How do you Train Yourself to Spend Time Alone With Your Thoughts?

How would you pass the time if you were waiting in line, riding a bus, or lounging on your couch at home and had a few minutes to spare? Like most people these days, you probably start browsing your phone, but what if you decide to ignore everything around you, focus on your own thoughts, and find a way to amuse yourself with fun thoughts? How challenging is that to accomplish?

Note: This article is based on blogger and University of Virginia PhD candidate in social psychology Remy Furreris, who tells us about his experience in creating fun ideas.

At first glance, it appears to be simple and feasible to implement. In the end, human beings are endowed with unique minds that are capable of reflecting on the past, managing the present, and even making projections about the future. We can focus our thoughts on positive or negative situations, and real or imagined scenarios and events. Given the countless shapes our thoughts can take, why wouldn't we dive into our own minds and indulge in them when given the chance to disconnect from the outside world?

Approximately ten years ago, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University began investigating this issue by inviting volunteers to spend time in a room devoid of all distractions except a defibrillator, occupying themselves with their thoughts.

Their results, which were revealed in a series of studies published in 2014, were shocking. As the findings confirmed, 67% of men and 25% of women preferred to purposefully shock themselves over spending a brief period of time alone with their thoughts. After that, when given complete freedom to sit alone and think for themselves, people typically experience low to moderate levels of enjoyment.

The human race, which is renowned for its exceptional cognitive abilities, considers these findings surprising. This raises questions on the meaning of our species' name, Homo sapiens, which is a translation of the Latin for "wise man."

Although we have a remarkable ability to simulate other worlds in our minds, it takes a lot of knowledge to do so, and we aren't always well trained to do it. It is important to remember that our brains primarily evolved to regulate our body's metabolic needs through work.

The benefit of thinking about pleasant thoughts is not easy, especially when compared to the many other things to think about, such as planning, problem-solving, or even reflection, while attention to negative issues in our lives has its benefits but is undoubtedly not a pleasant thing. Therefore, thinking for enjoyment may take enough practice and stimulation, and people may need a little prodding, and thinking can be made more enjoyable.

In a recent experiment, a group of social psychologists from around the world under the direction of Nicholas Buttrick and Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia asked their volunteers to take a "thinking break" to concentrate solely on their fun ideas for the purpose of enjoying the experience.

However, the researchers discovered that people did not particularly enjoy the experience associated with other activities, even when they were instructed to think of specific pleasurable thoughts. Through a series of studies involving participants from 11 different countries, it was discovered that those who were given the task of thinking for fun found it to be significantly less enjoyable than those who were given the task of engaging in other solo activities, such as reading or watching videos.

The findings were consistent across cultures, suggesting that rather than spending time contemplating enjoyable subjects of their own creation, people prefer activities that provide an external source of entertainment.

To better understand why it is so difficult to think for pleasure, divide the activity into two parts: thought processes and thought contents. Thought processes refer to intent, such as having enough motivation and ability to think for pleasure, whereas thought contents refer to the topics of the individual's thoughts and whether they are meaningful and/or enjoyable.

Although people may generally prefer an external stimulus over hedonistic thinking, a second series of recent studies has demonstrated that thinking can be made more enjoyable by simply reinforcing people's intentions to use their thoughts in this way.

When the researchers specifically asked the participants to come up with fun ideas rather than giving them the freedom to think whatever they wanted, the participants reported that the experience was noticeably more enjoyable. This implies that thinking for pleasure, especially thinking for pleasure on purpose, increases pleasure.

Another set of studies supported the significance of these factors when it came to the second element of the hedonistic thought process, which is the capacity to concentrate, generate ideas, and sustain one's attention on such thoughts for an extended period of time. After experimenting with hedonistic thinking for a while, participants reported that they had trouble focusing, and to the extent that they did, their enjoyment was noticeably diminished.

Fortunately, the same research discovered a simple solution for this aspect of the thinking process when the participants were first instructed to write a list of interesting topics and to compare their list to those who didn't write it down whenever they could during a thinking break. Participants had less trouble focusing, which increased their enjoyment of thinking.

The content of one's thoughts is the other crucial component of hedonistic thinking, which is brought up by this. What kind of thoughts bring them the most joy? Do we intuitively know what these thoughts are? According to research by Erin Westgate, most people are unaware of the best areas to concentrate on when intentionally thinking for pleasure.

In contrast to having participants come up with their own, which suggests that they found it difficult to come up with these topics themselves, my colleagues and I discovered that giving participants examples of fun thinking topics like accomplishments, social gatherings, and vacations increased their enjoyment. When asked to come up with fun ideas, people frequently fail to come up with practical ones.

We tested this in a second study where we presented the same topic examples to two groups of participants, but asked one group to consider meaningful thoughts and the other to consider fun thoughts. We were shocked to discover in comparison to those who were instructed to think for pleasure, those who were instructed to think meaningful thoughts reported that the experience was neither more nor less enjoyable.

Using text-language analysis, we discovered that participants who were asked to think of meaningful thoughts used fewer emotional words as well as fewer positive words than those who were asked to think for enjoyment. This allowed us to further investigate this. This suggests that meaningful and engaging topics are not ones that people choose on their own.

Our findings indicate that, generally speaking, when people are asked to think of pleasant thoughts, they do not always do so when asked to think of meaningful thoughts, which reduces their happiness. Likewise, when asked to think of meaningful thoughts, they do not always think of pleasant thoughts, which reduces their happiness once more.

All of this suggests that most of us lack the intuitive sense of how and what to concentrate on in order to enjoy our thought experience to the fullest. Now that you've finished reading this article and have some extra time on your hands, why not spend some time with your own thoughts? These findings fortunately point to two scientifically supported ways to make hedonistic thinking really fun.

What I can suggest to enhance your enjoyment of ideas is as follows

• Your intention should be to enjoy yourself, which means that you want to concentrate on the activities and facets of those activities that make you happy.
• Select interesting and fulfilling topics, such as social occasions and accomplishments.
• Before you start thinking about these subjects, write them down so you can refer to them later if you start to feel distracted.
• Establish a specific time for your thinking sessions. For example, start your thinking when you feel inspired to do so for pleasure, and stop when you feel that your thinking is requiring a lot of awareness.
• As with everything else, practice makes perfect, and the more you do it, the higher your hopes are for experiencing pleasure while thinking.

The life we lead is shaped by the ideas we develop, so it is in our best interests to spend some time doing so. While it may seem difficult at first, with a little practice, we can develop the cognitive abilities to take pleasure in simply enjoying our own ideas. In a world where the external environment demands a lot of our attention, I believe that we can all benefit from occasionally looking within to find both meaning and pleasure.