What is flow?

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if 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 discovered that people find genuine satisfaction during a state of consciousness called Flow. In this state they are completely absorbed in an activity, especially an activity which involves their creative abilities. During this “optimal experience” they feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.” In the footsteps of Maslow, Csikszentmihalyi insists that happiness does not simply happen. It must be prepared for and cultivated by each person, by setting challenges that are neither too demanding nor too simple for one’s abilities.

Some Background: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the pioneers of the scientific study of happiness, born in 1934 in Hungary. During a trip to Switzerland, Csikszentmihalyi heard Carl Jung speak and this sparked an interest in psychology. As a fairly new discipline, there were few options in Europe for further study, so he traveled to the United States. As an artist who had dabbled in painting himself, Csikszentmihalyi started his initial observations and studies on artists and creative types. He noted that the act of creating seemed at times more important than the finished work itself and he was fascinated by what he called the “flow” state, in which the person is completely immersed in an activity with intense focus and creative engagement. He set his life’s work to scientifically identify the different elements involved in achieving such a state. His studies and findings gained increasing popular interest and he is today considered one of the founding figures of positive psychology.

Happiness as a Flow-Like State

Cziksentmihalyi defines flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity, that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

He identifies a number of different elements involved in achieving flow:

• There are clear goals every step of the way.
• There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
• There is a balance between challenges and skills.
• Action and awareness are merged.
• Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
• There is no worry of failure.
• Self-consciousness disappears.
• The sense of time becomes distorted.
• The activity becomes an end in itself.

Csikszentmihalyi points to five ways through which one is able to cultivate one’s self into an autotelic person:

• Setting goals that have clear and immediate feedback
• Becoming immersed in the particular activity
• Paying attention to what is happening in the moment
• Learning to enjoy immediate experience
• Proportioning one’s skills to the challenge at hand

As these criteria indicate, flow is created by activities with a specific set of properties: they are challenging, require skill, have clear and immediate feedback (one knows whether one is doing the activity properly or not), and have well-defined success or failure metrics. Flow is a constant balancing act between anxiety, where the difficulty is too high for the person’s skill, and boredom, where the difficulty is too low.

Pleasure and Flow

Another consequence of this concept of flow is the confirmation of the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s view that happiness cannot be identified with pleasure. While a pleasurable experience is typically a passive state, like watching television, enjoying a massage, or ingesting a pill, the flow experience is an active state that is completely within the control of the person. The effortlessness that is achieved during the flow experience is only arrived at after engaged focus and goal-directed behavior. In our opening example, the effortlessness and pleasure of flowing down the ski slope was made possible only by years of perfecting and honing that particular skill. As the New York Times review article of Csikszentmihalyi’s book succinctly put it, “the way to happiness lies not in mindless hedonism, but in mindful challenge”. Indeed, flow experiences often consist of painful bodily sensations, as when an athlete pushes himself beyond his normal limits in order to win a race, or rounds the bases to score the winning run. Despite the pain, these are the moments that people often recall as being the peak moments of their lives.

Martin Seligman has drawn on Csikszentmihalyi’s work to mark a distinction between pleasures and gratifications. While pleasures are states that have clear sensory and emotional components, gratifications are marked by energies that demand your strengths and allow you to lose self-consciousness. A lot of research indicates that pleasurable experiences, including enjoying food, sex, and even relaxation states (taking a nap, for example), are strong components of happiness, in addition to the “mindful challenge” states of flow. Seligman proposes that the aspect of happiness that can be voluntarily obtained is a matter of the appropriate balance between pleasure and flow.

Excerpt from an article found originally at The Pursuit of Happiness