Most of us have experienced that when our body is still and resting, the mind doesn’t stop. Instead, it takes off on its own journey of generating thoughts about our past, our plans, and the people around us, a process known as mind-wandering. While researchers have learned a lot about these kinds of thoughts, there aren’t many studies that explore how often our attention turns inward, toward sensations in our bodies, such as our breathing, heartbeat, or physical feelings.
This lesser-known side of our inner experience, called body-wandering, is what a recent study by a brain research team with collaborators from Denmark, Canada and Germany set out to explore.
To understand how the mind focuses on the physical self, researchers conducted a large-scale study with 536 participants who were asked to stay still in the MRI machine during a brain scan while looking at a cross on the screen above them.
The findings revealed that people don’t just drift into thoughts about the past or present, they also frequently think about their bodies, such as their heartbeat, breathing, stomach, and bladder. How often this happened varied widely from person to person.
When people’s thoughts turned to their bodies, it triggered a high-alert response, with the heart beating faster and lower heart rate variability—small changes in the time gap between each heartbeat—whereas ordinary mind-wandering reflected a more physically relaxed state. The results also pointed to a pattern where people who more often focused on bodily sensations reported fewer symptoms of both ADHD and depression. The findings are published in PNAS.
Why does the role of the body matter?
In most neuroimaging studies, the resting state is treated as a cognitive baseline, with little attention paid to what the body is experiencing internally, even though rhythms like heartbeat and breathing shape how people feel during that time. To date, most research on mind-wandering has focused on thoughts alone and neglected the role of the body and its internal sensations.
The researchers of this study recognized that being inside an MRI scanner is a unique physical experience. To truly understand the brain signals they were measuring, they needed to account for what the body was experiencing during rest, as well as the mind. While the machine scanned their brain activity, researchers simultaneously used sensors to track their heart rate, breathing, and stomach activity.
After the scan, participants answered a list of 22 questions about their thoughts during rest—covering topics such as past or future focus and thoughts about others. They also rated how much they had noticed internal sensations such as their heartbeat, breathing, stomach, bladder, and skin, as well as their overall sense of physical alertness.
The researchers found that unlike typical mind-wandering or daydreaming, which tends to feel pleasant, body-wandering was consistently tied to negative emotions and a faster heart rate.
Despite the association of negative feelings, people who body-wandered more, actually reported fewer symptoms of depression and ADHD. Researchers believe this effect comes from the mind focusing on the body, which keeps a person rooted in the present, rather than getting caught up in past regrets or future worries.
The team also discovered a unique signature of body-wandering created in the brain—stronger connections between the thalamus and the areas that regulate movement and touch.
The study highlights that the body plays a bigger role in our inner mental life than previously recognized, and that understanding this connection could open new doors for treating conditions like depression and ADHD. That being said, more research is needed to confirm how well these findings translate to everyday life outside the scanner. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-body-focused-mind-mental-health.html
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