Last night, I caught a segment on the TED Radio Hour about the connection between happiness and staying in the moment. Fellow humans, we may all be guilty of this.
Researcher Matt Killingsworth talked about his research app, Track Your Happiness, which sends a series of questions to people throughout the day in order to track what they’re currently doing and also gauge how happy they are in that moment.
Do you know what he found that correlated most with being unhappy?
Guess.
When people were doing one thing, and thinking about another.
Now, he explained that sometimes, this is because when we think about other things, we are thinking about things that cause us stress (“hmm, need to pay those bills tonight”) or anxiety. But, it turned out to be true across the board that when our minds wander, we become less happy. He even said that people are even happier commuting when they’re just solely focused on the commute itself and not thinking about other things.
This sounds highly similar to the benefits of achieving flow in your daily life.
When he finds his mind wandering these days, he asks himself: Is what I’m thinking about productive? If the answer is no, he catches himself and refocuses on what he is doing.
Stay present, stay involved, and possibly, be happier. What do you think?
