Klint Finley points me to an answer to my question about the relationship between distraction and happiness: the Track Your Happiness study, conducted by Harvard scientists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth. It concludes that “Our lives are most enjoyable and content when we are completely focused on the job in hand – even more than when we are daydreaming about pleasant thoughts.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this work, Gilbert is the author of a great book on happiness, Stumbling on Happiness (here’s the book’s blog). According to the Telegraph, the study
uses a technique called “experience sampling” seems to run in the face of the old Socrates’ belief that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. [ed: doesn’t such work support Socrates’ adage? oh well…]
Mr Killingsworth invented an iPhone application that randomly questioned 2,250 volunteers from all over the world at different intervals of the day about their levels of happiness, what they were doing and what they were thinking about.
Each time the participants, aged between 18 and 88, were asked to select one of 22 general activities and record how happy they were while doing it, as well as whether they were thinking about their current activity or something else.
This technique is similar to what the flow researchers have used (Csikszentmihalyi talks about the method in the early pages of Flow). It has its flaws and limits, but short of following people around or filming them, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with something much better. So what did they find? Again, from the Telegraph:
people’s minds wander on average 46.9 per cent of the time, when they think about things that are not going on around them.
Participants in the survey said they were distracted no less than 30 per cent of the time during every activity, except making love, when they were more focused than usual.
Mr Killingsworth said “mind wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities”.
“Human beings are unique in their ability to focus on the non-present – to learn from the past, anticipate and plan for the future and even imagine about things that may not happen at all,” he said.
“However when our minds wander we don’t do it in a way that benefits our happiness. We are doing it in a way that is detrimental.
“This is true even when we are in our least favourable activities and even when the topic on our mind is pleasant.”
Equally interesting are their findings about what kinds of activities are most and least likely to be interrupted by distraction: we’re most focused
when we are having sex, exercising or in intense conversations with friends, they discovered. Listening to music and playing also helped take us out of our heads…. The findings seem to show why people enjoy extreme sports, joining clubs and going for a chat down the pub.
In contrast,
the mind wanders most when we are resting, working or using our home computer.
Activities such as reading, doing the housework and watching television appear to be almost neutral in their effect on our minds.
This last observation may help explain why some of the most voiferous criticisms of the effect of the Internet revolve around its effect on our ability to read: if that’s already an activity that demands a high level of focus, then it makes sense that it would be more easily affected by another, competing, similar-yet-critically-different activity.
Three other points.
First, it seems to me that there’s a small but significant difference made in the literature between distraction and mind-wandering. “Mind-wandering” is what your brain does when it’s at rest, or when you’re doing things that do not require engagement or concentration. “Distraction” is more like an unwanted redirection of your attention from one thing to another– usually from something that you know you should be focused on, to something else. Driving offers a good example. If you’re on a familiar road where you can go on semi-automatic and not really have to think too much about your route, you’re engaged in mind-wandering. If you’re trying to navigate an unfamiliar city, you’re trying to remember the names of the next two turns, and the kids start screaming, that’s distraction. Mind-wandering is internally-generated (my brain wanders off by itself), while distraction is externally-generated (I’m overloaded by too many things). They bear a resemblance to each other, but it’s worth trying to disaggregate them.
Second, lest we conclude that mind-wandering is all bad, in their Science article, Gilbert and Killingsworth offer this corrective:
Unlike other animals, human beings spend a lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or will never happen at all. Indeed, “stimulus-independent thought” or “mind wandering” appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation. Although this ability is a remarkable evolutionary achievement that allows people to learn, reason, and plan, it may have an emotional cost…. [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.
So mind-wandering has positives: the basic ability to place your thoughts elsewhere can be extremely valuable.
Finally, studies of mind-wandering and mental default states remind us just how unnatural concentration is. It’s incredibly easy to describe mindfulness– I think of it as detached and deliberate attention– but there’s a reason people spend years practicing it. It actually is hard.