Finding Flow
Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied thousands of high achievers in various fields and came up with his theory of Flow.
Flow is basically a highly productive mental state where we are so engrossed in a task at hand that we forget about everything else in life.
When we are in Flow our mind is so focused on a single task that we don’t have any stray thoughts to distract us. (And that includes hunger pangs and bathroom breaks.)
Even our sense of time tends to fade away.
According to Dr Csikszentmihalyi, that’s the closest we can get to coming up with a definition of happiness that’s universally applicable.
And guess what, its entirely in our control to reach such flow states.
His book titled “Flow: The Psychology of Happiness” argues that our happiness depends entirely on the content of our consciousness. And we can control that content by deliberately involving ourselves in activities that generate higher degrees of flow.
Look at this graph.
Achieving flow state in any activity depends on 2 things:
- The difficulty of a task.
- The level of our skill in that particular task.
If the task is too difficult compared to our skill, then it can make us anxious. And if the task is too easy then it can lead to boredom.
If the task at hand is just hard enough to challenge our skills, then we are drawn towards it and we feel a great sense of satisfaction in fulfilling it.
Achieving a task which was just out of our reach also increases our level of skill. And now with an enhanced skill level we aspire to fulfill an even more difficult task.
Thus flow, induces a virtuous cycle of challenge and achievement.
I think we have all felt that at some level when we were in school.
Starting with an entirely new topic at the beginning of an academic year, with a mixed feeling of challenge and intrigue. And mastering it by the end of the term, with a sense of achievement and happiness unparalleled.
We see this in other fields too, in areas as diverse as music, to sports to programming, to even writing.
The trick is finding an activity that interests you, challenges you just enough, and improves your skills in tackling that challenge. And doing it repeatedly with increased difficulty levels. (Something which we try to do with this blog every week!)
Here’s a quick tip. Think about what task you spend most of your time on, how does that make you feel. Try to match that feeling in the graph below —
Wherever you are on the graph, now you know where you need to go to achieve happiness. You either need to increase the level of difficulty of your challenges, or the level of your own skill.
Its a brilliantly insightful book written after decades of research, its a must read.
Check it out —
Flow: The psychology of happiness
Here’s a short video summary on Youtube
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