Daydreaming App

Does your mind wander all day, do you daydream a lot? You might be doing it more than you think and it could be what's bumming you out.

We all daydream once in a while, but that daydreaming might not be as harmless as it seems. Researchers wanted to find out both how much someone daydreams and how that daydreaming affected their mood. So using an iPhone app, they had people track both how frequently their mind wandered during the day and how their mood might have changed.

Turns out, daydreaming happens more often than most of us thought with most people reporting having meandering thoughts about half the time they were questioned by their smart phone "app". They also consistently reported a lower mood when they where daydreaming, even though they may have been daydreaming about pleasant things.

Researchers think this could be because although daydreaming is our brains way of figuring out past events or how to proceed with future issues, it does come at the emotional cost of lowering our mood. Experts say that may have more to do with the fact that the more we worry about something the more our mind wanders.

There aren't any big answers to what this all means but if you want to help researchers figure it out---"there's an app" for that. To get the app go to www.trackyourhappiness.org.