A wandering mind is an unhappy mind

Harvard researchers used a phone app to ask thousands of people, at random moments, what they were doing and what they were thinking about. Almost half the time, people's minds were somewhere else, and they were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were focused on the moment.

For a stressed teenager, a wandering mind often lands on the same loud voices: the exam, the comparison, the worry. Stop, Listen, Ask gives the mind a simple job to do instead of drifting back to them.

Source: Killingsworth and Gilbert, Science, 2010.