By Andrea Kay, USA Today
You don't have to save people from burning buildings or develop the cure for cancer to have a gratifying career.
Reward comes in here-and-there moments. The key is being "present" for those times.
Yes, as corny as that may sound and as many times as you might have heard it, there's a lot to be said for "being here now" when it comes to life in general and career satisfaction in particular.
But most people have a tough time doing that, and it's costing them their happiness.
A well-documented study conducted by two Harvard researchers who set out to measure happiness, shows that 47 percent of the time people think about something other than what they are doing, and that mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy.
Psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert concluded this after collecting data from more than 15,000 volunteers ages 18 to 88 from more than 80 countries in 86 different occupations.
They gathered the data through an iPhone application that tracks people's happiness, trackyourhappiness.org, asking at random intervals how happy someone was,what they were doing and whether they were thinking about their current activity or something else that was pleasant, neutral or unpleasant.
The study showed that mind-wandering occurred in all activities. When someone is working, they discovered a person's mind wanders 50 percent of the time. It makes you wonder if that's one reason so many people complain their work is not rewarding.
That tendency for the human mind to wander and think about what is not happening, is a cognitive achievement that comes with an emotional costs, say the researchers in the journal Science, adding, "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."
It's incredibly easy to mind-wander at work.
Just look at all the distractions. The sounds of people around you on the phone, using equipment or just walking by. If you're like many, you're trying to work on more than one thing at a time.
One of the biggest distractions are emotions. There's that frustration or anger you can't shake over yesterday's interaction with a client or co-worker. Or just worrying about something happening right in front of you.
Once, I was sitting in an audience listening to a conceptual artist from San Francisco respond to questions from his interviewer. I can't recall the question the interviewer asked, but I remember the artist's response: He just sat there and didn't say anything.
One, two, three awkward seconds passed. Then another five or so seconds of silence. At first, I thought he was stumped by the question. Or confused. Or ill. Finally he explained that he hadn't heard the question. He said he was worrying about the fact that his wife, who was in the front row of the audience and taping the interview on a hand-held camera, was going to use up the battery on the camera. "Could you repeat the question?" he asked.
The researchers found that things like worrying "seem to be incredibly destructive to happiness" and "that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the nonpresent," Killingsworth says in Harvard Science.
Even when they looked at more pleasant mind-wandering, they say it's not as good as just being focused on what you're doing.
The key, as many philosophies and religious traditions have taught for centuries, is to first notice when you're not "present" — like the conceptual artist who was worrying instead of listening to the question he was asked.
Then make a conscious decision to "be there" for the here and now.
And that can happen only one moment at a time.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/jobcenter/workplace/kay/story/2012-07-28/combat-unhappiness-on-the-job/56547616/1
No comments:
Post a Comment