where your attention goes

almost everything built for your attention wants it pointed outward: the feed, the game, the show, the advert between them. but nothing you have ever experienced happened out there. it happened in you, through you, as a perception. this page is about what the research says happens when attention turns back inward, and it is not a simple story: there are two kinds of inward, and one of them is the unhappy kind.

the idea

here is the claim, in my words. our culture is obsessed with looking outside ourselves. social media, games, television, the feed, all of it keeps attention on the external world, and most of what is out there was built by someone who wants you to buy something or feel something they chose. but every experience you have ever had was perceived through an internal lens. your whole experience, always, comes from within. so where you spend your attention decides who is steering. spend it outside and you are driven by external forces. turn it inward and you experience your own inner world more, and you can influence it. i think that is where our true divinity lies. you do not have to use that word. the older traditions used it, the research below does not, and the rest of this page is what the research can and cannot support.

what the research says

there are two kinds of inward, and one of them is the unhappy kind

the best-known study of attention and happiness pinged 2,250 adults on their phones at random moments and asked three things: how do you feel, what are you doing, and are you thinking about something other than what you are doing^[1]. minds were wandering in 46.9 percent of samples, in at least 30 percent of samples during every activity but one. people were less happy when their minds wandered than when they were not, during every activity including the least enjoyable. and the part that matters here: people were no happier when wandering to pleasant topics than when attending to what they were doing, and considerably unhappier when wandering to neutral or unpleasant ones. what people were thinking predicted their happiness better than what they were doing^[1].

read carefully, that cuts against a naive version of this page. the mind that leaves the present and goes somewhere else is the unhappy mind, and a mind that goes inward to replay, worry and analyse is doing exactly that. the depression literature has a name for it. rumination, focusing on your symptoms and their possible causes and consequences, predicts longer and more frequent depressive episodes, worse problem-solving and eroded social support^[2][3], and it shows up in anxiety, binge eating and self-harm too^[3]. so inward is not automatically good. inward as rumination is one of the best-documented bad habits a mind can have.

the research also found the other kind. in 1999 two psychologists showed that the standard scale for self-attention had been mixing two unrelated traits, rumination and reflection, which explained a paradox in the field: people who attended to themselves more knew themselves better and suffered more^[4]. once you separate the traits, the curious kind is not the distressed kind. and experiments found the lever that moves one into the other: asking why about a painful experience from a step back, a self-distanced perspective, let people work through it without reheating the emotion, while asking why from inside the memory did the opposite^[5]. people who spontaneously take that step back are less reactive in the moment, less intrusive in their thoughts weeks later, and better at solving problems in conflicts with partners^[6].

so the honest version of “go inward” is: attend to what is actually happening in you now, and when you examine something painful, examine it from a little distance. the version that circles the same hurt from inside it is the thing the evidence warns about.

who you think is driving

in 1966 julian rotter named the difference between people who expect outcomes to follow from their own actions and people who expect them to come from outside forces: an internal versus an external locus of control^[7]. it is the closest thing psychology has to the idea on this page. the largest pooling of that work, 152 samples and 33,224 adults without a diagnosis across 18 cultural regions, found that an external locus correlated 0.30 with depression symptoms and 0.30 with anxiety symptoms^[8]. that is a moderate correlation and a consistent one.

two caveats, both from the same study. these are correlations in cross-sectional self-report, so they cannot say whether feeling driven makes you low or feeling low makes you feel driven. and the meaning of external control is not the same everywhere: the anxiety link was weaker in collectivist societies, and people there may endorse “outside forces” items without the negative load those items carry in the west^[8]. there is a third caveat the field itself raises: an internal locus taken too far becomes blaming yourself for everything, which is rumination by another name^[3]. the useful version is not “everything is my fault”. it is “my response is mine”.

what you want, and where you got it

attention pointed outward tends to come back carrying wants. the research on extrinsic goals is thirty years old and unusually consistent. in 1993, people whose central aspiration was financial success had lower wellbeing and, in a non-student sample, lower rated adjustment and more behavioural problems^[9]. in 1996 the finding was widened: aspirations for money, an appealing appearance and social recognition went with lower vitality and more physical symptoms, while aspirations for self-acceptance, close relationships, community and health went with higher wellbeing and less distress^[10].

the meta-analysis that pooled all of it, 753 effect sizes from 259 samples, found materialism correlated −0.19 with wellbeing on the broad measures and about −0.13 to −0.15 with life satisfaction specifically^[11]. small by the usual yardsticks, and larger where it bites hardest: risky health and consumer behaviours and harsh self-judgement, −0.28 to −0.44^[11]. the authors' best explanation for the link is poor satisfaction of basic psychological needs: the wants that come in from outside crowd out the ones that would have fed you^[11]. almost all of this is cross-sectional, so hold the direction loosely.

the feed, in both directions

this is where the argument usually gets overstated, so here are the numbers as the papers state them. for the idea: in a randomised trial of 2,743 american facebook users, deactivating the account for the four weeks before the 2018 midterm improved an index of wellbeing by 0.09 standard deviations, with gains in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression and anxiety; the authors put that at about a quarter to two fifths of the effect of psychological interventions in a meta-analysis they cite^[12]. people also knew less news and were less polarised. afterwards they used the app about 22 percent less, five percent still had the account off nine weeks later, and the amount they would need to be paid to stay off for another month dropped by up to 14 percent: once off it, people valued it less than they had predicted^[12]. a smaller trial of 143 students who capped three platforms at ten minutes each a day for three weeks found lower loneliness and depression than controls^[13]. a natural experiment on facebook's college-by-college rollout in 2004 to 2006 found worse student mental health after arrival, with social comparison as the likeliest mechanism^[14]. two much larger deactivation experiments before the 2020 election, still a working paper, found six weeks off facebook improved an emotional-state index by 0.060 standard deviations and six weeks off instagram by 0.041^[15]. a 2025 meta-analysis of 32 randomised restriction trials, 5,544 people, put the pooled effect at g = 0.17 and described that as “only weak support”^[16].

against the idea, or at least against the loud version of it: in 355,358 adolescents across three large datasets, digital technology use explained at most 0.4 percent of the variation in wellbeing, which the authors judged too small to warrant policy change^[17]. a 2020 review of the field found mostly correlational work producing “a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations”, and said the best preregistered studies report associations “unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance”^[18]. the authors of the deactivation trial themselves say their causal effects are “far smaller” than the correlational literature would have predicted^[12].

both sets of numbers are true at once. stepping off the feed helps a little, reliably, in trials. the amount of time on screens explains almost nothing about how a population of teenagers is doing. the claim this page can support is narrow: the feed is an hour or two a day of attention spent outside, and getting some of it back has a small, real, measured benefit. the claim it cannot support is that screens are why anyone is depressed.

the adverts between the posts

the feed is paid for by the thing adam's idea is really about: content built to make you want. in a dutch cohort of 466 children aged 8 to 11 followed for a year, advertising exposure raised materialism, entirely through wanting the advertised products^[20], and low life satisfaction turned into materialism only in the children who saw a lot of adverts, which the authors read as adverts teaching children that things are how you cope^[19]. at the national scale, about 900,000 europeans across 27 countries and three decades: years of higher advertising spend were followed by lower life satisfaction, after controls for income, growth, country and year. the authors estimate that doubling a country's advertising would cut life satisfaction by about 3 percent, roughly half the size of the marriage effect in the same data, and they are careful to say more research is needed^[21]. it is the best evidence there is that an industry devoted to manufacturing wants has a measurable cost, and it is observational.

the inside has a body

“inward” is not only thoughts. interoception, the sensing of signals from inside the body, is now the mainstream account of where emotional feeling comes from: the heart, gut and breath are read by the brain and emotions are built partly out of that reading^[23]. the practices that train attention on the body have been tested properly. in 47 randomised trials with active controls, 3,515 people, mindfulness programmes had moderate evidence for small to moderate improvements in anxiety (effect size 0.38 at eight weeks), depression (0.30) and pain (0.33), and no evidence of being better than other active treatments such as exercise, therapy or medication^[22]. real, modest, not magic. and being alone with yourself has its own finding: solitude lowers high-arousal feeling of both kinds, the excitement as well as the anxiety, so it is deactivating rather than automatically good; it only became relaxing when people chose it and chose what to think about^[24]. chosen matters. that is the locus of control finding again, in a quieter room.

the older version of this idea

none of this is new. the traditions got there first, some of them two thousand years ago, in their own language, and they are offered here as traditions, not as evidence. read them as four ways of saying the same thing the research keeps circling: the place where experience happens is inside, and what you attend to there is the one thing that is yours.

• luke 17:21. asked when the kingdom of god would come, jesus answers that it “cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of god is within you”^[25]. that is the king james wording; many modern translations read “among you” or “in your midst”, and the greek allows both. either way, the answer to “where” is not “out there”.
• marcus aurelius, meditations 7.59. “look within; within is the fountain of all good. such a fountain, where springing waters can never fail, so thou dig still deeper and deeper”^[26]. written to himself, by a man running an empire, as a note on where to put his attention.
• epictetus, enchiridion 1. “there are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office”^[27]. a former slave wrote the locus of control scale nineteen centuries before rotter did^[7].
• chandogya upanishad 6.8.7. a father teaching his son: “that which is that subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. it is the true. it is the self, and thou, o svetaketu, art it”^[28]. tat tvam asi, you are that. the strongest statement in any tradition that what you are looking for outside is what is looking.
• william james, 1890. the founder of american psychology, in the chapter on attention: “millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. why? because they have no interest for me. my experience is what i agree to attend to”^[29]. a century before the feed, a description of exactly what the feed is competing for.

call it divinity, call it the self, call it attention. the word is yours to pick. the claim underneath it is the same in each: experience is made inside, and what you agree to attend to is the one lever you actually hold.

what to actually do

small things, none of them prescriptions. they are what the studies above make reasonable, and each is sized to be done tomorrow.

• treat attention as a budget. you have perhaps sixteen waking hours. a feed is one to two of them spent on things other people chose. the trials say getting some of that back helps a little and reliably^[12][16]; the trial that worked used ten minutes a platform a day^[13]. that is a trial setting, not a rule. pick your own.
• check in with yourself once a day, in your own words. not to fix anything. a minute of saying how the day actually was is attention to what is happening in you, which is the kind the mind-wandering study rewarded^[1]. if you want a place for it, the veisund app has a daily mirror: a voice check-in that is processed on your phone and never uploaded, so it is a private record of how you have actually been.
• when it turns into circling, step back. the test is simple: are you learning something, or replaying it? if replaying, ask why from a distance, as if watching it happen to someone else^[5][6]. that is the experimental move that separates reflection from rumination.
• notice where a want came from. before you buy or chase, ask who put the want there. the children's data say adverts turn unhappiness into wanting^[19][20]; the adult data say the wants that come from outside are the ones that do not feed you^[11].
• choose some solitude, and choose what to think about in it. chosen solitude relaxed people; imposed solitude just flattened them^[24]. the choosing is the point.
• if you are already in treatment, none of this replaces it. mindfulness beat waiting lists and matched, not beat, other active treatments^[22]. keep what is working. never change a medication on your own.

questions people ask

sources

1. Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science 2010;330(6006):932. 2,250 adults sampled by iPhone at random moments (nearly a quarter of a million samples in the database). “Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of the samples”; “people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not [slope (b) = –8.79, P < 0.001], and this was true during all activities”; “people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity (b = –0.52, not significant) and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics (b = –7.2) or unpleasant topics (b = –23.9)”; “what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing.” Time-lag analyses “strongly suggested that mind wandering in our sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness.” Correlational within people; self-selected iPhone users. PMID 21071660. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21071660/
2. Nolen-Hoeksema S. Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 1991;100(4):569-582. The response styles theory: “People who engage in ruminative responses to depression, focusing on their symptoms and the possible causes and consequences of their symptoms, will show longer depressions than people who take action to distract themselves from their symptoms.” PMID 1757671. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1757671/
3. Nolen-Hoeksema S, Wisco BE, Lyubomirsky S. Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2008;3(5):400-424. Review: “rumination exacerbates depression, enhances negative thinking, impairs problem solving, interferes with instrumental behavior, and erodes social support”; it “appears to more consistently predict the onset of depression rather than the duration”; and “positive distractions has not consistently been correlated with lower levels of depressive symptoms in correlational studies, although dozens of experimental studies show positive distractions relieve depressed mood.” Highlights “the distinction between rumination and more adaptive forms of self-reflection.” PMID 26158958. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158958/
4. Trapnell PD, Campbell JD. Private self-consciousness and the five-factor model of personality: distinguishing rumination from reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999;76(2):284-304. Four studies. The private self-consciousness scale “confounds two unrelated, motivationally distinct dispositions–rumination and reflection–and that this confounding may account for the ‘self-absorption paradox’”: higher self-attention “associated with more accurate and extensive self-knowledge yet higher levels of psychological distress.” PMID 10074710. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10074710/
5. Kross E, Ayduk O, Mischel W. When asking “why” does not hurt. Distinguishing rumination from reflective processing of negative emotions. Psychological Science 2005;16(9):709-715. Two experiments after recalling an anger-provoking experience: a “why” focus from a self-distanced perspective “was expected to enable ‘cool,’ reflective processing of emotions, in which individuals can focus on their experience without reactivating excessive ‘hot’ negative affect. Findings were consistent with this hypothesis.” Lab studies, students. PMID 16137257. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16137257/
6. Ayduk O, Kross E. From a distance: implications of spontaneous self-distancing for adaptive self-reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2010;98(5):809-829. Three studies: “the more participants spontaneously self-distanced while reflecting on negative memories, the less emotional (Studies 1-3) and cardiovascular (Study 2) reactivity they displayed in the short term”, with “lower emotional reactivity and intrusive ideation over time” and “more problem-solving behavior and less reciprocation of negativity during conflicts among couples.” PMID 20438226. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20438226/
7. Rotter JB. Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs 1966;80(1):1-28. The origin of the locus of control construct and its scale; cited here for the idea, not for a number. PMID 5340840. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5340840/
8. Cheng C, Cheung SF, Chio JH, Chan MP. Cultural meaning of perceived control: a meta-analysis of locus of control and psychological symptoms across 18 cultural regions. Psychological Bulletin 2013;139(1):152-188. 152 independent samples, 33,224 adults, nonclinical. “Moderately strong relationships for external LOC with depression symptoms (k = 123, N = 28,490, r = .30, 95% confidence interval [CI] [.27, .32]) and anxiety symptoms (k = 65, N = 13,208, r = .30, 95% CI [.27, .33]).” The anxiety link was weaker in collectivist societies (r = .20 vs .32), and “external LOC does not carry the same negative connotations across cultures.” Cross-sectional self-report; direction of cause not established. PMID 22642229. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22642229/
9. Kasser T, Ryan RM. A dark side of the American dream: correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1993;65(2):410-422. Three studies: “the relative centrality of money-related values and expectancies is negatively related to college students’ well-being and mental health”, and in a non-college sample “a high centrality of aspirations for financial success is associated with interview ratings of lower global adjustment and social productivity and more behavioral disorders.” PMID 8366427. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8366427/
10. Kasser T, Ryan RM. Further examining the American dream: differential correlates of intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 1996;22(3):280-287. “The relative importance and efficacy of extrinsic aspirations for financial success, an appealing appearance, and social recognition were associated with lower vitality and self-actualization and more physical symptoms. Conversely, the relative importance and efficacy of intrinsic aspirations for self-acceptance, affiliation, community feeling, and physical health were associated with higher well-being and less distress.” Two samples, correlational. DOI 10.1177/0146167296223006. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167296223006
11. Dittmar H, Bond R, Hurst M, Kasser T. The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: a meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2014;107(5):879-924. 753 effect sizes from 259 independent samples. “Materialism was associated with significantly lower well-being for the most widely used, multifaceted measures (materialist values and beliefs, r = -.19, ρ = -.24; relative importance of materialist goals, r = -.16, ρ = -.21), more than for measures assessing emphasis on money alone (rs = -.08 to -.11)”; largest for risky health and consumer behaviours and negative self-appraisals (rs = -.28 to -.44), “weakest effects for life satisfaction and negative affect (rs = -.13 to -.15)”. Mediation analyses point to “poor psychological need satisfaction.” Mostly cross-sectional. PMID 25347131. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25347131/
12. Allcott H, Braghieri L, Eichmeyer S, Gentzkow M. The welfare effects of social media. American Economic Review 2020;110(3):629-676. Randomised trial, 2,743 US Facebook users recruited through Facebook adverts, deactivation for the four weeks before the November 2018 midterm. “Our overall index of subjective well-being improved by 0.09 standard deviations”, which the authors put at “about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy, group training, and individual therapy”; the index of news knowledge fell 0.19 SD and political polarization 0.16 SD; afterwards the treatment group’s app use was “about 11 minutes (22 percent) lower”, the post-experiment use index 0.61 SD lower, and willingness-to-accept to stay off for a further four weeks dropped “by up to 14 percent” (median $100, mean $180 before). “The magnitudes of our causal effects are far smaller than those we would have estimated using the correlational approach of much prior literature.” Read in the authors’ Stanford copy. DOI 10.1257/aer.20190658. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190658
13. Hunt MG, Marx R, Lipson C, Young J. No more FOMO: limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 2018;37(10):751-768. 143 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates randomised to limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes per platform per day, or use as usual, for three weeks: “The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring.” Small, one campus. DOI 10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10.751
14. Braghieri L, Levy R, Makarin A. Social media and mental health. American Economic Review 2022;112(11):3660-3693. Natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges, 2004 to 2006, against student mental health surveys. “The rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests the results are due to Facebook fostering unfavorable social comparisons.” Quasi-experimental; the abstract was read, the full text is paywalled, so no magnitude is quoted here. DOI 10.1257/aer.20211218. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20211218
15. Allcott H, Gentzkow M, et al. The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users’ emotional state. NBER Working Paper 33697, April 2025 (working paper, not yet a journal article). Two large randomised experiments before the 2020 US election: “People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls.” Exploratory: the Facebook effect “is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.” DOI 10.3386/w33697. https://www.nber.org/papers/w33697
16. Burnell K, Meter DJ, Andrade FC, Slocum RE, George MJ. The effects of social media restriction: meta-analytic evidence from randomized controlled trials. SSM - Mental Health 2025;7:100459. 32 randomised trials, 5,544 people, 91 effect sizes, mean age 23, 70% female. “Restricting social media use significantly improved subjective well-being (ḡ = .17, 95% CI [0.08, 0.27])”; “Although significant, the pooled estimates were small in magnitude, suggesting only weak support for the effectiveness of restricting social media use.” DOI 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2025.100459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2025.100459
17. Orben A, Przybylski AK. The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour 2019;3(2):173-182. Specification curve analysis across three datasets, 355,358 adolescents: “The association we find between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is negative but small, explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being. Taking the broader context of the data into account suggests that these effects are too small to warrant policy change.” Correlational. PMID 30944443. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/
18. Odgers CL, Jensen MR. Annual Research Review: adolescent mental health in the digital age: facts, fears, and future directions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 2020;61(3):336-348. “Most research to date has been correlational, focused on adults versus adolescents, and has generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations. The most recent and rigorous large-scale preregistered studies report small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents’ well-being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect and, as estimated, are unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance.” PMID 31951670. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31951670/
19. Opree SJ, Buijzen M, Valkenburg PM. Lower life satisfaction related to materialism in children frequently exposed to advertising. Pediatrics 2012;130(3):e486-491. 466 Dutch children aged 8 to 11, two waves a year apart: “no effect of materialism on life satisfaction was observed. However, life satisfaction did have a negative effect on materialism. Exposure to advertising facilitated this effect: We only found an effect of life satisfaction on materialism for children who were frequently exposed to advertising.” PMID 22908113. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22908113/
20. Opree SJ, Buijzen M, van Reijmersdal EA, Valkenburg PM. Children’s advertising exposure, advertised product desire, and materialism: a longitudinal study. Communication Research 2014;41(5):717-735. Same 466 children, two waves 12 months apart: “advertising exposure had a positive longitudinal effect on materialism. This effect was fully mediated by children’s increased desire for advertised products.” DOI 10.1177/0093650213479129. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650213479129
21. Michel C, Sovinsky M, Proto E, Oswald AJ. Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence on one million Europeans. In Rojas M (ed), The Economics of Happiness: How the Easterlin Paradox Transformed Our Understanding of Well-Being and Progress. Springer, 2019, pp. 217-239. About 900,000 Eurobarometer respondents, 27 countries, 1980 to 2011, against national advertising spend (Zenith-Optimedia): “increases in national advertising expenditure are followed by significant declines in levels of life satisfaction”; “a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3 percent drop in life satisfaction”, about 0.09 points on the one-to-four scale, which the authors compare to “approximately one half the absolute size of the marriage effect”. Observational, country-level exposure; the authors write “Further research remains desirable.” Read in the January 2019 manuscript on Oswald’s site, which states it is the chapter text. DOI 10.1007/978-3-030-15835-4_10. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15835-4_10
22. Goyal M, Singh S, Sibinga EMS, et al. Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Internal Medicine 2014;174(3):357-368. 47 randomised trials with active controls, 3,515 people. “Mindfulness meditation programs had moderate evidence of improved anxiety (effect size, 0.38 [95% CI, 0.12-0.64] at 8 weeks and 0.22 [0.02-0.43] at 3-6 months), depression (0.30 [0.00-0.59] at 8 weeks and 0.23 [0.05-0.42] at 3-6 months), and pain (0.33 [0.03-0.62])”; “We found no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment (ie, drugs, exercise, and other behavioral therapies).” PMID 24395196. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24395196/
23. Critchley HD, Garfinkel SN. Interoception and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology 2017;17:7-14. Review: “Influential theories suggest emotional feeling states arise from physiological changes from within the body. Interoception describes the afferent signalling, central processing, and neural and mental representation of internal bodily signals”, with “models of interoceptive predictive coding that explain emotions and selfhood.” A narrative review, not a trial. PMID 28950976. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28950976/
24. Nguyen TT, Ryan RM, Deci EL. Solitude as an approach to affective self-regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2018;44(1):92-106. Four studies: “solitude generally has a deactivation effect on people’s affective experiences, decreasing both positive and negative high-arousal affects”; high-arousal positive affect did not drop when people “actively chose what to think about”; and “solitude could lead to relaxation and reduced stress when individuals actively chose to be alone.” Small lab and diary studies. PMID 29072531. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29072531/
25. The Gospel according to Luke 17:20-21, King James Version (1611; Project Gutenberg eBook #10): “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Translation note: the Greek entos hymōn is rendered “within you” in the KJV and “among you” or “in your midst” in many modern translations; this page quotes the KJV and says so. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10
26. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VII, section XXXI in Meric Casaubon’s 1634 translation (Project Gutenberg eBook #2680; the passage is 7.59 in modern numbering): “Look within; within is the fountain of all good. Such a fountain, where springing waters can never fail, so thou dig still deeper and deeper.” https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2680
27. Epictetus, The Enchiridion, chapter 1, translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Project Gutenberg eBook #45109): “There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.” https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45109
28. Khândogya-Upanishad VI.8.7, translated by F. Max Müller, The Upanishads Part I, Sacred Books of the East vol. 1 (Oxford, 1879), read on Wikisource: “Now that which is that subtile essence (the root of all), in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it.” The Sanskrit is tat tvam asi, usually rendered “that art thou” or “you are that”. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sacred_Books_of_the_East/Volume_1/Kh%C3%A2ndogya-upanishad/Sixth_Prap%C3%A2thaka
29. James W. The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Henry Holt, 1890), chapter XI, Attention (Project Gutenberg eBook #57628): “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind–without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57628

not cited, on purpose: benassi, sweeney and dufour's 1988 meta-analysis of locus of control and depression (journal of abnormal psychology 97:357), because its abstract could not be read from any source we can reach, so the 2013 meta-analysis is used instead; ferguson's 2025 meta-analytic review of social media experiments in psychology of popular media, for the same reason; and the often-quoted comparison of screen time to “eating potatoes”, which sits in the body of the 2019 paper rather than in the abstract we read, so only the 0.4 percent figure is used. every quotation above was read in the record it is attributed to on 2026-10-06.

related: what works that costs nothing · the book series · male loneliness in the data · about veisund and the daily mirror

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