YNOT – It’s a development that, frankly, will take no one by surprise: 2,200 people completing 250,000 mood status updates through the Harvard-created iPhone app “Track Your Happiness” indicated they were at their happiest when highly focused … and having sex.
In further research published in Science by the Harvard psychologists behind the iPhone happiness project, sex produced the highest rating of any activity recorded. Alas, mood ratings mid-coitus or immediately after remain unknown — which is unfortunate, as it would be interesting to know whether participants actually were happier during sex or afterward.
One surprising result emerged from Track Your Happiness: within the quarter-million responses, people reported that their minds were wandering 47 percent of the time, though it was unclear whether the wandering occurred only while they were using their iPhones to report on happiness levels.
The research seems to indicate that the more people’s minds wander, the less happy they feel. In fact, during sex, people reported wandering thoughts only 10 percent of the time. Exercise was next most joyful activity, followed by conversation, listening to music, walking, eating, praying, meditating and cooking.
Mappiness, another iPhone happiness tracking project, gathered data on 22,000 users in the UK and boasted more than a million ratings. According to it, for most people Saturday at 8 p.m. ranks the highest among times of day.
“If you ask people to imagine winning the lottery, they typically talk about the things they would do — ‘I’d go to Italy,’ ‘I’d buy a boat,’ ‘I’d lay on the beach’ — and they rarely mention the things they would think,” Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert told The New York Times. “But our data suggest that the location of the body is much less important than the location of the mind, and that the former has surprisingly little influence on the latter. The heart goes where the head takes it, and neither cares much about the whereabouts of the feet.”
If you’re interested in tracking your own happiness levels, the Harvard researchers continue to seek more app users.
