What’s So Bad About Being Alone With Your Thoughts?
10:58 minutes
Researchers at the University of Virginia were recently amazed to discover that many people would rather self-administer painful shocks than sit quietly with their own thoughts for 15 minutes. They also found that men were significantly more likely to shock themselves than women. So what’s so bad about sitting alone and thinking? Study author Erin Westgate helps parse the results.
Erin Westgate is a Ph.D. student in psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Annie Minoff is a producer for The Journal from Gimlet Media and the Wall Street Journal, and a former co-host and producer of Undiscovered. She also plays the banjo.