Flow By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[ULFBERHT]

In his seminal work, Csikszentmihalyi details the concept of Flow, a state of optimal experience in which a person experiences complete involvement with life and how one can take steps to more efficiently and regularly foster this state in every aspect of life.

What Makes Us Happy? What Is Flow?

Flow is a unique state of being in which we are involved when we actively choose a course of self- determination, psychological growth, and deep personal fulfillment. Being in flow is much the same as "being in the zone". When we are doing a flow activity, we are completely absorbed in it and loving every aspect of it. Time stops. We could do it forever. We are intrinsically motivated to do it, and we would do it even at personal cost if we had to. Think of a time in your life when a project long worked on and toiled over was finally brought to complete fruition, or during an athletic event when you were at your best, or perhaps during a math test when you were nailing it, you totally understood the material, and you felt great that you had overcome this challenge. At that moment, you were likely in a flow state.

Happiness is largely a function of pursuing and being in a flow state. The most important thing to remember, and you've likely observed it yourself, is that your moments of greatest happiness are often times not spent in passive leisure or through dulling the senses with drugs or sex, but rather when you set your focus on a great challenge and then worked to overcome it.

Participation in determining the contents of our consciousness is of the utmost importance. How you perceive the world is far more important than what happens to you. Through practicing emotional mastery and training our attention, we can more effectively determine what's relevant in our experience to reaching our goals and what isn't.

Happiness, flow, and peak experience are all fundamentally about self- determination (both physical and psychological), intrinsic motivation, enjoying the present moment, and seeking to grow ourselves psychologically outside of the context of what society at large says we should do (blindly acquire wealth, possessions, material status etc.) or what biological imperatives dictate to us (seek comfort above all else, become a slave to the sex and food instinct, etc.) Flow is about freedom of will.

Ordering Our Conscious Minds

To lay the foundation for creating more flow experiences, we must realize that in order to do so, we must set an intention (goal) and focus our attention on it.

Each of us has the power to control our subjective reality, but because we are constantly bombarded with sensory and other kinds of information at all times, we must use our attention and our intentions to filter what is resourceful and what is not. To do so is to fundamentally influence the content and the quality of our existence.

Attention is the discriminatory process of our consciousness. By using or attention we decide what action to take in response to a given set of information, and thus we can more efficiently fulfill our intentions. Intentions are the goals, attention is the executive function by which we begin to attain them. Attention is the most important tool in determining the quality of our experience. The more attention you can muster, the happier you'll be.

It is also worth noting here that the information we receive into our consciousness has no inherent value judgment attached to it. The self assigns value judgments. Therefore, when you sharpen your skills of attention and clarify your intentions, you are more free to determine what value or meaning a given piece of information has relevant to your experience. In this way, nurturing flow experiences can be an effective precursor to emotional mastery. Occurrences both in and out of your control can effectively be re-framed or interpreted in a way that is most resourceful to your intentions. Not in a way that denies reality, of course, but in a way that leaves you less subject to the whims of the actions of other people or to otherwise harmful and debilitating emotions.

When we choose a goal, no matter how grand or mundane, and invest in it to the limits of our concentration, anything we do will be enjoyable.

How Do We Get Into Flow?

The end goal of facilitating flow experiences to is increase enjoyment and quality of life. What follows are the principle signs of a flow experience that can help us not only what a true flow experience looks like, but also how we can create it for ourselves in every area of life.

1. We must seek to match external conditions with internal intentions (or goals) and simultaneously seek to change our perception of the external world to match our internal intentions. In other words, don't just change your reality, but change how you feel about it.

2.  Set goals that will challenge you and force you to improve your skills.

3. Focus intently on the task at hand. This means mindfulness, focus, sensory clarity, and equanimity. An unfocused mind is an unhappy mind. Find something about the experience that you can really get into and focus on intently.

4.  Find a way to get feedback as to your progress and evaluate it. Assess your progress regularly. Feedback can also be interpreted as a system of guidelines or rules that frame the flow experience and allow us to order our consciousness. Ordering of the consciousness and focusing the attention is of the greatest importance. Without it psychic entropy is sure to take hold. So whether you're playing a board game, playing a professional sport, or starting your own business, make sure you are adhering to the rules or you have a way to measure your progress so as to keep your mind focused and on track.

5. Commit to excluding and information, experience, emotions, etc. that would distract your attention from the task at hand. These events are collectively called psychic entropy. This is the emotional mastery part of flow.

6.  Be involved in an activity that gets you some skin in the game. A fight is exhilarating because you might lose. A goal is worth working for because you can't just go out and buy it. When we feel like we have a hand in self- determination and the influencing of an uncertain outcome, we can enter flow.

7. Seek to lose yourself, notice any distortion of time. If time seems to drag on and you're miserable, you're not in flow state. Flow is characterized by being so deep in the activity that you forget yourself and time becomes irrelevant. When you recognize this feeling, you're probably in flow!

8. Establish an intrinsic motivation for the activity. If we are doing things because of external pressures, be they social, biological, or what have you, they will likely not result in a flow state.

The Autotelic Personality

The conditions of flow are largely contingent upon the individual assuming responsibility for the quality of his existence and actively seeing to it that experiences are made as optimal as possible. The ideal of this person is called an autotelic personality, or someone who finds an intrinsic motivation for intentions that he himself has defined.

An autotelic person is someone who can, using the steps described previously, can take any experience and turn it into a flow experience, from workplace boredom to life in a concentration camp (Viktor Frankl should come to mind here).

Some people are more autotelic than others, but the good news is that, like training our attention, it is a skill that can be practiced and perfected should we choose to undertake it.

Some Examples

Because we have the power to control our subjective experience, almost anything can be turned into a flow experience, provided that is has enough structure to order our consciousness. In cases where there is no inherent structure, we can choose to superimpose one onto the experience, much like scaffolding on a skyscraper.

Games of any kind, sports, cultural and religious ceremonies, exercise, dance, sex, yoga, martial arts,  art and music appreciation, tasting great food, studying history, doing science, silly word games with friends, AND EVEN WORK can all be transformed into flow experiences.

As a final note, it is important to realize that the activity itself does not necessarily correlate to a flow experience. What matters, essentially, is how much mindfulness we involve in the activity, why we do it, how it challenges us, and how it transforms our psyche. Sex can either be be some rote thing that we do every so often to get our rocks of and go on about or day, or it can be an opportunity to improve our skill as lovers, learn more about ourselves and our partner(s), take our relationships to the next level, and create a level of intimacy that we haven't experienced before.

Ultimately, the choice is up to us, moment by moment, to decide if our lives and our endeavors are optimal experiences or if they are merely occasional perturbations in what is mostly a humdrum and unfulfilling life. It's a choice you can make at any time.