Share this post
Summary: Keeping the mind focused on the present is associated with happiness.
Key Take Aways:
- The habit of mental wandering and not being engaged with the present might create unhappy moments.
- Tracking mental activity and moods may be helpful in creating more mindfulness and happiness.
TrackYourHappiness.org is an intriguing free service requiring an iPhone or an email address and registering for a website to complete a survey and set up an account. The basic premise is that once you have signed up you will receive messages on a regular basis containing surveys which you complete in order to track how much your mind is engaged with present moments, rather than wandering off on various tangents.
If you don't have a smart phone, these daily surveys can also be sent to an email address, and they are quite short. They contain questions about how engaged you are in the current moment, how you feel, how much you have slept and so forth. Each time you complete a survey the data is stored and it becomes part of an overall happiness report, which you can see when you log into the website.
This technology-based service was founded by Matt Killingsworth, a graduate student at Harvard. So far he has collected a large amount of data which points to a simple, but profound premise: people are less happy when their minds are wandering and happier when they are engaged with present moments.
A wandering mind might begin to focus on thoughts that are associated with unhappiness, "Research has shown that rumination is associated with a variety of negative consequences, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, binge-drinking and binge-eating." (Source: Psychcentral.com)
Happier workers tend to be more productive and disengaged workers can decrease productivity and profitability greatly.
Image Credit: HereToHelp, Wiki Commons
