A wandering mind is an unhappy mind
What they found
People's minds were elsewhere in almost half of their waking moments - and they were reliably less happy when their mind wandered than when it was on what they were doing, whatever that was.
How they know
An iPhone app pinged people at random moments of real life, asking what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how they felt; the analysis covered 2,250 adults, drawn from a database of nearly a quarter-million samples.
What it means for you
Where your attention is matters more to how an hour feels than what the hour holds. In a conversation, the cheapest upgrade is being entirely in it.
The limits
Correlational moment-to-moment data - though wandering preceded unhappiness more than the reverse; the sample skewed young and from wealthier countries.
This is a short takeaway in our own words, not a reproduction of the study. For the method, the sample and the caveats, read the original. Mind lives inside the Booking Minds app under the brain icon, where you can save and share each piece.