Matt Killingsworth: Want to be happier?

In this TED talk, Matt Killingsworth talks about happiness.

He starts by talking about how people in the past strived for things like a bigger house, a nicer car, and a good job. They thought that these were the keys to happiness. Recently however, he says that people have been thinking scientifically of how people could be happier.

So, as a scientist himself, he created an app called Track Your Happiness. The app sent you alerts daily asking three questions. It asked 1. How happy are you on a scale of very good or very bad 2. what are you doing (22 activities you could have been doing) and 3. Are you focused or mind wandering about something neutral, pleasant, or negative. They collected a lot of data and came to some conclusions.

He concluded that no matter what your mind is wandering about, pleasant or not, that people are always happier in the moment focused on the task they are doing. Who knew--that to be happier you could just focus on what you are doing? It seems like when you are sad, you might wander about happy things, but according to Killlingsworth, just focusing and living in the moment will keep you happier.

So their data pointed to a connection with mind wandering and unhappiness. They had to distinguish which was the cause and effect, because in life, there is always one that causes the other. They wanted to know if mind wandering caused unhappiness as they hypothesized or if unhappiness caused someone to wander. Personally, it seems logically like unhappiness causes someone to wander because they would wanna get to a better place and think about happier times, but it's actually the opposite. Most of the time, mind-wandering causes unhappiness because when people wander, they eventually think about mistakes, bad times, and regrets.

So, pretty simple right? Just stay in the moment and don't mind wander to stay happier. That's what Matt Killingsworth says. Try it out.

Although it does seem hard not to wander. According to his app's data, of all the 22 activities, most of the percent time wandering was around 50% with a max of around 75% in the shower and a minimum of 10% during sex. A second lowest was around 30% showing how much people actually do wander. He showed graphs showing how the people's average happiness when focused is slightly higher when they are mind wandering about pleasant things, significantly higher than when they wander about neutral things and way higher then when thinking about unpleasant things. Therefore Killingsworth compares mind wandering to a slot machine where you lose 50$, 20$, or just 1$, clever isn't it?