Why does a wandering mind not mean you failed?

A sit full of wandering isn’t a failed sit. If anything, the research of the past fifteen years points the other way: the drifting is the normal part, and catching it is the part that actually happens during practice.

The usual fear goes like this. You decide to rest your attention on one plain sound for a few minutes, and by the second minute you’re replaying a conversation or drafting tomorrow’s list. You decide you’re bad at this. That conclusion assumes a mind should be able to hold still if it’s trying hard enough. Four papers, read in the order they came out, took that assumption apart one piece at a time.

2010: How much of a day is spent somewhere else?

Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert asked a simple question and gave their paper a blunt title: A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. They checked in on people at random points in their everyday lives and asked what they were doing and what they were thinking about. Close to half the time, the answer was something other than the task in front of them.

Those people weren’t meditating. They were working, commuting, talking and doing chores. The drift showed up across all of it as a background condition of being awake.

The same study found that people reported feeling somewhat less happy in the moments their minds had strayed. That finding deserves to be stated carefully. It’s a correlation drawn from ordinary daily activities. It says nothing about how a three-minute sit should go, and it never showed that anyone, anywhere, had a mind that stayed put.

2012: Noticing gets its own button

Two years later, Wendy Hasenkamp, Christine Wilson-Mendenhall, Erica Duncan and Lawrence Barsalou put practiced meditators in a brain scanner and asked them to rest on the breath. The design detail that matters here is that whenever a participant realized their attention had slipped away, they pressed a button.

The button turned the realization into a recorded event, with a time stamp of its own. The researchers then described focused practice as a loop with four phases: the mind wanders, the person becomes aware of it, attention shifts back, and attention stays for a while before the loop starts again.

It was a small study. Its framing still did something useful. In this model the moment of catching yourself isn’t what’s left over after you failed to concentrate. It’s one of the four parts the practice is made of, and a sit that runs through the loop many times is running exactly as described.

2015: The stream, mapped

In 2015, Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler reviewed the growing research on mind wandering for the Annual Review of Psychology. Their account of ordinary experience is unglamorous. Attention keeps moving away from whatever the current task is, toward unrelated thoughts and feelings, and it seldom holds one topic for long without sliding off.

On that account, drifting is how thought normally moves, not a defect that some people have more of. Sitting down with one sound doesn’t switch that movement off. What it can do is give the movement a plain enough background that you finally see it happening.

2016: Is every drift the same kind?

The next year, Paul Seli, Evan Risko, Daniel Smilek and Daniel Schacter added a distinction that complicates the idea of a tally. In their review, mind wandering that happens deliberately and mind wandering that happens without any intention behind it are two different experiences that can be pulled apart, not one lapse wearing two names.

That matters for the inner voice that says I drifted again. That voice counts every departure as the same mistake. The researchers studying these departures don’t count them that way, and none of them proposed a grading scale.

Still true: each return stands on its own

Put the four papers side by side and a fairly plain picture comes out.

• A mind elsewhere about half the time is ordinary life, not a problem with your sit.
• The catch is a step of its own in the practice.
• Drifting is part of how thought normally moves.
• Not all drifting is one thing, so there’s nothing to tally.

None of this tells you how a sit ought to feel. It does take away the standard many people bring to one, which is an unbroken stretch of attention that no study has ever recorded.

In practice, coming back can be the whole task each time. You notice you’ve left, maybe give it a one-word label like planning, and return to the sound without going back over where you went. Whether the sound comes from moonMind, a fan or anything else steady and plain doesn’t change the shape of the loop. A short sit that was mostly drifting and a short sit that was mostly sound both ran the same cycle. One just went around it more often.

Where this history stops

These four papers are one large study of thoughts during everyday activities, one small imaging study of meditators reporting on their own attention, and two reviews. They don’t measure any specific sit, sound or result, and they aren’t a recipe for how practice should go.

Do not grade the sit.

This isn’t medical advice, and nothing in this post claims that listening to a steady sound changes the way attention works.

Sources

1. Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 2010, 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
2. Hasenkamp W, Wilson-Mendenhall CD, Duncan E, Barsalou LW. Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: a fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states. NeuroImage, 2012, 59(1), 750–760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.008
3. Seli P, Risko EF, Smilek D, Schacter DL. Mind-wandering with and without intention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2016, 20(8), 605–617. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.05.010
4. Smallwood J, Schooler JW. The science of mind wandering: empirically navigating the stream of consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 2015, 66, 487–518. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015331