Daydreams, mind-wandering and rumination: What you think about can affect your feelings and mood

Numerous types of thoughts pass through your mind over the course of a day.

You may be reminiscing about your last vacation, thinking about a news story, recalling a funny conversation or brainstorming ideas for weekend plans.

Not only are these thoughts highly prevalent in everyday life, but they also have wide-ranging impacts on how we function.

Our research shows that different types of thoughts are meaningfully tied to emotional well-being.

By understanding these connections, individuals can identify new ways to support and improve their mental health.

This is especially pressing given the global increase in mental-health challenges , compounded by the shortage and burnout of mental-health professionals .

Given these challenges, we believe expanding mental-health approaches to include prevention, in addition to intervention, may be important.

Prevention initiatives will require an understanding of how clinically significant thought patterns arise in order to inform effective prevention strategies, which may ultimately prevent everyday stress from turning into mental-health problems.

As a team of cognitive scientists who study mind-wandering and its ties to emotional well-being — as well as the brain and eye-movement patterns that support the wandering mind — we carried out several studies to examine the relationship between thoughts and emotions.

In short, we found that what people think about is strongly linked to how they feel.

Thoughts and feelings In a series of studies, we first set out to understand this relationship in the student population in Canada and the United States.

Over the course of a week, we sent several short surveys to individuals every day asking them to report what type of thoughts they think about and how they feel.

This allows us to capture their naturalistic thoughts and emotions in the moment as they go about their everyday life.

We found that individuals tend to report worse mood when they experience off-task thoughts, often referred to as mind-wandering (for example, you may be thinking about what to make for dinner tonight while you are at work).