Ask people about their hobbies these days and most of them don’t have one. Ask what they do with their spare time and the answer is: look at their phone. Reels, Shorts, there really is a lot of fun stuff out there, so I get it
But are you actually happy while you’re resting with your phone? Phones are addictive. That doesn’t mean they hand you any happiness.
If lying down and taking it easy doesn’t make us happy either, then when are we happiest?
To think that through, here’s a study I found interesting. “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” is a paper in which Harvard researchers tracked the daily lives and happiness of 5,000 people around the world. They sent alerts to people’s phones at random and had them record what they were doing right then, and how they felt.
That gave us a picture of which activities people are happiest doing. The results are surprising.
We usually assume that the harder the work, physically or mentally, the more miserable we are, and that lying still and doing nothing is the happiest state of all. People did report being unhappy while working. But strangely, they didn’t report being happy while resting.
If anything, people said they were more unhappy resting than working. Why would that be?
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Why even pleasant thoughts don’t make us happy
Why be unhappy when you don’t have to do anything at all? Because happiness depends less on what you’re doing than on what you’re thinking about.
The paper explains that while people are doing things, their minds are somewhere else for roughly 50% of the time. A wandering mind here means chewing over something that already happened, or picturing things that might happen in the future, or things that will never happen at all. Your body is driving or cleaning; your head is off somewhere else entirely.
So what does a wandering mind do to our happiness? The paper sorted people’s thoughts into positive, neutral, and negative. Which kind makes people happiest? Oddly, none of the three. Positive, pleasant thoughts barely raise happiness at all. What people reported instead was that they were happiest when they weren’t thinking, just absorbed in the present. Wash the dishes while paying attention to the dishes and you’re happy. Wash them while running through tomorrow’s to-do list and you’re not.
Do we have to stop thinking to be happy?
So when did people say they were happy? Ranked by activity, making love came out far ahead of everything else (90 out of 100), followed by exercise (77), conversation (72), playing, and listening to music. Eating and praying or meditating also came out happy.
These are all activities that make it easy to get absorbed. The unhappy ones, grooming, work, housework, sitting around resting, are the ones that leave plenty of room for the mind to drift. It’s also interesting that active rest (relaxing) came out neither happy nor unhappy, while passive rest (resting) came out much unhappier.
Going by this paper alone, we seem to be happy when our minds aren’t wandering. Even a pleasant thought costs us happiness the moment it pulls us away. Absorption makes us happier than rest does. The biggest difference between humans and animals is our ability to think, and yet that ability is what makes us unhappy. As the paper’s closing line points out, we gained the ability to think about what isn’t happening, and we paid for it with that much happiness.
This conclusion brings my last post to mind. That one was about how the future isn’t something you predict but something you build. Put the two together and I start to think we’re at our happiest when we’re absorbed in making something interesting.
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Sources
- A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. DOI:10.1126/science.1192439
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