
I got rid of my iPhone precisely because I thought it was leading me to not enjoy the times when my mind wandered.
Yes, keeping one's mind centered, aka, in the present moment, in awareness, is being happy. Being happy without external causes.
Unhappiness is basically thought-forms or thought-waves saying "I am unhappy" or "I am bored" or "I will be happy when ...". There is no more reality to unhappiness than mere thought-forms. The underlying silence revealed by a still mind is happiness itself.