In 2010, an interesting headline appeared in hundreds of sources, including Scientific American and the National Institutes of Health: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. In 2018, very different headlines, including one on the same National Institutes of Health website, read: “Mind Wandering Boosts Creativity”.

What gives?

Is mind wandering good or bad? A 2020 study concluded: “Our results indicated that frequency of mind wandering was linked to a risk of poorer mental health as well as to higher divergent thinking ability.” In other words, creativity.

In my experience, mind-wandering can indeed be both good and bad; it all depends on the content of the thoughts.

So what exactly is mind wandering? I looked up a bunch of different definitions (and there are hundreds!) and the one that I think best captures it is this one: “mind wandering has been defined as the state that occurs when attention drifts away from the current context and engages in an internal stream of thoughts, ideas, and imagery”.

Mind wandering is your attention wandering away from what you’re actually doing or where you actually are right now. Your body is sitting right here but your mind has travelled to a different time and place. And research shows we spend an awful lot of time in exactly that state.

So, what’s going to determine whether your mind wandering leads to unhappiness or to creativity? Intentionality and focus. Since we spend so much of our lives (at least half the time, according to research, and more like three-quarters of the time according to yours truly!) engaged in mind-wandering, much of that is just going to be habitual, or default. The trick is to accept that that’s just what human minds do, and figure out how to make it work for you.

A great way to do this is to always have a problem that you’re working on solving. If you’re an entrepreneur, it could be “how can I increase customer satisfaction?” or if you’re a leader it could be “how can I increase the level of engagement on my team?” You keep this “problem” in your mind, you remind yourself of it every day, even several times a day, so that when your mind wanders (which it will) it gravitates back to this problem. You turn a habit (mind wandering) into a tool. You’ll find that you have more and more creative solutions to your problem over time. It also helps if you make it a concrete, real-world problem, and relatively precise.

Practicing meditation can help with your ability to focus when you need to, but I’ve found that it’s best to accept that mind-wandering will happen in any case, and rather than fight it, harness it. Let your mind wander, but not just anywhere, and certainly NOT to self-obsessed, ruminative thoughts. That way lies unhappiness! Instead, let the wandering mind circle around solving a real-world problem. In time, your mind will make random connections and generate more creative solutions.