>Even more intriguingly, they discovered that people's feelings of happiness had much more to do with where their mind was than what they were doing. Only 4.6% of a person's happiness could be attributed to what they were doing, but 10.8% of it was caused by what they were thinking about at the time, and people consistently reported being happiest when their minds were on what they were doing.
However, what I'd suggest is that the happiness associated with an activity isn't 100% a function of the activity in and of itself, but whether or not you're in the right mindset for that activity at the time. Thus it would be possible for the wandering mind to be an effect and not a cause and still be more strongly correlated with happiness than the nature of the activity itself.
>Even more intriguingly, they discovered that people's feelings of happiness had much more to do with where their mind was than what they were doing. Only 4.6% of a person's happiness could be attributed to what they were doing, but 10.8% of it was caused by what they were thinking about at the time, and people consistently reported being happiest when their minds were on what they were doing.
However, what I'd suggest is that the happiness associated with an activity isn't 100% a function of the activity in and of itself, but whether or not you're in the right mindset for that activity at the time. Thus it would be possible for the wandering mind to be an effect and not a cause and still be more strongly correlated with happiness than the nature of the activity itself.