Most Men Pick Physical Pain Over Solitude: Study

Most men would rather receive a mild electric shock than spend time relaxing and thinking, a new study has found.

The University of Virginia stated that most people are not comfortable with wandering thoughts and would want to engage in any activity rather than sit idle.

"Those of us who enjoy some down time to just think likely find the results of this study surprising - I certainly do - but our study participants consistently demonstrated that they would rather have something to do than to have nothing other than their thoughts for even a fairly brief period of time," said Timothy Wilson, U.Va. psychologist and one of the study authors, according to a news release.

According to Wilson, everybody likes to daydream, but these thoughts are pleasant when they occur spontaneously, not when they are summoned during a test.

Around 83 percent of Americans don't spend any time thinking, according to estimates by U.S. Department of Labor, Bloomberg reports. The new study, which was based on a series of 11 experiments, found that people could even hurt themselves in order to avoid sitting in a room with nothing but their own thoughts.

Few studies in the current research were conducted in a lab. People were asked to sit in an unadorned room with no T.V., books or reading material. Participants had to spend time by themselves for about six to 15 minutes. Afterwards, they were asked to fill a questionnaire describing the experience.

Initially, researchers conducted the studies on college students and found that most of them found alone time distasteful. Later, the team repeated the study with people aged between 18-77 years.

Most people reported that they had a tough time dealing with wandering thoughts. "That was surprising - that even older people did not show any particular fondness for being alone thinking," Wilson said.

Researchers found that most of the study participants preferred doing external activities - reading a book, listening to music and even hurting themselves to avoid dealing with wandering thoughts.

Additional research found that people could even hurt themselves to avoid thinking. In this experiment, people were given a choice between mild electric shock and time to think.

The results showed that 12 out of 18 men and six out of 24 women opted to give themselves a mild shock than think. Note that participants were given a sample of this electric shock before the test and almost all of them had said that it was unpleasant and that they would pay to avoid getting the shock again.

"What is striking," the investigators write, "is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid."

The availability of electronic devices such as smartphones might not be the only reason for people's lack of interest in spending time with themselves. Researchers said that humans are hard-wired to find pleasure in external activities.

Surveys conducted by Wilson and colleagues have shown that most Americans like to watch television, socialize or read rather than spend time relaxing or thinking.

Researchers are yet to find a mechanism that could explain why people wouldn't want to spend time thinking.

The study is published in the journal Science.