You’d think it would be easy to figure out what makes us happy. Until recently, though, researchers have had to rely mainly on people’s reports about their average emotional states over long periods of time and on easily surveyed predictors of happiness, such as demographic variables. As a result, we know that married or wealthy people are, on average, happier than unmarried or less-well-off people. But what is it about being married or having money that makes people happy?
Focusing on average emotional states also smoothes out short-term fluctuations in happiness and consequently diminishes our ability to understand the causes of those fluctuations. For example, how do the moment-by-moment details of a person’s day affect that person’s happiness?
We can now begin to answer questions like these, thanks to the smartphone. For an ongoing research project called Track Your Happiness, I have recruited more than 15,000 people in 83 countries to report their emotional states in real time, using devices they carry with them every day. I created an iPhone Web app that queries users at random intervals, asking them about their mood (respondents slide a button along a scale that ranges from “very bad” to “very good”), what they are doing (they can select from 22 options including commuting, working, exercising and eating), and factors such as their level of productivity, the nature of their environment, the amount and quality of their sleep and their social interactions.
Since 2009, I have collected more than half a million data points – making this, to my knowledge, the first-ever large-scale study of happiness in daily life.
One major finding is that people’s minds wander nearly half the time, and this appears to lower their mood. Wandering to unpleasant or even neutral topics is associated with sharply lower happiness; straying to positive topics has no effect either way.
The amount of mind-wandering varies greatly depending on the activity, from roughly 60 percent of the time while commuting to 30 percent when talking to someone or playing a game to 10 percent during sex. But no matter what people are doing, they are much less happy when their minds are wandering than when their minds are focused.
All of this strongly suggests that to optimize our emotional well-being, we should pay at least as much attention to where our minds are as to what our bodies are doing. Yet for most of us, the focus of our thoughts isn’t part of our daily planning. When you wake up on a Saturday morning and ask, “What am I going to do today?” the answer is usually about where you’ll take your body – to the beach, to the kids’ soccer practice, for a run. You ought to also ask, “What am I going to do with my mind today?”
A related stream of research examines the relationship between mind-wandering and productivity. Many managers, particularly those whose employees do creative knowledge work, may sense that a certain amount of daydreaming is a good thing, providing a mental break and perhaps leading people to reflect on related work matters. Unfortunately, the data so far suggest that, in addition to reducing happiness, mind-wandering on the job reduces productivity.
And employees’ minds stray much more than managers probably imagine – about 50 percent of the workday – and almost always veer toward personal concerns. Managers may want to look for ways to help employees stay focused, for the employees’ and the company’s sakes.
The data are also beginning to paint a picture of variations in happiness within an individual and from one individual to the next. The most striking finding here is that happiness differs more from moment to moment than it does from person to person. This suggests that it’s not the stable conditions of our lives, such as where we live or whether we’re married, that are the principal drivers of happiness; it could be the small, everyday things that count the most.
It also suggests that happiness on the job may depend more on our moment-to-moment experiences – our routine interactions with co-workers, the projects we’re involved in, our daily contributions – than on the stable conditions thought to promote happiness, such as a high salary or a prestigious title. A priority of my current and future research is to deploy this tracking technology in the workplace and, I hope, at last reveal what actually makes employees happy.
(Matthew Killingsworth is a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard University. To participate in his study, go to trackyourhappiness.org.)
