“In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.”

Why it was said

Johann Hari writes this in Stolen Focus (2022), in his chapter on the collapse of mind-wandering, one of the twelve causes he gives for our weakening attention. He draws on conversations with psychologists who study the wandering mind, among them Jonathan Smallwood.

What it actually means

Much productivity advice treats a wandering mind as a fault to be trained out. Hari's point, built on that research, is that mind-wandering is not good or bad in itself; what decides its effect is the state a person is in when it happens. When someone feels safe and rested, a drifting mind connects ideas, plans ahead and makes sense of experience, which is why ideas often arrive on a walk or in the shower. When someone is anxious or under threat, the same drift turns into rumination and replays the worry. The practical consequence is that unstructured time only helps if the conditions around it are calm. The research on mind-wandering is still developing, and the two-sided picture Hari describes is a reasonable summary of it rather than a settled law.

How to use it

1. 1Protect twenty minutes this week with no phone and no input, such as a walk, at a time of day when you feel relatively calm.
2. 2If your mind keeps returning to the same worry when you stop working, write the worry down with one next step before you try to rest.