Most of us know the feeling. We’re washing dishes or driving home, but our minds are somewhere else: replaying a conversation, rehearsing tomorrow, worrying about something that may never happen. Psychologists call this mind wandering, and it turns out to be one of the most common things the human mind does.

In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert set out to measure it. Using an iPhone app, they contacted people at random moments throughout the day and asked three simple questions: How are you feeling right now? What are you doing? Are you thinking about something other than what you’re doing? Analyzing reports from 2,250 adults, they found that people’s minds wandered in nearly half of all moments, and at least 30% of the time during almost every activity.

They also found that people were less happy when their minds wandered, no matter what they were doing. Even drifting to pleasant thoughts made people no happier than staying with the present moment, while drifting to neutral or unpleasant thoughts made them noticeably less happy. The timing of people’s reports suggested that the wandering tended to come first and the unhappiness after. Perhaps most striking of all, what people were thinking predicted their happiness better than what they were doing.

None of this means that a wandering mind is a flaw. Our ability to remember, plan, and imagine is remarkable, and the researchers acknowledge as much. But the restless, unbidden drift of thought, what we might call mental noise, appears to carry a cost. (This study relied on volunteers using an early smartphone app, and it observed patterns rather than testing them experimentally, so its conclusions are strong but not final.)

How do we come back to the present? Many contemplative traditions teach that it takes practice. Research suggests nature may help. Attention restoration theory, which we explore in our article on Clarity, proposes that natural scenes hold our attention gently, drawing us into the present without effort. In a separate study, Gregory Bratman and colleagues found that a 90-minute walk in nature, compared with a walk along a busy road, reduced rumination, the repetitive negative thinking that so often fills a wandering mind, along with activity in a brain region linked to it.

Spirit of Solitude, Spirit Island on Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park, Alberta. Available as a print.

This is the heart of what Natural Phocus means by reducing mental noise. A view of nature, real or carefully chosen and placed with intention, can serve as an invitation back to where we are.

Try it: The next time you notice your mind has drifted, don’t scold yourself; noticing is the first step back. Let your eyes rest on a view of nature, through a window or in an image you love. Find one small detail and stay with it for a few breaths. Then ask yourself, quietly: Where am I? What is here, right now?

Sources: Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510459112