The state of Flow – The secret to happiness

Have you ever been so completely emerged in a task that you forgot the whole outside world? Time suddenly did not matter anymore, your thoughts and sense of who you are, your past or future completely vanished from your consciousness? Maybe it was while doing something you loved like climbing a mountain or something more simpler like playing an instrument.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, you are likely to have experienced a state called Flow, one of life’s highly enjoyable and transformative states of being. Experiencing Flow helps us be more productive, creative and happy whilst enhancing our sense of self. You may also have heard of it as “being in the zone“.

How Does It Feel to Experience Flow?

The experience of deep absorption in an activity has been recorded many times throughout history, commonly by great artists or athletes. Deriving from Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s & colleagues work on the creative process in the 1960’s, they conducted their studies on Flow in the 1980’s and 1990’s in Chicago and Italy.

Their extensive examination of Flow involved elaborate interviews and a method called Experience Sampling Method (ESM). For this, the participants were given some technological advice (i.e., pager, watches, phones) that signaled them to complete a questionnaire about what they were doing or feeling at various times during the day.

From their extensive research, they conducted 8 major components. Mostly, all of them are experienced whilst it is possible to experience Flow through a combination of only some of them:

• Experience of a sense of control over one’s action
• The task has clear goals
• The task offers immediate feedback
• The experience of time alters (i.e., minutes feel like hours or hours like minutes)
• High focus and attention on only the activity at hand (the task itself is intrinsically rewarding)
• The task confronted has a chance of completion (involving a balance between one’s skill level and the challenge presented)
• Concern and awareness of self disappears (on the other hand, after the experience of Flow the sense of Self emerges as stronger and more complex)
• Deep and effortless involvement in the task, removing awareness of frustrations or worries of everyday life (often accompanied with a feeling of serenity or even ecstasy)

“…It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

How to achieve Flow

Flow can be achieved by any activity. If one was to call Meditation an activity (which would be the activity of doing nothing), even achieving a deep meditative state can be described as Flow.

Nevertheless, there are some activities that seem to make entering a flow state easier:

• Sports; especially Climbing, Skiing, Yoga and Martial Arts
• Playing an instrument
• Creative activities like painting or writing
• Spending quality time with others
• Making love
• Activities of the mind like playing chess or doing math

Flow often seems to occur spontaneously and outside one’s ability to induce it. In reality, entering the state of Flow is not arbitrary. The more you experience Flow and the more you gain the skill of controlling your attention, the more easily you will enter a Flow-State.

Here are several factors that you could influence, which will make the experience of Flow more likely:

• Pick an activity you enjoy/are passionate about
• Eliminate outside distractions (i.e., phone)
• Your goal and plan of action should be specific (following clear feed-back)
• Implement the element of challenge in your activity
• Stretch your current skill level
• Train your skill to focus your attention (i.e., through meditation)

Benefits of Flow

People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

According to books of Csizentmihalyi, enhancing the time spent in Flow will enrich our entire life. It will lead to more happiness, success and ultimately to growth of oneself. Aside from Flow being an innate positive experience, it also leads to positive affect and happiness in the long run.

Several studies in different research fields have linked Flow to many positive outcomes. It is linked to more intrinsic motivation [1] and self-directed learning. Simultaneously, it leads to higher performance in different areas like arts, learning, teaching or sports [2].

In this video, Steven Kotler talks about how the experience of Flow dragged him out of a place of suicidal intention and helped in recovering from Lyme disease. Here, you will also have an overview of the benefits the Flow state has on our brain:

Mainly, Flow is about growing a more complex sense of self whilst reducing entropy and chaos. Gaining control over one’s consciousness is key to living a life more free and more present. Your attention being energy, developing the skill to focus your attention will allow you to invest your energy deliberately instead of it to be scattered, unfocused and chaotic.

Sources

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Csikzentmihaly, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Vol. 1990). New York: Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2004). Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness [Video file]. TED Talks in Monterey, California.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013). Flow: The psychology of happiness. Random House.

Other Sources are linked in the text.