46.9% and Shades of Green

Guess what percentage of the time your mind wanders? 10%? 25%?

Psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert used an app to gather 250,000 random data points from 2,250 people from the ages of 18 to 88 and discovered our minds wander 46.9 % of the time.

They also discovered when our minds wander what we end up thinking about typically makes us unhappy. We ruminate, for example, on the past and replay what we could have done or said differently. We imagine the future and become anxious about what might go wrong. “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write.

I was mentioning the 46.9% statistic to my mother-in-law on a walk in her retirement community after it rained. She responded, “After it rains I choose to notice all the different shades of green in the trees.”  

The next time you feel your mind wander, perhaps pick a color– green, blue, orange - and try to notice all the shades around you; it might bring you into the beauty of the moment unfolding in front of you.