Mindful Mind Wandering
Scroll to the bottom of the blog to download your free Guided Mindful Mind Wandering Meditation and other Creative Flow Practices.
Have you had the experience of reading where you get to the end of the page and realize you don’t have any clue what you’ve just read? Or maybe you’ve been in a conversation and when it’s finally your turn to speak, you don’t recall what the conversation was about? Chances are you have. In fact there’s a 47.5% chance your mind is wandering right now. Did that get your attention? Or, are you still thinking about something else?
It turns out that when our minds are wandering, we’re more likely to feel unhappy, according to Harvard study. Counter to most of our intuitions, even when our minds are lost in fantasy, we’re still less likely to feel happy than when we’re fully present to a neutral task like doing the dishes. Additionally, when we’ve drifted from the present moment, we’re less efficient, have slower reaction times, make more mistakes and miss relevant cues from other people and the environment.
The good news of course is that mindfulness increases presence and decreases mind wandering. Yay mindfulness! In fact, there have been numerous studies that show mindfulness decreases activity in brain regions associated with mind wandering and other unpleasant thought patterns like inner criticism, giving practitioners a deeper access to an uninterrupted experience of presence and flow.
Based on this analysis, an easy conclusion is that mindfulness is good and mind wandering is bad. When it comes to happiness and performance, it appears we’ve found our foe…but have we?
Does mind wandering always decrease performance? Could something we’re privately engaged in half of our lives be inherently bad? If you put yourself in a relaxing environment and choose to let your mind wander on these questions for a set length of time, you’re mind may actually come up with a more nuanced answer. It turns out there is a time and place for mind wandering, as long as it’s done mindfully!
While fantasizing about your next vacation during a big presentation will never be good for performance, “Positive Constructive Daydreaming”, a more mindful form of mind wandering can actually help you solve problems, access creativity, and recover from “decision fatigue”.
Because of our brains evolutionarily inherited “negativity bias”, the mind is more likely to ruminate about the looming collapse of the stock market than it is to invent a scalable nuclear fusion reactor. But with mindfulness, you can observe your mind beginning to wander down the dark alley and intentionally shift it back to the spaciousness of the present moment. After spending a few moments re-centering on the breath and checking in with your senses, you can choose to intentionally introduce a more constructive topic for your mind to ponder. And why not? The brain is going to start thinking again anyways so you might as well point it in the direction of creative problem solving, visualizing and planning.
This practice has also been called “Blue Sky Thinking” which is “open-ended, divergent brainstorming without the constraints of judgment”. Whatever we choose to call it, Mindful Mind Wandering is less focused than intentional thinking but still done more intentionally –meaning your mind is wandering but you know your mind is wandering and you choose to keep tracking it while it wanders. Lets put it this way, if focused attention is analogous to having your dog on a short leash, mindful mind wandering is having your dog at the park, off leash but in eyesight most of the time.
If you’d like to experiment with letting your mind wander off leash a bit, it will require some mindfulness training. Mindful Mind Wandering for creative flow is one of five core meditation practices in the upcoming mFLOW course. If you’d like to sample some of these practices yourself you can:
Download a FREE Guided Mindful Mind Wandering Meditation here.
Or you following these two practices for recovery and insight:
Recovery:
Attention can fatigue with use so taking a few unstructured mindful mind-wandering breaks can help restore your attention during a long day of focused activity. This session won’t necessarily yield creative insight but can leave you feeling refreshed and ready to get back to business. Find a special spot in nature if possible. A bench with a view or a grassy area under a tree would be ideal, but just sitting in your car will do. The instructions are easy: give yourself permission to just sit, relax, and do nothing. Let your mind zone out and wander wherever it wants to go. When you notice it getting caught up in something that doesn’t feel good, come back to your breathing and repeat.
Insight:
Practice approaching a mindful mind wandering session with the intention to reflect on a specific situation that needs clarity. Choose to “sit with it” until an insight or new perspective arises. This can also be done to process a past event or plan for an upcoming project. During this practice, you’re not trying to figure anything out or solve a problem in a traditional sense. You’re simply stating a topic and opening up with curiosity and non-attachment. You only need to apply a gentle effort to keep the stream of consciousness moving in a constructive direction.
