“It’s now extremely easy to ‘kill time.’ On the bus on your way to work, you can check your phone rather than immerse yourself in your internal free-floating thinking, because you predict thinking will be boring,” he said. “However, if that prediction is inaccurate, you are missing an opportunity to positively engage yourself without relying on such stimulation.” Kou Murayama The American Psychological Association reports that: “The researchers found that people enjoyed spending time with their thoughts significantly more than they had predicted. This held true across variations of the experiment in which participants sat in a bare conference room or in a small, dark tented area with no visual stimulation; variations in which the thinking period lasted for three minutes or for 20 minutes; and one variation in which the researchers asked people to report on their enjoyment midway through the task instead of after it was over. In every case, participants enjoyed thinking more than they had expected to.”
Today, test this for yourself. Yes, you may expect that just sitting and letting your thoughts wonder will be boring, but research tells that this prediction is consistently inaccurate. If 20 minutes feels like too long, try just 10 minutes. You may be surprised by how rewarding free floating thinking can be. You want to read the full paper? Here it is.
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