Mind Wandering to Physical Sensations Could Impact Your Mental Health

Human minds often wander. Whether we’re busy at work, doing household chores, or exercising, our thoughts often wander away from the task at hand. These spontaneous thoughts sometimes turn to bodily sensations, like our heartbeat or our breathing, and this could affect our immediate emotional state and long-term mental healththe researchers report on March 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Many studies focus on thinking about memories, events, and other people, what scientists consider the cognitive aspects of life. the mind wanderssays Micah Allen, a neuroscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark. This research suggests that mind wandering plays an important role in planning, learning, creativity and other important mental processes. This was also linked to negative emotions and some, like obsessively ruminating about past mistakes, can contribute to depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other mental illnesses.

But how the mind might drift toward bodily sensations, what some researchers call “body wandering,” and its effects, has been largely overlooked, Allen says.

He and his colleagues asked 536 people to stand still in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, then fill out a questionnaire about what was on their minds during that time. In addition to typical daydream content, like memories, plans, or social interactions, participants reported paying attention to sensations in their body, like their breathing, heartbeat, and bladder. The team also found evidence of this in MRI scans: body wandering appeared to have a distinct brain signature from that of “cognitive” mind wandering.

The questionnaires showed that the more people reported engaging in body wandering, the more likely they were to report feeling negative emotions during the MRI. Leah Banellis, study co-author and neuroscientist at Aarhus University, notes that the negative emotional experience of body wandering may be unique to the small enclosed space of an MRI scanner. But there is evidence that this relationship holds outside of this specific context. A 2024 study in which people were asked to track their experiences via their smartphone throughout the day also found that focusing on their body was more important. associated with negative mood.

On the other hand, participants who reported more body wandering overall appeared to have fewer symptoms of depression and ADHD, according to the questionnaire results. In other studies, both conditions have been linked to levels above average traditional, cognition-specific mind wandering and impaired interoception, the ability to connect to one’s bodily sensations. These findings suggest that being in tune with one’s internal sensations may protect against certain harmful thought patterns, the authors say. And while experiencing negative emotions at one point may coincide with increased body wandering, over time a tendency to interact with bodily cues may have a more grounding or protective role, particularly for individuals prone to negative ruminations or attention difficulties, Banellis says.

“This is a rigorously conducted study that characterizes a new and interesting aspect of mind wandering,” says Daniel Smilek, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who was not involved in the work (but has collaborated with one of the study’s co-authors in the past). Like Banellis, he notes the study’s unique setting — within the confines of an MRI scanner — and says it would be useful to examine how people “wander” while performing different tasks throughout the day.

A major limitation of this study is that participants’ inner thoughts were probed only once, after the session was over, says Aaron Kucyi, a neuroscientist who was not involved in the work but who peer-reviewed the study. “We know from research on mind wandering that it is dynamic, that it varies over time, and that it happens differently in different individuals,” says Kucyi, of Drexel University in Philadelphia. “A single, cross-sectional measure that attempts to summarize their entire experience during this period might miss the nuances.”

Nevertheless, this work makes an important contribution to the field, says Kucyi. Until now, researchers studying interoception and mind wandering have largely lived in separate worlds, but these findings will most likely encourage these two groups to begin integrating their work, he says. “I think it’s going to have an influence.”