Flow

Contrary to what we usually believe…the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times…The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee), a professor and former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, has devoted his life’s work to researching what makes people happy. His most important discovery is the concept of “flow”.

What Is Flow?

Mihaly describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Some people describe flow as being “in the zone” or as a “peak experience”. A professional athlete may say he was “in the zone” after he’s played a great game. An artist may describe his “peak experience” after he created a beautiful painting.

Mihaly further breaks down flow into seven characteristics:

1. Timelessness: You’re completely focused on the present (mindfulness) and hours seem to pass by in minutes.
2. A sense of serenity: You’ve no worries about yourself and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of your ego (loss of ego).
3. A sense of ecstasy: You feel that you’re outside everyday reality.
4. Complete immersion: You’re focused on only the activity. You block out non-activity related stimuli.
5. Great inner clarity: You know what needs to be done and how well you’re doing the activity.
6. Knowing that the activity is doable: You know your skills are barely adequate for the activity.
7. Intrinsic motivation: Any activity that helps you feel flow is its own reward.

You can experience flow while performing various activities including engineering, art, writing, social, spiritual, and sport. I’ve been fortunate to experience flow many times in my adult life. It’s common when I play racquetball, write, or program.

Even children can spontaneously experience flow. When I was a child, I experienced flow when I built plastic models. I watched Ben, my eldest son, experience flow when he was three years old. He was so focused on putting together a wooden puzzle that he didn’t hear me calling his name even though I was standing next to him. I recognized his total immersion was a state of flow.

Flow is a pleasurable, happy feeling that most of us want to experience again and again. You can do things to encourage your own flow.

Encouraging Your Own Flow

You can’t force flow to happen, but you can improve your odds. Mihaly describes three circumstances that increase your likelihood of experiencing flow:

1. Clear goals: You need something well-defined and concrete you’re trying to accomplish. It helps if the rules related to the goals are also absolute. For instance, games like chess, tennis, and golf have concrete goals and absolute rules. The goals are generally short-term unlike the goals I described in Goals and Happiness.
2. Immediate feedback: You need to get immediate feedback from the activity about progress towards the goal. For instance, tennis and golf have scores which provide immediate feedback. Software programming provides immediate feedback because software either runs successfully or crashes.
3. Balanced skills and challenges: You need an activity with the optimal balance of skills and challenges. The chart below shows the optimal balance for flow. Flow happens when there’s a high level of challenge and you have the high skill needed to accomplish the goal. If there’s high challenge and you have less skill, you enter a state of arousal. Similarly, if there’s less challenge and you have high skill, you feel as though you’re in control.
   
   You optimal balance changes over time. If your skills improve, the corresponding challenges will have to increase. The desire to feel more flow is one of the things that motivates us to get better at an activity.

Flow and Happiness

Experiences of flow improve our long-term happiness. We feel a long-lasting sense of fulfillment when we repeatedly experience flow according to Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Buddhism also describes mindfulness and loss of ego as necessary conditions for long-term happiness (enlightenment). This corresponds to the flow characteristics of “timelessness” (mindfulness) and “a sense of serenity” (loss of ego).

Other Flow Resources

Michael Buffington wrote his own tips for getting into flow. His tips are particularly relevant if your flow work is done on a computer.

Below is a youtube video of Mihaly giving a nineteen minute lecture about flow. It covers some of what I’ve discussed, but is still interesting.

If you’re interested in learning more about flow, Mihaly has written two great books I’ve read and recommend:

Have you experienced flow? If so, what was it like?

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Tags: Mindfulness, Personal goals, Psychology