The Happiest People Don't Let Their Minds Wander, According to a Harvard Study | Hacker News Reader

The Happiest People Don't Let Their Minds Wander, According to a Harvard Study

inc.com

87 pointsBerislavLopac34 comments

Is is odd that this is just an answer copied from Quora?

I wonder if Quora actively tries to syndicate answers for backlinks? Maybe Mellissa O'Brian sent this to the Editors at Inc to see if they would run it?

In either case I'm curious how this article came to be published.

EDIT: I see now that Quora has an author profile of syndicated content, which answers my question. http://www.inc.com/author/quora

Also, the article was written by a "mindfulness teacher" which should raise the question of the article's objectivity. How was this upvoted?

I think there may be growing pressure to game Hacker News. I've been seeing (anecdotally) increasing odd activity in early morning hours (EST) linked with some funny account activity, etc.

Seems most potential spam gets caught and flagged pretty quick, though. It's interesting browsing HN with the "showdead" option activated every now and then.

I've been more confused about the recent trend in just posting wikipedia articles on random subjects. No one in the comments seems to ever have a problem with it either.

What's confusing about it? They're usually articles about fairly niche, but HN relevant, ideas/subjects.

I sometimes can spot why: it happens that there is a 'big' thread going on on HN and sometimes a Wikipedia article about one of the aspect of the thread or an argument in it is posted. I have also seen two articles on the front page that seemed to be part of the same discussion.

Eg: an article about Tokyo gentrification would trigger a discussion about waste management in big cities and then Wikipedia articles about Japanese sewers and some aspects of Japanese culture would be posted.

I've been here at least 5 years, and that's always been done. Often resulted in some great comment pages.

I thought exactly the same thing, but there is a link to the scientific American article [1] that in turn links to the original research [2] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-wandering-mind-... [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932

Going through the links, this article from the IEEE signal processing magazine looked interesting: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944261/?tool=p...

"[...] the keys to happiness lie in mastering the mind, and not in changing external factors in our lives."

I have been interested in mindfulness for years, but I found it very unhelpful to follow strong statements like this one. In many cases I found pro-actively dealing with problems and trying to improve my situation is eventually easier than trying to keep my mind from them.

There is a balance between being mindful and content in the present on the one hand, and being analytical/critical/discontent on the other. Of course, most people in industrialized societies could certainly profit immensely from shifting more towards the mindful state.

If you are mindful you are way more proactive and productive. Mindfulness meditation (done properly) creates a bias towards action by changing the neurochemistry in the brain.

Well put! I would add that in mastering your internal frame of mind, a spotlight emerges on the "right" external factors to focus your action on.

Yeah, this statement carries some privilege. It's all well and good to master your mind if your circumstances are more or less okay. If there are things out of your control that objectively affect your happiness, like living in poverty for example, it is much tougher to fix it all with a little extra dash of mindfulness.

Maybe you are able to focus because you are happier, more into the work or task, smarter so it's easier...etc.

How to make it to top of HN: Tack on harvard/Mit/Stanford/in crowd institution's name to something that contrasts with a pop culture norm. Wait for lemmings to duke out the implications. It's as predictable as Trump getting elected.

Wait but haven't there been posts on this very site where studies showed that daydreams & wandering minds help creativity as well? e.g. Something in this article must have been linked and upvoted here at some point: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/mind-wandering_n_40...

Sadness is also linked to creativity: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2015/08/27/happy-sadne...

Bunch of stuff out there to support it, anecdotally I would agree. If you're too happy why bother doing/thinking differently?

When you're frustrated you also behave more variably, and behavioral variability is important to the discovery of novelty.

I'm from the Midwest, and we learn to bottle it all up from a very young age! We must be the happiest people on earth.

I find it easy enough to be mindful in general, assuming we're talking about the same concept, but lately it's relationships that have troubled my flow, and more particularly the repeated occurrence of getting attached to and then losing someone. I'm learning to deal with it, though.

So simple yet so hard to get there, I've been trying to be mindful for more than a year now, but my mind is always full of worries and trying to find solutions, even though my life is no particularly complicated :/ anybody that achieved this has advice?

Maybe your worries are about important matters, and focusing in finding solutions to them has been useful for you. If doing that was useful then it's difficult to let go of that because nobody likes to cease doing what's useful.

If you want to worry less I think about two things that may help:

A - Set a time of the day for worries, and procrastinate worrying until that time. For example, set the worrying time from 18:45 to 19hs. This may sound strange, but it's recommended by some CBT therapists. http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/docs/Info-Postpone%20your%20... http://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/worryzones.htm

B - Train! Not following worry thoughts is a skill that requires practice, like building muscle. If you train you become better at it. You may train your attention by noticing your breath and when your attention gets caught by worry thougts, you notice that and go back to your breath. When it happens again, you notice it and go back to your breath. With practice, letting go of worry becomes much easier. You may practice that 15 minutes a day.

Sure I've meditated for over 4 years now, and find the easiest time to do is when you lie down to sleep. If you think of your mind like a flipbook, and every thought is a page on the book, when you begin it can feel like you are flipping through the book very fast. Try to concentrate and observe something in your body (many people focus on breathe, or the forehead, I find the heartbeat to be easier). The flipbook thoughts will keep drawing your attention so you must keep trying to bring your focus back to your body when you realise you were distracted. Eventually the flipping slows down more and more, until you begin to occupy the gap between your thoughts. This is a place you are not even aware of until you come out of it. If you can imagine a place with no thought, it can be quite peaceful!

I suggest doing a search for 'The Mind Illuminated' and see if the book's description resonates with you. It contains meditation practices that aim to strengthen mindfulness. Unless you're amazingly unique you'll still have lapses in mindfulness but they can become shorter and less frequent over time depending on how diligently you practice during formal meditation and also in day-to-day life.

The way this article casually treats depression, anxiety, and unhappiness as basically the same root issue is mistaken. While shifting one's focus may allow one to be more happy, it will not cure a mental illness.

Due to involvement in communities seeking alternatives to the illness model of depression, I've come to the conclusion that that model is unhelpful to about as many people as it is helpful.

For myself (lifelong struggles with melancholy and several Major Depression diagnoses) this has been the rough effectiveness of approaches:

Medication: nil

Therapy: very slight, highly dependent on circumstances

Changing circumstances: Extremely effective when things go my way, but ultimately not effective because life is chaotic, and gatekeepers always have either more or much more control over your circumstances than you do, unless you're a gatekeeper. Or, you can be winning at life in every way, but you and your loved ones are still eligible for sudden misfortune.

Mindfulness: Very effective. Takes practice, but totally worth it, and ultimately becomes something you can control more than most other things.

Interesting. I have the exact same feeling on your first three, and have only ever given mindfulness a slight attempt. Maybe I should try it more. I'm surprised you came to the same conclusion on circumstances while still concluding that they may not matter if your mind is under control.

I can't see a mechanism for this, whereas the opposite causation - that worry causes you to be distracted and you mind to wander - seems trivially obvious.

I wish I had known that the key to happiness was just a google search away...

Corollary: Happiness and Creativity have an inverse correlation.

Maybe happiness isn't the thing we should be prioritising?

Makes me want to go code...

Can I code a girlfriend?

Do you think a girlfriend would make you happy?

that's truely a good question

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