External distractions occur when attention is temporally grasped by sensory experiences that are unrelated to the task at hand (e.g., being distracted while driving because of a smartphone vibrating or because of a sudden urge to sneeze), whereas mind-wandering episodes correspond to a switch of attentional focus from the current task to internally generated thoughts that are decoupled from the here and now, such as memories of past events, personal concerns, or plans about the future (Lustig, Hasher, & Tonev, 2001; Smallwood & Schooler, 2015; Stawarczyk et al., 2011; Unsworth & McMillan, 2014).