Want to be happier Stay in the moment Matt Killingsworth
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so people want a lot of things out of
life but I think more than anything else
they want happiness Aristotle called
happiness the chief good the end towards
which all other things aim according to
this view the reason we want a big house
or a nice car or a good job isn’t that
these things are intrinsically valuable
it’s that we expect them to bring us
happiness now in the last 50 years we
Americans have gotten a lot of the
things that we want we’re richer we live
longer we have access to technology that
would have seems like science fiction
just a few years ago the paradox of
happiness is that even though the
objective conditions of our lives have
improved dramatically
we haven’t actually gotten any happier
maybe because these conventional notions
of progress haven’t delivered big
benefits in terms of happiness there’s
been an increased interest in recent
years and happiness itself people have
been debating the causes of happiness
for a really long time in fact for
thousands of years but it seems like
many of those debates remain unresolved
why is with many other domains in life I
think the scientific method has the
potential to answer this question in
fact in the last few years there’s been
an explosion in research on happiness
for example we’ve learned a lot about
its demographics how things like income
and education gender and marriage relate
to it
but one of the puzzles this is revealed
is that factors like these don’t seem to
have a particularly strong effect yes
it’s better to make more money rather
than less or to graduate from college
instead of dropping out but the
differences in happiness tend to be
small which leaves the question what are
the big causes of happiness I think
that’s a question we haven’t really
answered yet but I think something that
has the potential to be an answer is
that maybe happiness has an awful lot to
do with the contents of our
moment-to-moment experiences it
certainly seems that we’re going about
our lives that what we’re doing who were
with what we’re thinking about have a
big influence on our happiness and yet
these are the very factors that have
been very difficult in fact almost
impossible for scientists to study a few
years ago I came up with a way to study
people’s happiness moment-to-moment is
they’re going about their daily lives on
the massive scale all over the world
something we’ve never been able to do
before
called track your happiness org it uses
the iPhone to monitor people’s happiness
in real-time how does this work
basically I send people signals at
random points throughout the day and
then I ask them a bunch of questions
about their moment-to-moment experience
at the instant just before the signal
the idea is that if we can watch how
people’s happiness goes up and down over
the course of the day minute to minute
in some cases and try to understand how
what people are doing who they’re with
what they’re thinking about and all the
other factors that describe our day how
those might relate to those changes in
happiness
we might be able to discover some of the
things that really have a big influence
on happiness we’ve been fortunate with
this project to collect quite a lot of
data a lot more data of this kind than I
think has ever been collected before
over 650,000 real-time reports from over
15,000 people and it’s not just a lot of
people it’s a really diverse group
people from wide range of Ages from
eighteen to late 80s a wide range of
incomes education levels people who are
married divorced widowed etc they
collectively represent every one of 86
occupational categories and hail from
over 80 countries what I’d like to do
with the rest of my time with you today
is talk a little bit about one of the
areas that we’ve been investigating and
that’s mind wandering as human beings we
have this unique ability to have our
mind stray away from the present this
guy is sitting here working on his
computer and yet he could be thinking
about the vacation he had last month
wondering was gonna have for dinner
maybe he’s worried that he’s going bald
this ability to focus our attention on
something other than the present is
really amazing it allows us to learn and
plan and reason in ways that no other
species of animal can and yet it’s not
clear what the relationship is between
our use of disability and our happiness
you’ve probably heard people suggest
that you should stay focused on the
present be here now you’ve probably
heard a hundred times maybe to really be
happy we need to stay completely
immersed and focused on our experience
in the moment maybe these people right
maybe
wandering is a bad thing on the other
hand when our minds wander their
unconstrained we can’t change the
physical reality in front of us but we
can go anywhere in our minds since we
know people want to be happy
maybe when our minds wander they’re
going to someplace happier than the
place that they’re leaving it would make
a lot of sense in other words maybe the
pleasures of the mind allow us to
increase our happiness with mind
wandering well since I’m a scientist I’d
like to try to resolve this debate with
some data and in particular I’d like to
present some data to you from three
questions that I asked with track your
happiness remember this is from sort of
moment-to-moment experience in people’s
real lives there’s three questions the
first one is a happiness question how do
you feel on a scale ranging from very
bad to very good second an activity
question what are you doing on a list of
22 different activities including things
like eating and working and watching TV
and finally a mind wandering question
are you thinking about something other
than what you’re currently doing people
could say no in other words I’m focused
only on my task or yes I am thinking
about something else and the topic of
those thoughts are pleasant neutral or
unpleasant any of those yes responses
are what we called mind wandering so
what did we find
this graph shows happiness on the
vertical axis and you can see that bar
there representing how happy people are
when they’re focused on the present when
they’re not mind wandering as it turns
out 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 their 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
their 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 then when
their mind is going off to something
else it’s amazing so how could this be
happening
I think part of the reason a big part of
the
is that when our minds wander we often
think about unpleasant things and they
are enormous ly 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 we’re a slot-machine would be
like having the chance to lose $50 $20
or $1 right you’d never want to play so
I’ve been talking about this suggesting
perhaps that 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 wonder
maybe that’s what’s really going on how
could we ever disentangle these two
possibilities well one in fact that we
can take advantage of I think a fact
you’ll all agree is true is that time
goes forward not backward right the
cause has to come before the effect
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
a few minutes ago I likened
mind-wandering to a slot machine you’d
never want to play well how often do
people’s minds wander turns out they
wonder a lot in fact really a lot
forty-seven percent of the time people
were thinking about something other than
what they’re currently doing how does
that depend on what people are doing
this shows the rate of mind wandering
across 22 activities ranging from a high
of 65 percent when people are taking a
shower brushing their teeth
to 50% when they’re working to 40% when
they’re exercising all the way down to
this one and short bar on the right that
I think some of you were probably
laughing at 10% of the time people’s
minds are wandering when they’re having
sex but there’s something I think that’s
quite interesting in this graph and that
is basically with one exception no
matter what people are doing their mind
wandering at least thirty percent of the
time which suggests I think that mind
wandering isn’t just frequent it’s
ubiquitous it pervades basically
everything that we do in my talk today
I’ve told you a little bit about mind
wandering a variable that I think turns
out to be fairly important in the
equation for happiness my hope is that
over time by tracking people’s moments
moment happiness and their experiences
in daily life will be able to uncover a
lot of important causes of happiness and
then in the end a scientific
understanding of happiness will help us
create a future that’s not only richer
and healthier but happier as well thank
you
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