Flow Illuminates the way to Happiness.
Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous investigations of “optimal experience” have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow.
During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.
Csiksgentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Video Summaries
Fight Mediocrity & OnePercentBetter
Practical Psychology & Productivity Game
Key Takeaways
“A person can make himself happy or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside’ just by changing the contents of consciousness.”
Some people have this idea that if you just had a bigger house, nicer car, or a lot of money, then you’d be happy. But that’s just not how happiness works. After a basic point where your needs have been met, buying a bigger house won’t bring more happiness. It’s about changing the contents of consciousness.
How can we change the contents of consciousness? One of the best ways to do this is to put ourselves in a state of optimal experience called. flow.
Flow ‘State in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.’ Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant or to worry problems. Self consciousness disappears and the sense of time becomes distorted.
A psychological state of mind where your ego completely disappears and you enter a highly productive work flow. Time seems to pass really quick and you get this amazing feeling that you’re accomplishing so much. Some people report to work 12-15 hours a day and some even say they forget to eat or go to the bathroom.
Positive effects of entering flow:
Another great benefit of entering flow is the satisfaction reported among those studied. They seem to have a clear feeling of their purpose being fulfilled. Basically this is one of the highest versions of intrinsic rewards, while usually producing extrinsic rewards.
Basic criteria that must be met to reach optimal experience in any task. Secondly, flow isn’t this on or off binary switch, it’s more of a dimmer switch. When you get all the variables just right, it feels amazing. The variables to enter flow are:
1. Initial and Quick Feedback
2. Long-Term Feedback Goal/Purpose for the individual. Flow is great because it gives our minds the tools and proper mindset to get closer to fulfilling our purposes. Must be able to measure progress over time to understand that you’re actually improving, which will fuel your work ethic even more.
3. Just Out Of Reach the challenge a task offers must be slightly out of reach for the individual. It has to be easy enough to not be seen as a super difficult challenge, but it also has to be difficult enough so that it’s not completely boring. Too easy and you’ll be bored while too challenging and you’ll have anxiety. Balance these two and you’ll end up in the flow channel.
4. Reduced Distractions respectively once you achieve a high state of flow, all distractions will seem to disappear.
5. A Personality Trait of curiosity will also increase your overall chance of entering flow. As well as high levels of grit and persistence, with low levels of selfishness.
Not every activity can produce flow. But when something you love starts to get a bit boring, make it more challenging and it will increase your chance of entering the state.
Our goal should be to find what it is we love and then keep getting better at it and keep making it more challenging. You increase your challenge so you get better, you get better so you increase your challenge. We want to be spending as much of our lives in a state of flow because that is where you’ll find unbelievable ecstasy.
Flow: How To Be So Happy Time Stops
Practical Psychology
Many people have a misconception of what happiness is and they feel happiness is something they will achieve one day, something that is an end result- once I buy this amazing house, once I get a new phone, or get that raise.
Happiness is actually a feeling perceived by our brains and is experienced in the process of doing and this is where people go terribly wrong finding happiness. You have to be happy working for your paycheck or you’ll never be happy getting your paycheck.
To be happy doing work we have to enter flow. Flow might be the answer of why some people enjoy a happy and creative existence, while others are just miserable and find themselves settling for a comfortable, but frustrating life.
What is flow? In a state of flow, or pattern recognition prediction and information processing skills seems to be massively amplified. It means that it doesn’t only amplify our creative performance, but also our physical performance and intellectual performance.
Once we are in the state of flow it seems like suddenly we realize that we love what we are doing, so much that if it wasn’t for what we were doing life wouldn’t have meaning. Ego completely disappears and we lose sense of ourselves. A study actually proved parts of our prefrontal cortex shuts down, which heightens our attention and allows us to reach mastery fasters.
In a world with so much distraction, many people just focus on external rewards like power or wealth and forget about our intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is something that we value as a person that we love to do despite what others might thing.
Most of us choose instant gratification as compensation for the daily grind and we tend to favor simple pleasure over the more fulfilling yet more difficult to attain long-term enjoyment. It doesn’t matter if its developing a new, interesting skills or improving ones we already have.
Facing challenges to contribute to our sense of reward and happiness overcoming challenges for fun is what makes life interesting and is the key to the flow. If we understand this concept, we understand that most of us seek pleasure and not enjoyment. Enjoyment is part of the flow and is available to everyone, but everyones goals are unique.
Conditions To Be In Flow
- Clear Set of Goals and Progress we have to have a clear goal in mind. Little goals will provide instant feedback.
- Clear and Immediate Feedback there must be both long-term and short-term feedback.
- Balance Between the Perceived Challenge of The Task & One’s Perceived Skills whenever we try to do something that isn’t too easy or too difficult, we take it as a challenge and it can actually become fun. If something is challenging our skills, but not challenging enough to deter us from trying it, it’s in the right action to achieve flow. Challenge is supposed to be 4% higher than our skills level.
Improvement is required and these skills must be aligned with our personal goals and passions. If its too challenging, you’re going to have anxiety and if it’s not challenging enough, you’re going to get bored. Finding something that is right in the middle, is the key to be on your way to experiencing some ecstasy. This state of heightened focus can be achieved anywhere- school, art, business, sports and any other activity you can think of, just needs to respect the conditions.
In conclusion, if you’re searching for some psychological happiness, stop spending so much time watching television, scrolling through your Facebook feed, because this puts you in the low skill and low challenge category, which is literally the opposite of flow and won’t be productive self-fulfilling work.
It’s ok to do these thing as a refresher, but making them a go to default state of mind is not healthy. Flow your life with meaningful, yet challenging work and you’ll look back on your life dying, where did all the time go with a smile and amazing life, instead of a regretful frown and useless activities.
