Patterns of Ongoing Thought in the Real World and Their Link to Mental Health and Well-Being

The thoughts we experience in daily life have important implications for our health and well-being. However, it is often difficult to measure thoughts patterns outside of laboratory conditions due to concerns about the voracity of measurements taken outside of controlled laboratory conditions. To address this gap in the literature, our study set out to measure patterns of thought as they occur in daily life and assess the robustness of these measures and their associations with traits measurements of health and well-being. A sample of undergraduate participants completed multi-dimensional experience sampling (mDES) surveys eight times per day for five days in daily life. Principal component analysis (PCA) reduced these data to identify the dimensions that explained the patterns of thoughts reported in our study. We used (LMM) modelling to map how these ‘thought patterns’ relate to the activities taking place, highlighting good consistency within the sample, as well as substantial overlap with prior work. Multiple regression was used to examine the association between patterns of ongoing thought and aspects of mental health and well-being, highlighting a pattern of negative intrusive distraction that had a positive association with anxiety, and a negative association with social well-being. Notably, states of intrusive distraction tended to be most prevalent in solo activities and was relatively suppressed when interacting with other people (either in person or virtually). Our study, therefore, highlights the use of mDES as a tool to understand how thoughts in daily life impact on our mental health and well-being and highlight an important role in social connectedness in the etiology of intrusive thinking.