The role of the body in wandering thoughts, emotions, and mental health

What is it about?

We discovered a previously overlooked form of mind-wandering in which people’s thoughts drift toward sensations in their own bodies. We call this phenomenon “body-wandering.” Our results show that this state is surprisingly common during idle moments, is linked to people’s emotional experience and mental health, and has its own distinct “fingerprint” of brain connectivity. When we are bored or not focused on a task, our minds often drift into daydreams. Psychologists call this mind-wandering. Usually, we think of these drifting thoughts as being about memories, plans, or other people. But our research asked a different question: how often does the wandering mind turn toward the body itself? We found that people frequently report thoughts about internal sensations such as their heartbeat, breathing, or stomach. When these body-focused thoughts occurred, participants tended to experience more negative emotions in that moment, and their bodies showed signs of being more activated, such as a faster heartbeat. At the same time, individuals who reported more body-wandering overall showed lower levels of ADHD and depression symptoms. This suggests the relationship between bodily attention and mental health is complex. Focusing on bodily sensations may sometimes accompany unpleasant feelings in the moment, but people who naturally notice their bodily signals more often also appear to have fewer symptoms of these common mental health difficulties. Finally, we found that body-wandering has a distinct pattern of brain connectivity. Unlike typical mind-wandering, which is often linked to the prefrontal cortex—a brain region involved in planning, reflection, and other higher-level thinking—body-wandering involves networks that monitor signals from inside the body and regulate how alert or activated the body is.

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Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Most research on mind-wandering has treated it as a purely mental process. When scientists study drifting thoughts, they usually focus on memories, future plans, or social situations. Our findings suggest that this picture is incomplete. The wandering mind also turns toward the body itself, and these bodily sensations appear to shape the emotional tone of our thoughts. These embodied thoughts appear to relate both to people’s moment-to-moment emotional experience and to longer-term patterns of mental health. The results also highlight an important nuance. When people’s attention turns toward bodily sensations, it can sometimes accompany temporary feelings of tension or anxiety. At the same time, individuals who reported more body-wandering tended to show fewer symptoms of ADHD and depression. This suggests that the ability to notice internal bodily signals may play a role in how attention and emotional experience are regulated over time. The scale of the study also makes the findings unusually robust. As part of the Visceral Mind Project, we studied more than 500 Danish participants, combining brain scans with detailed reports of what people were thinking and feeling during idle moments. This allowed us to link people’s spontaneous thoughts, their emotional experience, and patterns of brain connectivity in the same dataset. Together, these results suggest that everyday thought is more deeply tied to the body than we typically assume. In the long run, understanding how attention moves between thoughts and bodily sensations could help researchers better understand attention, emotion regulation, and mental health conditions such as ADHD and depression.

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