The biggest obstacle to your happiness might be your wandering mind. This is according to the data collected via iPhone from Track Your Happiness project.
Check out the graph above from the TED talk at Harvard from Mark Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate in psychology that just went on-line this month.
The research points to the age-old wisdom of living in the moment — being in the “here and now”.
In general, the research indicates, the wandering mind diminishes your satisfying experience of living in the present by taking you to darker distractions, much of which we can not solve in the moment ,anyways.
“A Wandering Mind Is Not A Happy Mind” is the name of Killingworth’s paper for Harvard based on his research.
The point of the below talk is that by disciplining your mind to stay in the moment, you will be happier.
“The gold standard for collecting this kind of data is what is called ‘experience sampling,’ or taking a sampling from moment to moment,” Killingsworth said. “But typically that is very expensive and manually intensive to conduct.”
Matt Killingsworth has been using an iPhone app to gather data fromm 86 countries. Killingsworth, a former software developer, has helped create an application called Track Your Happiness for the iPhone to collect information to determine which factors are associated with happiness.
In the second paragraph of the Declaration Of Independence , it is affirmed that the inalienable rights of all men and women include the pursuit of individual happiness.
I’m interested in these studies on happiness…. and indeed, what it means to be happy. My 2013 novel, the Address of Happiness, is a fiction but it also equips people with the with the tools of to how how-to live a purposeful and happy life.
I’ll be writing more about this happiness app in my next blog.
So if you’re happy and you know it, tell your iPhone.
