Hate sitting alone amid wandering thoughts and have a constant itch to do something? Given the choice, many people would rather give themselves mild electric shocks than sit alone in a room for just 15 minutes, a new study reveals.
"We lack a comfort in just being alone with our thoughts. We are constantly looking to the external world for some sort of entertainment," explained Malia Mason, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York.
The results are a testament to our discomfort with our own thoughts, say psychologists, and to the challenge we face when we try to rein them in.
To understand why this happens, social psychologist Timothy Wilson from University of Virginia in Charlottesville and his team asked undergraduate students to stash their mobile phones and other distractions.
They were asked to sit in a sparsely furnished room for up to 15 minutes.
Afterwards, nearly half of the 409 participants said that they did not enjoy the experience.
The researchers were surprised.
"We have this huge brain that is full of pleasant memories and has the ability to tell stories and construct fantasies. It should not be that hard," Wilson added.
In the next experiment, participants were given a small electric shock that was so unpleasant that three-quarters of them said they would be willing to pay not to experience the shock again.
Yet when they were placed in the room to sit alone with their thoughts, 67 percent of male participants and 25 percent of female subjects were so eager to find something to do that they shocked themselves voluntarily.
"The discomfort comes from a lack of mental control: that it is difficult to tell our minds to stay on one topic and keep it there for a long time," Wilson noted in a paper published in the journal Science.
