By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not, which is unfortunate considering we do it so often. Moreover, the size of this effect is large—how often a person’s mind wanders, and what they think about when it does, is far more predictive of happiness than how much money they make, for example.” – Matt Killingsworth
We spend a tremendous amount of time with our minds wandering and not on the task or the environment at hand. We daydream, plan for the future, review the past, ruminate on our failures, exalt in our successes. In fact, we spend almost half of our waking hours off task with our mind wandering. Mindfulness is the antithesis of mind wandering. When we’re mindful, we’re paying attention to what is occurring in the present moment. In fact, the more mindful we are the less the mind wanders and mindfulness training reduces mind wandering.
You’d think that if we spend so much time with the mind wandering it must be enjoyable. But, in fact research has shown that when our mind is wandering we are actually unhappier than when we are paying attention to what is at hand. There are times when mind wandering may be useful, especially in regard to planning and creative thinking. But, for the most part, it interferes with our concentration on the task at hand. People differ in the amount of time their mind wanders and, when the mind wanders, the difficulty they have disengaging from the off-task thoughts and returning to present moment attention. This is referred to as the stickiness of mind-wandering.
In today’s Research News article “Self-Reported Stickiness of Mind-Wandering Affects Task Performance.” See:
or see summary below or view the full text of the study at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4870246/
Van Vugt and Broers investigate the relationship of this stickiness of mind-wandering to how well individuals do in performing a task that requires attention, a go, no-go decision task. On some of the trials the subjects, prior to task onset, were reminded of one of the things that were currently on their mind, as a means of evoking mind wandering. On other trials, no such reminders were present. Participants were asked what their mental state was during the trial and how difficult it was to disengage from the wandering thoughts and return to attention to the task, stickiness.
They found that establishing a current concern prior to the trial did not increase mind wandering, but decreased the accuracy of performance. But, as expected, when the mind was wandering, it interfered with performance of the attention demanding task. They also found that the more difficulty that the participant had in disengaging from wandering thoughts, stickiness, the more mind wandering occurred and the lower the accuracy of response in the task. So, not only the amount of mind wandering, but also the stickiness of the mind wandering was detrimental to performance on a task that demands attention.
These results are interesting and show that mind wandering and stickiness can be studied in the laboratory under controlled conditions. It remains to be seen if mindfulness training can improve this kind of task performance and reduce mind wandering and stickiness. It has been demonstrated that mindfulness improves attention and cognitive task performance. But, it is not known whether it can change stickiness. Regardless, it is clear that we must unstick a wandering mind for task performance.
“In mindfulness what gets stronger are the brain’s circuits for noticing when your mind has wandered, letting go, and returning to your chosen focus. And that’s just what we need to stay with during that one important task we’re working on.” – Daniel Goleman
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Van Vugt, M. K., & Broers, N. (2016). Self-Reported Stickiness of Mind-Wandering Affects Task Performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 732. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00732
Abstract
When asked to perform a certain task, we typically spend a decent amount of time thinking thoughts unrelated to that task–a phenomenon referred to as “mind-wandering.” It is thought that this mind-wandering is driven at least in part by our unfinished goals and concerns. Previous studies have shown that just after presenting a participant with their own concerns, their reports of task-unrelated thinking increased somewhat. However, effects of these concerns on task performance were somewhat inconsistent. In this study we take the opposite approach, and examine whether task performance depends on the self-reported thought content. Specifically, a particularly intriguing aspect of mind-wandering that has hitherto received little attention is the difficulty of disengaging from it, in other words, the “stickiness” of the thoughts. While presenting participants with their own concerns was not associated with clear effects on task performance, we showed that the reports of off-task thinking and variability of response times increased with the amount of self-reported stickiness of thoughts. This suggests that the stickiness of mind-wandering is a relevant variable, and participants are able to meaningfully report on it.