Inhabiting your life rather than managing it : what the science says about autopilot

Two thirds. There is no moral to draw from that. There is a question. If most of our days run without us, what is left of the sensation of inhabiting a life ? And why does that question bite harder for women in the Maghreb, whose time is structurally more fragmented than men's ?

What exactly is autopilot ?

Autopilot is the execution of a behaviour triggered by context rather than by conscious intention. It is not absent-mindedness. It is cognitive economy, and it works for you.

The psychologist Wendy Wood, professor at the University of Southern California, had established in her work that roughly 43 % of daily behaviours are repeated in the same context, usually while the mind is somewhere else entirely. The Rebar and Gardner study, using finer real-time measurement, pushes that figure up. The two results converge on the substance : automaticity is the rule, not the exception.

One detail runs against intuition and deserves its own sentence. Of the behaviours this team observed, 46 % were both automatic and aligned with what the participants actually wanted. Habit is not the enemy of will. It is often will, running cheaply. From this Benjamin Gardner draws a conclusion aimed squarely at the coaching industry : telling people to "try harder"

will not shift an established habit.

Inhabiting your life, then, does not mean abolishing automaticity. That would be exhausting and impossible. The question sits elsewhere. Which portion of the day deserves to be lived consciously, and does that portion still exist ?

Why does a wandering mind make us unhappy ?

Because the wandering comes first and the bad mood follows. That is the most counter-intuitive result in the literature on attention.

In 2010, the psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, then at Harvard University, published in the journal *Science* a study of 2,250 volunteers aged 18 to 88, questioned at random intervals through an application. Participants spent 46.9 % of their waking time thinking about something other than what they were doing. The study is more than fifteen years old, and it is cited here for a precise reason : it remains the founding reference of the field, the paper that more recent work argues with.

Its main contribution is not the percentage. It is the shape of the link. Mind wandering accounted for roughly 10.8 % of the variation in reported happiness, against only 4.6 % for the nature of the activity underway. What you are doing matters less than whether you are there while you do it. The authors' time-lag analyses suggest that the wandering caused the drop in mood rather than the reverse.

Add to this a mechanism documented by Sophie Leroy, professor at the University of Washington, who in 2009, in the journal *Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes*, named what she calls attention residue. Move from one task to another before finishing the first, and part of your attention stays hooked on what you left behind. The next task pays for it. Leroy states the implication without hedging : multitasking, in the strict sense, does not exist.

Attention residue describes fairly well what a woman lives through when she prepares a work file while thinking about her mother's medical appointment, then answers her daughter while thinking about the file.

Managing is not inhabiting : the weight of invisible cognitive labour

The difference between managing your life and inhabiting it is not a turn of phrase. It matches a distinction that research in family sociology has made operational.

The researchers Ana Dean, Brendan Churchill and Leah Ruppanner, of the University of Melbourne, proposed in 2021, in the journal *Community, Work and Family*, a theorisation of the mental load that splits it into cognitive labour (anticipating, planning, organising) and emotional labour. Three features make it expensive. It is invisible. It is boundaryless, spilling into working time and into leisure time alike. And it is endless, because it is attached to continuous care directed at others.

A quantitative study published in 2024 in the journal *Archives of Women's Mental Health* linked this cognitive labour to depression, stress and exhaustion among mothers. It is one of the first to measure the cognitive dimension separately from the material execution of tasks. The level of certainty to hold on to here : the link is established as a robust correlation, but the quantitative literature on this precise point remains young.

The distinction throws light on something the vocabulary of wellbeing misses every single time. A woman who "functions well" can be in a state of permanent management, her attention entirely taken up by anticipation and never by the present. She is nowhere, because she is everywhere at once.

What do the Maghreb data say ?

Two things. That women's time is structurally taken, and that it is badly measured.

In Morocco, the national time use survey (Enquête nationale sur l'emploi du temps) conducted by the High Commission for Planning (Haut-Commissariat au Plan, HCP) in 2011 and 2012 remains the reference in figures. Women devoted 4 hours and 46 minutes a day to domestic tasks, against 27 minutes for men. Seven times more. They carried out 92 % of the total volume of domestic work, valued at 34.5 % of gross domestic product at the minimum wage. A salaried woman devoted 4 hours and 18 minutes a day to it, barely 1 hour and 42 minutes less than a woman at home. Employment took almost nothing away from the domestic load. It was added on top.

The High Commission for Planning has announced that a new edition of this survey is being prepared for 2026 and 2027. So the Moroccan figures available today are more than ten years old, and that has to be said out loud.

In Tunisia it is worse, and this is the most telling fact in the section. The Tunisia Gender Profile published in 2025 by UN Women notes that the last national time use survey, the only instrument capable of measuring unpaid domestic work, dates back to 2005. Twenty years without data. A country cannot steer what it does not count.

What is known about mental health in the Maghreb

• 48.9 % of Moroccans aged 15 and over show or have shown symptoms of mental disorders, including 48.5 % of women against 34.3 % of men (Economic, Social and Environmental Council of Morocco, report on mental health, 2022)

• 454 psychiatrists in Morocco for the whole country (same report)

• Density of psychiatrists in Tunisia : 1.25 per 10,000 inhabitants in 2021, and falling (report on access to mental health care in Tunisia, 2025)

The Tunisian outlet Nawaat reported in 2024 a 20 % rise in requests for consultation for anxiety and depressive disorders since 2017, with an average wait of fifteen months for an appointment. The practitioners quoted in that investigation note that women consult more often for these disorders, and put part of the gap down to the overload of being pulled between working life and private life.

Exhaustion is also measured by occupation. A cross-sectional study of 525 teachers in the governorate of Sfax, 55.6 % of them women, found a burnout prevalence of 47.2 %. A necessary qualification : these data were collected during the 2020-2021 school year, in the middle of the pandemic, which rules out reading them as a baseline level in ordinary times.

The practical cost counts as much as the diagnosis. In Morocco, a session with a psychologist commonly falls between 300 and 600 dirhams and is generally not reimbursed by compulsory health insurance. In Tunisia, a private psychiatric consultation runs to around 70 to 100 dinars. Telling a woman she ought to "take time for herself" without looking at those figures is a joke.

Does self-help deliver on its promises ?

On several central points, no. And it takes very little effort to check.

Take the 21 day rule for installing a habit, probably the sector's most repeated claim. It rests on no research into habits at all. It comes from an observation by the plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz, published in a 1960 book, about how long his patients took to adjust psychologically to a new face. The figure has crossed sixty years of self-help literature and mislaid its object somewhere along the way.

The real data exist. Phillippa Lally, then at University College London, followed 96 volunteers adopting a new daily behaviour, measuring felt automaticity day by day. Results published in 2010 in the *European Journal of Social Psychology* : a median of 66 days to reach the plateau of automaticity, with a spread running from 18 to 254 days. Missing a day did not reset the count to zero. Three lessons the 21 day slogan erases : it takes longer, it varies enormously from one person to the next, and a lapse is not a failure.

The same caution applies to mindfulness. In 2018, a critical review signed by Nicholas Van Dam and around fifteen colleagues, published in *Perspectives on Psychological Science*, documented the methodological weaknesses of part of the literature on meditation and warned that excessive communication risked misleading the public. The sociologist Ronald Purser, professor at San Francisco State University, adds a complementary criticism under the term McMindfulness : a standardised management technique, cut off from its original framework, which hands the individual responsibility for suffering whose causes are social.

None of this is an invitation to throw meditation away. It is an invitation to refuse the implicit equation : if you are exhausted, you must simply not have found the right technique yet. When 92 % of domestic work rests on one sex, the explanatory variable is not breathing.

The Sultane view

There is a difference between recognising a mechanism and resigning yourself to it. The two thirds of automaticity are a figure, not a sentence. The remaining third is the real ground. Those are the moments when attention is available, and they decide, far more than the content of the days, whether you feel present in them.

For many women in the Maghreb, that third is already spoken for by permanent anticipation. No meditation app will hand back the 4 hours and 46 minutes a day. What would hand them back : time use surveys actually conducted, a domestic share renegotiated inside households, access to psychological care that does not cost a week's salary. Tunisia has not measured its women's time since 2005. Inhabiting your life may begin with demanding that it be counted.

The Editors