Living in the moment really does make people happier

[R.E.M.]

Check this Guardian article out. Basically multi-tasking makes one
less happy, or multi-task/thinking.

All this talk about trying to improve productivity - perhaps there is
an inverse relationship between productivity and happiness! After
which there needs to be discount factor from the utility/happiness
that increased income accompanying the increase productivity will
bring.

That said, I think many of the time people who "super-"multi-task tend
to just be less productive overall.

Extract from the article: "They found that people were happiest when
having sex, exercising or in conversation, and least happy when
working, resting or using a home computer"





http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/11/living-moment-happier

Living in the moment really does make people happier
Psychologists have found that people are distracted from the task at
hand nearly half the time, and this daydreaming consistently makes
them less happy
Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 November 2010 19.00 GMT

Reminiscing, thinking ahead or daydreaming tends to make people more
miserable. Photograph: Corbis RF/Alamy
Happiness is found by living in the now, particularly if the now
involves having sex, according to a major study into mental wellbeing.

But the study also found that people spend nearly half their time
(46.7%) thinking about something other than what they are actually
doing.

The benefits of living in the moment are extolled by many
philosophical and religious traditions, but until now there has been
scant scientific evidence to support the advice.

Psychologists at Harvard University collected information on the daily
activities, thoughts and feelings of 2,250 volunteers to find out how
often they were focused on what they were doing, and what made them
most happy.

They found that people were happiest when having sex, exercising or in
conversation, and least happy when working, resting or using a home
computer. And although subjects' minds were wandering nearly half of
the time, this consistently made them less happy.

The team conclude that reminiscing, thinking ahead or daydreaming
tends to make people more miserable, even when they are thinking about
something pleasant.

Even the most engaging tasks failed to hold people's full attention.
Volunteers admitted to thinking about something else at least 30% of
the time while performing these tasks, except when they were having
sex, when people typically had their mind on the job around 90% of the
time.

"Human beings have this unique ability to focus on things that aren't
happening right now. That allows them to reflect on the past and learn
from it; it allows them to anticipate and plan for the future; and it
allows them to imagine things that might never occur," said Matthew
Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology and lead author of the
study.

"At the same time, it seems that human beings often use this ability
in ways that are not productive and furthermore can be destructive to
our happiness," he added.

For the study, Killingsworth and his supervisor, Daniel Gilbert,
author of the 2006 book Stumbling on Happiness, developed a web
application for the iPhone that contacted participants at random times
during their waking hours. When they received a message, those taking
part had to respond with information about what they were doing, by
selecting from a list of 22 activities, such as doing housework,
shopping, or watching TV. They went on to rate their happiness on a
scale from zero to 100, and said whether they were focused, or
daydreaming about something positive, negative or neutral.

The results showed that happiness was more affected by how often
people drifted off, and where they went in their imagination, than by
the activity they were doing at the time. The researchers say they're
confident that being distracted was the cause of unhappiness, rather
than the other way round.

The authors write in the journal Science: "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."

Asked why people seemed to be particularly focused during sex,
Killingsworth observed: "If you were messaged while you were having
sex it probably wouldn't turn out so well if you whipped out your
iPhone. Sex is one of the few broad categories of activity that
requires and perhaps benefits from our full attention."

More than 5,000 people have signed up for the happiness study and the
researchers hope to attract more so they can look at mental wellbeing
in different geographical regions and between the sexes with greater
accuracy.

"Hopefully we will get a lot of new participants from all over the
world and be able to answer questions we've not really been able to
ask before, because we've never had this kind of data on people's
experiences," Killingsworth said.

Take part in the study at www.trackyourhappiness.org

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

[Kevin Lai]

haha and lil wonders.... i'm connected 24x7 and wondering how elusive it is :P 

it is something I do subscribe to as well living at the present. (although tough...in practice) 

There's a whole series of books from this guy Eckhart Tolle 

Do google/youtube him up 

Attached are some videos (or audio recording) and quite painful to follow unless you're patient :P 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dax857tfusk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ryMX-5Gkqc

something that stumbled upon....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abR8ELQlvBY

Kev

[siuyuin]

This is the NYTimes report on the same study.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/science/16tier.html


Findings
When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: November 15, 2010

A quick experiment. Before proceeding to the next paragraph, let your
mind wander wherever it wants to go. Close your eyes for a few
seconds, starting ... now.

And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever
your mind went — the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid
bills — that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as
focusing intensely on the rest of this column will.

I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can assure you it is
based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current
issue of Science. Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness,
psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random
intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what
they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses
from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world
were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were
enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the
phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor,
unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy,
unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they
tried to resume.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100
being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90.
That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity,
exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to
music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking,
shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom
of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of
concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray
from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their
minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65
percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming,
clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

On average throughout all the quarter-million responses, minds were
wandering 47 percent of the time. That figure surprised the
researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert.

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize
that half the people aren’t really there,” Dr. Gilbert says.

You might suppose that if people’s minds wander while they’re having
fun, then those stray thoughts are liable to be about something
pleasant — and that was indeed the case with those happy campers
having sex. But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no
correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of
their thoughts.

“Even if you’re doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr.
Killingsworth says, “that doesn’t seem to protect against negative
thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable
activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander
toward negative thoughts.”

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or
shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity
instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where
their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what
they were doing.

“If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery,” Dr. Gilbert says,
“they typically talk about the things they would do — ‘I’d go to
Italy, I’d buy a boat, I’d lay on the beach’ — and they rarely mention
the things they would think. But our data suggest that the location of
the body is much less important than the location of the mind, and
that the former has surprisingly little influence on the latter. The
heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the
whereabouts of the feet.”

Still, even if people are less happy when their minds wander, which
causes which? Could the mind-wandering be a consequence rather than a
cause of unhappiness?

To investigate cause and effect, the Harvard psychologists compared
each person’s moods and thoughts as the day went on. They found that
if someone’s mind wandered at, say, 10 in the morning, then at 10:15
that person was likely to be less happy than at 10 , perhaps because
of those stray thoughts. But if people were in a bad mood at 10, they
weren’t more likely to be worrying or daydreaming at 10:15.

“We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no
evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” Mr. Killingsworth
says.

This result may disappoint daydreamers, but it’s in keeping with the
religious and philosophical admonitions to “Be Here Now,” as the yogi
Ram Dass titled his 1971 book. The phrase later became the title of a
George Harrison song warning that “a mind that likes to wander ’round
the corner is an unwise mind.”

What psychologists call “flow” — immersing your mind fully in activity
— has long been advocated by nonpsychologists. “Life is not long,”
Samuel Johnson said, “and too much of it must not pass in idle
deliberation how it shall be spent.” Henry Ford was more blunt:
“Idleness warps the mind.” The iPhone results jibe nicely with one of
the favorite sayings of William F. Buckley Jr.: “Industry is the enemy
of melancholy.”

Alternatively, you could interpret the iPhone data as support for the
philosophical dictum of Bobby McFerrin: “Don’t worry, be happy.” The
unhappiness produced by mind-wandering was largely a result of the
episodes involving “unpleasant” topics. Such stray thoughts made
people more miserable than commuting or working or any other activity.

But the people having stray thoughts on “neutral” topics ranked only a
little below the overall average in happiness. And the ones
daydreaming about “pleasant” topics were actually a bit above the
average, although not quite as happy as the people whose minds were
not wandering.

There are times, of course, when unpleasant thoughts are the most
useful thoughts. “Happiness in the moment is not the only reason to do
something,” says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. His research has shown that mind-
wandering can lead people to creative solutions of problems, which
could make them happier in the long term.

Over the several months of the iPhone study, though, the more frequent
mind-wanderers remained less happy than the rest, and the moral — at
least for the short-term — seems to be: you stray, you pay. So if
you’ve been able to stay focused to the end of this column, perhaps
you’re happier than when you daydreamed at the beginning. If not, you
can go back to daydreaming starting...now.

Or you could try focusing on something else that is now, at long last,
scientifically guaranteed to improve your mood. Just make sure you
turn the phone off.

###

[Kevin Lai]

cool :) and this can go into my foundation term paper :-) 

[Kevin Lai]

btw this is the link to the original article (can get full text from ntu lib proxy) 

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932.short

gettin the actual article to cite :P