Now that my silly face caught your attention…
Did you know that our minds wander 47% of the time? This impacts our experience of what we are doing in that very moment. Our minds like to wander to the past and ahead to the future, but in doing so takes away from enjoying the moment we are in.
Think about this for a moment. Has your mind ever drifted off during s£x? Have you ever started thinking about what you want to do next weekend instead of enjoying that Saturday hike you had been looking forward to all week? Do you drift off when you are listening to friends or family members speaking? Are you planning ahead all the things you need to get done instead of enjoying breakfast with your kids? Do you get lost in the should haves, would haves, could haves of the past? Everyone does! Welcome to part of the human experience. We have thoughts and we feel things. 🙌🏽
In an article by Libby Copeland, she shares some findings of research done on the impact on our happiness from our mind wandering. A few points that stood out to me as interesting are these:
👉🏼 “Overall, people were less happy when their minds wandered. Neutral and negative thoughts seemed to make them less happy than being in the moment, and pleasant thoughts made them no happier.”
👉🏽 “More than a quarter of our mental meanderings are to unpleasant topics. And the vast majority of our musings are focused on the future, rather than the past.”
👉🏾 “We tend to think of suffering as being due to a circumstance or a thing that’s happening—like, we’re physically in pain, and what this research points to is that oftentimes, it’s not actually due to that circumstance but much more to the way we relate to that.”
👉🏿 “We human beings spend lots of time and effort fixing the wrong problem. A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize the objective reality of our lives. But we don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to optimize where our minds go.”
👉🏻”The trick is in recognizing the illusion—ah yes, there’s that ridiculous clown car of anxiety coming down the road again. The saving grace, when I can manage to focus, is the present moment. “
So where does your mind go? What helps you to bring yourself back to the present moment? Do you engage in mindfulness exercises or have a meditation practice?
Sessions with Linz 