Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“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 (1990, p. 3)
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
ones abilities.
The experience of “flow” is strikingly reminiscent of Zhuangzi’s
description of “great skill” achieved by Daoist sages such as carpenter
P’ien and butcher Ting, the latter finding bliss in the art of chopping
up ox carcasses by “going along with the Dao” of the ox. It is no
coincidence that these blue-collar sages are situated on the bottom
rungs of the social hierarchy. They discover the Dao much more readily
than Confucian scholars, who, according to Zhuangzi, are studying the
“dregs of wisdom” in lifeless books and have lost touch with the world
of concrete affairs.
You
are skiing down a mountain trail at Aspen Colorado — one of the expert
diamond slopes, with the awe-inspiring, snow-capped Rockies in your
view. Though you have skied down this slope before, you have never been
able to “dominate” it — until now. You begin to hit your stride,
striking every mogul perfectly, effortlessly. Your actions seem frozen
in time and every little sound becomes more intense — the crisp slap of
your skis against the powder, the scrunch of your knees, and your
rhythmic breathing. You are flowing down the slope, and later you might
even describe yourself as having become “one with the mountain.” All
those years of training and struggling, taking ski lessons and tumbling
into the woods, are now finally justified. You have had, quite
literally, a peak experience.
If not in skiing, you may have had similar experiences in other
activities — some other challenging exercise, working on a difficult
project, or even to a certain degree in simpler exercises like reading
or conversation with a friend. These are moments in which your mind
becomes entirely absorbed in the activity so that you “forget yourself”
and begin to act effortlessly, with a heightened sense of awareness of
the here and now (athletes often describe this as “being in the zone”).
You may be surprised to learn, however, that in recent years this
experience has become the focus of much research by positive
psychologists. Indeed, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has even
given it a name for an objective condition — “flow.”
Some Background: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the pioneers of the scientific
study of happiness. He was born in Hungary in 1934 and, like many of his
contemporaries, he was touched by the Second World War in ways that
deeply affected his life and later work. During his childhood, he was
put in an Italian prison. It was here, amid the misery and loss of
family and friends during the war, that he had his first inkling of his
seminal work in the area of flow and optimal experience. In an
interview, he noted, “I discovered chess was a miraculous way of
entering into a different world where all those things didn’t matter.
For hours I’d just focus within a reality that had clear rules and
goals” (Sobel, D. (1995, January). Interview: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Omni, 73-90.).
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 and 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 now-famous Experience Sampling Study (a.k.a. Beeper Study) was a
particularly inventive way to make happiness a measurable phenomenon. A
group of teenagers were given beepers that went off during random times
throughout the day. They were asked to record their thoughts and
feelings at the time of the beeps. Most of the entries indicated that
the teens were unhappy, but Csikszentmihalyi found that when their
energies were focused on a challenging task, they tended to be more
upbeat. This and other studies helped shape his seminal work on flow.
His studies and subsequent findings gained still more popular interest
and he is today considered one of the founding figures of positive
psychology.
Happiness as a Flow-Like State
http://sketchnotesbook.com/
The main thesis of Csikszentmihalyi’s most popular book,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(1990), is that happiness is not a fixed state but can be developed as
we learn to achieve flow in our lives. The key aspect to flow is
control: in the flow-like state, we exercise control over the contents
of our consciousness rather than allowing ourselves to be passively
determined by external forces. As he writes,
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or
mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish
something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something
we make happen. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.3)
Unsurprisingly, this Hungarian psychologist comes to a conclusion not
unlike those of the great thinkers of the past: that happiness comes
from within oneself. He points to ways in which humans have attempted in
vain to find happiness through assigning power to things outside of
one’s control, and he quotes Marcus Aurelius approvingly when the Stoic
philosopher writes, “If you are pained by external things it is not they
that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your
power to wipe out that power now.” (Cskiszentmihalyi, 1990, p.20) The
key to happiness consists in how we invest our psychic energy. When we
focus our attention on a consciously chosen goal, our psychic energy
literally “flows” in the direction of that goal, resulting in a
re-ordering and harmony within consciousness.
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.” (Cskikszentmihalyi, 1990,
p.4) 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.
As the above qualities indicate, the flow-like state is not primarily
characterized by subjective feelings,even positive ones. Rather, the
essence of flow is the removal of the interference of the thinking mind.
When Michael Jordan is “in the zone” and making that behind-the-back
pass, he is not consciously thinking “how can I pass the ball,” and if
he did, he would interrupt his flow-like state and probably throw the
ball into the stands. Absorption in a task indicates the absence of the
self, and a merging of your awareness into the activity you are engaged
in. As positive psychologist Martin Seligman puts it, “Consciousness and
emotion are there to correct your trajectory; when what you are doing
is seamlessly perfect, you don’t need them (Csikszentmihalyi, 2002, p.
116).”
While Csikszentmihalyi’s research focuses on the area of work and
creative output, he sees that the state of flow is applicable to
relationships and situations; even times of adversity can transform into
a challenge rather than a setback. He even concludes that there are
people who have developed their flow to such an extent that they are
able to translate every potential threat into an enjoyable challenge,
and thereby maintain an inner tranquility as a continuous state of mind.
He calls such a person an “autotelic self,” someone who “is never
bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on and in flow most of
the time.” Now one might think that such a state is reserved for the few
great human beings such as Socrates, Gandhi, or the Dalai Lama; but in
fact, the examples that Csikszentmihalyi gives are of ordinary people
who are able to find delight in ordinary daily tasks.
Consider
the case of “Joe the Welder.” Here is someone who chooses to give up a
higher-paying promotion to foreman because he loves his job as a simple
welder. Over the years he has come to master every phase of the plant’s
operation: he can fix any piece of machinery no matter how complex, and
he looks forward to every challenge as an opportunity to test his
skills. While the other welders view their jobs as toilsome burdens from
which they must escape (typically into booze and television), Joe
relishes every moment of the day and hence doesn’t need to escape from
anything. Having an autotelic personality, he is able to create flow
experiences even in the most barren environment, and hence live a
fulfilling life, despite his relatively low salary and social status.
From this example and many others, 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 (see figure 1).
Thus flow is a dynamic rather than static state, since a properly
constructed flow activity leads to increased skill, challenge, and
complexity over time. Since one’s skill doesn’t remain static, repeating
the same activity would fall into boredom; the flow reward inspires one
to face harder challenges. This is why sports are extremely
well-designed for producing flow; another popular activity that appears
to meet these criteria (and thus explains its wide appeal) is the
playing of video games. The only problem, Csikszentmihalyi writes, is
that these kind of flow activities can easily become addictive, which
ultimately results in a loss of the control of consciousness and thus
further unhappiness.
Flow as Control of Consciousness
Csikszentmihalyi recounts research on the amount of information the
brain can process at a time, and points out the constant tradeoffs that
we’re making about what we’re paying attention to out of the huge
variety of possibilities. One key aspect of flow is that, while in flow,
nearly all of the brain’s available inputs are devoted to one activity.
This is why the perception of time changes, discomfort goes unnoticed,
and stray negative thoughts don’t enter the mind. The brain is too busy
focusing on one thing to keep track of all those other things. We see
here an obvious link between flow and the Buddhist concept of
mindfulness, or the kind of attention involved in meditation and yoga.
Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi argues that Hatha Yoga in particular is one of
the best models to describe what happens when psychic energy is flowing
along a single channel of consciousness. As he writes,
The similarities between Yoga and flow are extremely
strong; in fact it makes sense to think of Yoga as a very thoroughly
planned flow activity. Both try to achieve a joyous, self-forgetful
involvement through concentration, which in turn is made possible by a
discipline of the body. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.1o5)
Maybe
now you can understand why some people choose to spend so many hours
contorted in such strange bodily positions: they are achieving a deep
flow-like state and hence a strong sense of inner control and harmony.
And indeed, the ultimate goal of Yoga is to achieve a state called
moksha, a liberation from the self, described as combining three main qualities:
sat-chit-ananda,
or being, consciousness, and bliss. Using the flow model to describe
spiritual practices such as yoga may help to explain why people who
engage in such practices seem to be so happy and peaceful.
Csikszentmihalyi is quick to point out, however, that flow can be
achieved by many other activities that don’t require such elaborate
commitments. One can achieve such a state while skiing, fishing, playing
the guitar, cooking, reading, or even having a conversation and eating
food. Furthermore, while Yoga represents the ultimate state as
liberation from the self, Csikszentmihalyi sees flow as producing a
stronger self. Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi often uses Freudian terms to
explain what is happening, even though he is not himself a
Freudian psychologist.
According to Freud, the self is composed of three different parts: 1)
the “Id” which represents instinctual drives or our “nature;” 2) the
“Superego” which represents values or expectations imposed on us by
society, our “nurture,” and 3) the “Ego,” which is the part of
consciousness we are aware of and which can take control over the other
parts (see Figure 2). For example, the Id may give you an impulse to
have that extra beer even though you know you have to get up early for
work in the morning. The Superego could reinforce that impulse through
peer pressure from your buddies at the bar. However, you still have the
ability to reject these demands and choose to do what is best for
yourself. Your Ego is what enables you take conscious control over the
contents of your mind and hence achieve mastery over external forces. In
these terms, then, flow can be described as the developed capacity of
the Ego to master our instinctual/animal sides and the external
pressures of the Superego.
Given his adoption of Freud’s theory of the self and the emphasis on
flow as a kind of control, we can see that Csikszentmihalyi is operating
well within a set of assumptions common to western philosophy and
science. These assumptions include the idea that “progress” and even
“enlightenment” is a matter of Man emancipating himself from the power
of Nature. Thus Csikszentmihalyi claims that flow is a matter of
overcoming the “natural” state of the mind which is one of chaos and
“psychic entropy.” As he writes,
Contrary to what we tend to assume, the normal state of
the mind is chaos … when we are left alone, with no demands on
attention, the basic order of the mind reveals itself … Entropy is the
normal state of consciousness — a condition that is neither useful nor
enjoyable. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.119)
As we shall see, this is one of the main differences between
Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and the Taoist tradition, which sees
flow as regaining the natural harmony of the mind as oneness with Tao or
the Way. For now, it is enough to point out that flow is not simply a
matter of “letting go” or passively accepting things as they are.
Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi expresses a particular dislike for television,
since he believes it is primarily a way of distracting the brain from
psychic entropy without creating a challenge and feedback loop that
could lead to flow. Reading is a much better flow activity, since it
often requires complex skills of imagination and interpretation;
furthermore, there are increasing stages of complexity as one graduates
from the pleasures of young romance novels to high literature like
Shakespeare or Tolstoy.
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” (Tavris, 1990
). 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. Eating a
sirloin steak, for example, can produce a highly pleasurable state, but
it is doomed to be temporary, as proven by the fact that eating two such
steaks would produce pain. Pleasure reaches its limit surprisingly
fast, and this is where flow should enter in, as a way to obtain
gratifications that are less volatile and longer lasting than subjective
feelings (Seligman, 2002, p. 119).
[1] From http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/
Bibliography
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, & Csikzsentmihalyi, Isabella Selega (Eds.). (1988).
Optimal Experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990).
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1996).
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
Seligman, Martin (2002).
Authentic Happiness. New York, NY: Free Press.
Tavris, C. (1990, March 18). Contentment is hard work. The New York Times.
Video:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about Flow (TED Talks)
Recommended reading:
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, & Csikzsentmihalyi, Isabella Selega (Eds.). (2006).
A Life Worth Living: Contributions to Positive Psychology (Series in Positive Psychology). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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CONTENTMENT IS HARD WORK
By CAROL TAVRIS; Carol Tavris, a social
psychologist, is the author of ''Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion'' and
the editor of a forthcoming book on emotional well-being.
Published: March 18, 1990
FLOW
The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
303 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $21.95.
Years ago I came upon a melancholy fact: As the popularity of
television increased in the 1950's and 60's, the number of inventors and
do-it-yourselfers declined precipitously. This sad phenomenon reflects
the paradox of the pursuit of happiness. Given a choice, many people
choose narcotic pleasures that dull the mind and quell its restless
search for meaning. Yet in so doing, those people give up the very
activities that, in their complexity and challenge, offer the promise of
real satisfaction.
For 20 years, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a
professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has been
investigating the concept he calls flow - the state of involved
enchantment that lies between boredom and anxiety. A person in flow is
mentally involved in the challenge and intrinsic pleasure of the
activity (and hence is not bored), yet lacks self-consciousness and
apprehension about performance (the hallmarks of anxiety). Flow takes
energy and effort; it is not the same as fun, the teen-ager's grail, nor
one of those moments of pure joy that seem to spring from nowhere. And
it is not the same as the passive selflessness of ''going with the
flow.'' Usually, says Mr. Csikszentmihalyi, people experience flow while
pursuing a goal, in the context of a set of rules. The goal may be a
paramount ambition (building a better mousetrap), an interim ambition to
improve a specific skill (walking a little farther on the exercise
program today), or a temporary goal to keep from being bored to death
(getting through a dull lecture by thinking of 436 uses for a brick).
Most
people, Mr. Csikszentmihalyi argues, spend their lives alternating
between work they dislike but feel obliged to do, and passive leisure
activities that require no work but likewise offer no stimulation. ''As a
result,'' he says, ''life passes in a sequence of boring and anxious
experiences over which a person has little control.'' With flow, in
contrast, ''Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces
boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control, and psychic
energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of being lost in
the service of external goals.''
As a theory of optimal
experience, flow is a big improvement over Abraham Maslow's notion of
self-actualization. Maslow regarded optimal experiences as frosting on
the cake of life - possible only after one had met material needs for
safety and security. The popular idea that basic needs must be met
before people can pursue ''higher order'' needs for self-fulfillment has
never been validated by research. On the contrary, many who endure
poverty, tragedy and abuse nonetheless manage to find contentment and
fulfillment.
The reason, Mr. Csikszentmihalyi argues, is not that
misery builds character, but that the secret of contentment lies in
controlling one's consciousness, and anybody can learn to do this.
People have described having had flow experiences in every conceivable
setting - climbing a mountain, working on an assembly line, living alone
in the wilderness, enduring prolonged imprisonment. Flow doesn't
require education, income, high intelligence, good health or a spouse.
It requires a mind: one that is willing to set challenges for itself and
make the effort to meet them. In this respect, flow is another part of
the cognitive revolution in psychology and psychotherapy: as scores of
studies are finding, it is not so much what happens to people but how
they interpret and explain what happens to them that determines their
emotional well-being, their actions, their hopes, their ability to
recover from adversity.
Mr. Csikszentmihalyi regards flow as the
antidote to the twin evils of boredom and anxiety in all realms of
experience, including education, work, sexuality, religion and child
rearing, and as a cure for social problems and psychological malaise.
Flowlessness certainly does describe much of modern American life. But
because Mr. Csikszentmihalyi does not specify how society would have to
change in order to get everyone flowing, he implies that the solution to
our complex problems lies in millions of individuals learning to flow
on their own. To expect such a miraculous cognitive transformation seems
as dreamy, and unlikely, as counting on a mass religious conversion.
Mr.
Csikszentmihalyi's enthusiasm for flow occasionally carries him away.
Some of his examples of people who live their whole lives in a state of
flow - never a passive moment! never a mindless conversation! never a
dull activity that is not enhanced with mental exercises! - made me
self-consciously anxious and in need of my own escapist solution, a nap.
As
an analysis of individual psychology, flow is important, for it
illuminates the accuracy of what philosophers have been saying for
centuries: that the way to happiness lies not in mindless hedonism but
in mindful challenge, not in having unlimited opportunities but in
focused possibilities, not in self-absorption but in absorption in the
world, not in having it done for you but in doing it yourself. The
unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not
worth examining.
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The Flow Model
Balancing Challenge and Skills
Flow is when tasks seem effortless, challenging, and rewarding - all at the same time.
© iStockphoto/sandsun
Have you ever been so involved in doing something that you lost track
of time? Everything around you – from the ringing of phones to the
people passing in the hallways – seemed to fade away. Your attention was
focused entirely on what you were doing, and you were so engaged that
you might even have missed lunch. You felt energized, even joyful, about
what you were doing.
Most of us have had this experience at one time or another.
Psychologists call this "flow." When it happens, we lose our sense of
self, and move forward on instinct, completely devoted to the task
before us.
In this article, we'll examine flow in detail by looking into the
Flow Model. We'll review how the model can help us understand why we
find some tasks much easier than others. We'll also look at how you can
use the ideas behind the Flow Model to experience flow more often, so
that you can be more productive.
The Flow Model
The Flow Model (see Figure 1) was first introduced by positive
psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi. He wrote about the process of flow
in his book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."
Note:
Csíkszentmihályi published his book in 1990, but didn't publish this version of the model until 1997.
The model shows the emotional states that we're likely to experience
when trying to complete a task, depending on the perceived difficulty of
the challenge, and our perceptions of our skill levels.
For example, if the task isn't challenging and doesn't require a lot
of skill, we're likely to feel apathy towards it. But facing a
challenging task without the required skills could easily result in
worry and anxiety.
To find a balance, and to perform at our best, we need a challenge
that is significant and interesting, and we need well-developed skills,
so that we're confident that we can meet the challenge. This moves us to
a position where we can experience "flow" (being totally involved and
engaged in the activity).
This state of flow is often observed in people who have mastered
their business, art, sport, or hobby. They make whatever they're doing
look easy, and they're totally engaged with it.
10 Components of Flow
How do you know when you're experiencing flow? Csíkszentmihályi
identified 10 experiences that go with the state of being in flow:
- Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve.
- Being able to concentrate for a sustained period of time.
- Losing the feeling of consciousness of one's self.
- Finding that time passes quickly.
- Getting direct and immediate feedback.
- Experiencing a balance between your ability levels, and the challenge.
- Having a sense of personal control over the situation.
- Feeling that the activity is intrinsically rewarding.
- Lacking awareness of bodily needs.
- Being completely absorbed in the activity itself.
Remember that all of these factors and experiences don't necessarily
have to be in place for flow to happen. But you're likely to experience
many of them when flow occurs.
Three Conditions
Csíkszentmihályi also identified three things that must be present if you want to enter a state of flow:
- Goals – Goals add motivation and structure to what
you're doing. Whether you're learning a new piece of music or creating a
presentation, you must be working towards a goal to experience flow.
- Balance – There must be a good balance between your
perceived skill and the perceived challenge of the task. If one of
these weighs more heavily than the other, flow probably won't occur.
- Feedback – You must have clear, immediate feedback,
so that you can make changes and improve your performance. This can be
feedback from other people, or the awareness that you're making progress
with the task.
Using the Flow Model
To improve your chances of experiencing flow, try the following:
The Inverted-U Model
There's a potential conflict of ideas between the Flow Model and the
Inverted-U Model – a popular and widely respected model that helps explain the relationship between performance and pressure.
In the inverted-U graph, the vertical axis represents someone's level
of performance, while the horizontal axis represents the pressure that
he or she is under. According to the model, there's a "perfect medium"
of pressure where people perform at their best.
The Flow Model doesn't explain the loss of performance that occurs
when pressure is too high – for example, when we're scared, or when
we're overwhelmed by work. At these times, your productivity can drop
and negative emotions like anxiety will increase dramatically.
By using both of these models together, you're most likely to be able to enter and enjoy the state of flow.
Key Points
Flow is a state we reach when our perceived skills match the
perceived challenge of the task that we're doing. When we're in a state
of flow, we seem to forget time. The work we do may fill us with joy,
and we lose our sense of self as we concentrate fully on the task. This
is the state that we're in when we're doing our best work, and when
we're at our most productive.
The Flow Model shows the relationship between task complexity and
your perceived skill level. You can use the model to discover why you're
not achieving flow. It can also help you discover whether you need to
improve your skills, or increase the challenge or certain tasks, to help
achieve flow.
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Finding Flow
Reviews the book 'Finding Flow,' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
By
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published on July 01, 1997 - last reviewed on June 14, 2012
We all are capable of reaching that stateof effortless
concentration
and enjoyment called "flow." Here, the man who literally wrote the book
on flow presents his most lucid account yet of how to experience this
blissful state.
IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE SKIING DOWN A SLOPE and your
full attention is focused on the movements of your body and your full
attention is focused on the movements of your body, the position of the
skis, the air whistling past your face, and the snow-shrouded trees
running by. There is no room in your awareness for conflicts or
contradictions; you know that a distracting thought or emotion might get
you buried face down in the snow. The run is so perfect that you want
it to last forever.
If skiing does not mean much to you, this
complete immersion in an experience could occur while you are singing in
a choir, dancing, playing bridge, or reading a good book. If you love
your job, it could happen during a complicated surgical operation or a
close business deal. It may occur in a social interaction, when talking
with a good friend, or while playing with a baby. Moments such as these
provide flashes of intense living against the dull background of
everyday life.
These exceptional moments are what I have called "flow"
experiences. The metaphor of flow is one that many people have used to
describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand
out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as "being in the
zone,"
religious mystics as being in "ecstasy," artists and musicians as "aesthetic rapture."
It is the full involvement of flow, rather than
happiness,
that makes for excellence in life. We can be happy experiencing the
passive pleasure of a rested body, warm sunshine, or the contentment of a
serene relationship, but this kind of happiness is dependent on
favorable external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of
our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in
consciousness.
WHERE TO FIND FLOW
Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of
goals
that require appropriate responses. It is easy to enter flow in games
such as chess, tennis, or poker, because they have goals and rules that
make it possible for the player to act without questioning what should
be done, and how. For the duration of the game the player lives in a
self-contained universe where everything is black and white. The same
clarity of goals is present if you perform a religious ritual, play a
musical piece, weave a rug, write a computer program, climb a mountain,
or perform surgery. In contrast to normal life, these "flow activities"
allow a person to focus on goals that are clear and compatible, and
provide immediate feedback.
Flow also happens when a person's
skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about
manageable, so it acts as a magnet for learning new skills and
increasing challenges. If challenges are too low, one gets back to flow
by increasing them. If challenges are too great, one can return to the
flow state by learning new skills.
How often do people experience
flow? If you ask a sample of typical Americans, "Do you ever get
involved in something so deeply that nothing else seems to matter and
you lose track of time?" roughly one in five will say that this happens
to them as much as several times a day, whereas about 15 percent will
say that this never happens to them. These frequencies seem to he quite
stable and universal. For instance, in a recent survey of 6,469 Germans,
the same question was answered in the following way: Often, 23 percent;
Sometimes, 40 percent; Rarely, 25 percent; Never or Don't Know, 12
percent.
A more precise way to study flow is the Experience
Sampling Method, or ESM, which I developed at the University of Chicago
in the early 1970s. This method provides a virtual filmstrip of a
person's daily activities and experiences. At the signal of a pager or
watch, which goes off at random times within each two-hour segment of
the day, a person writes down in a booklet where she is, what she is
doing, what she is thinking about, and whom she is with, then she rates
her state of consciousness on various numerical scales. At our Chicago
laboratory, we have collected over the years a total of 70,000 pages
from about 2,300 respondents. Investigators in other parts of the world
have more than tripled these figures.
The ESM has found that flow
generally occurs when a person is doing his or her favorite
activity--gardening, listening to music, bowling, cooking a good meal.
It also occurs when driving, talking to friends, and surprisingly often
at work. Very rarely do people report flow in passive leisure
activities, such as watching television or relaxing.
Almost any
activity can produce flow provided the relevant elements are present, so
it is possible to improve the quality of life by making sure that the
conditions of flow are a constant part of everyday life.
FLOW AT WORK
Although
adults tend to be less happy than average while working, and their
motivation is considerably below normal, ESM studies find more occasions
of flow on the job than in free time. This finding is not that
surprising: Work is much more like a game than most other things we do
during the day. It usually has clear goals and rules of performance. It
provides feedback either in the form of knowing that one has finished a
job well done, in terms of measurable sales or through an evaluation by
one's supervisor. A job tends to encourage concentration and prevent
distractions, and ideally, its difficulties match the worker's skills.
Nevertheless,
if we had the chance most of us would like to work less. One reason is
the historical disrepute of work, which each of us learn as we grow up.
Yet
we can't blame family, society, or history if our work is meaningless,
dull, or stressful. Admittedly, there are few options when we realize
that our job is useless or actually harmful. Perhaps the only choice is
to quit as quickly as possible, even at the cost of severe financial
hardship. In terms of the bottom line of one's life, it is always better
to do something one feels good about than something that may make us
materially comfortable but emotionally miserable. Such decisions are
notoriously difficult and require great honesty with oneself.
Short
of making such a dramatic switch, there are many ways to make one's job
produce flow. A supermarket clerk who pays genuine attention to
customers, a physician concerned about the total well-being of patients,
or a news reporter who considers truth at least as important as
sensational interest when writing a story, can transform a routine job
into one that makes a difference. Turning a dull jot into one that
satisfies our need for novelty and achievement involves paying close
attention to each step involved, and then asking: Is this step
necessary? Can it be done better, faster, more efficiently? What
additional steps could make my contribution more valuable? If, instead
of spending a lot of effort trying to cut corners, one spent the same
amount of attention trying to find ways to accomplish more on the job,
one would enjoy working--more and probably be more successful. When
approached without too many cultural prejudices and with a determination
to make it personally meaningful, even the most mundane job can produce
flow.
The same type of approach is needed for solving the problem of
stress
at work. First, establish priorities among the demands that crowd into
consciousness. Successful people often make lists or flowcharts of all
the things they have to do, and quickly decide which tasks they can
delegate or forget, and which ones they have to tackle personally, and
in what order. The next step is to match one's skills with whatever
challenges have been identified. There will be tasks we feel incompetent
to deal with. Can you learn the skills required in time? Can you get
help? Can the task be transformed, or broken into simpler parts? Usually
the answer to one of these questions will provide a solution;that
transforms a potentially stressful situation into a flow experience.
FLOW AT PLAY
In
comparison to work, people often lack a clear purpose when spending
time at home with the family or alone. The popular assumption is that no
skills are involved in enjoying free time, and that anybody can do it.
Yet the evidence suggests the opposite: Free time is more difficult to
enjoy than work. Apparently, our nervous system has evolved to attend to
external signals, but has not had time to adapt to long periods without
obstacles and dangers. Unless one learns how to use this time
effectively, having leisure at one's disposal does not improve the
quality of life.
Leisure time in our society is occupied by three
major sorts of activities: media consumption, conversation, and active
leisure--such as hobbies, making music, going to restaurants and movies,
sports, and exercise. Not all of these free-time activities are the same in their potential for flow. For example, U.S.
teenagers
experience flow about 13 percent of the time that they spend watching
television, 34 percent of the time they do hobbies, and 44 percent of
the time they are involved in sports and games. Yet these same teenagers
spend at least four times more of their free hours watching TV than
doing hobbies or sports. Similar ratios are true for adults.
Why
would we spend four times more of our free time doing something that has
less than half the chance of making us feel good? Each of the
flow-producing activities requires an initial investment of attention
before it begins to be enjoyable. If a person is too tired, anxious, or
lacks the
discipline
to overcome that initial obstacle, he or she will have to settle for
something that, although less enjoyable, is more accessible.
It is
not that relaxing is had. Everyone needs time to unwind, to read trashy
novels, to sit on the. couch staring into space or watching TV What
matters is the dosage. In a large-scale
study in Germany, it was
found that the more often people report reading books, the more flow
experiences they claim to have, while the opposite trend was found for
watching television.
To make the best use of free time, one needs
to devote as much ingenuity and attention to it as one would to one's
job. Active leisure that helps a person grow does not come easily. In
fact, before science and the arts became professionalized, a great deal
of scientific research, poetry, painting, and musical composition was
carried out in a person's free time. And all folk--art the songs,
fabrics, pottery, and carvings that give each culture its particular
identity
and renown--is the result of common people striving to express their
best skill in the time left free from work and maintenance chores. Only
lack of imagination, or lack of energy, stand in the way of each of us
becoming a poet or musician, an inventor or explorer, an amateur
scholar, scientist, artist, or collector.
SOCIAL FLOW
Of all
the things we do, interaction with others is the least predictable. At
one moment we experience flow, the next apathy, anxiety, relaxation, or
boredom. Over and over, however, our findings suggest that people get
depressed when they are alone, and that they revive when they rejoin the
company of others. The moods that people with chronic depression or
eating disorders
experience are indistinguishable from those of healthy people as long
as they are in company and doing something that requires concentration.
But when they are alone with nothing to do, their minds begin to be
occupied by depressing thoughts, and their consciousness becomes
scattered. This is also true, to a less pronounced extent, of everyone
else.
The reason is that when we have to interact with another
person, even stranger, our attention becomes structured by external
demands. In more intimate encounters, the level of both challenges and
skills can grow very high. Thus, interactions have many of the
characteristics of flow activities, and they certainly require the
orderly investment of mental energy. The strong effects of companionship
on the quality of experience suggest that investing energy in
relationships is a good way to improve life.
A successful
interaction involves finding some compatibility between our goals and
those of the other person or persons, and becoming willing to invest
attention in the other person's goals. When these conditions are met, it
is possible to experience the flow that comes from optimal interaction.
For example, to experience the simple pleasures of
parenting,
one has to pay attention, to know what the child is "proud of" or
"into"; then to share those activities with her. The same holds true for
any other type of interaction. The secret of starting a good
conversation is to find out what the other person's goals are: What is
he interested in at the moment? What is she involved in? What has he or
she accomplished, or is trying to accomplish? If any of this sounds
worth pursuing, the next step is to utilize one's own experience or
expertise on the topics raised by the other person--without trying to
take over the conversation, but developing it jointly. A good
conversation is like a jam session in jazz, where one starts with
conventional elements and then introduces spontaneous variations that
create an exciting new composition.
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
A deprived
childhood,
abusive parents, poverty, and a host of other external reasons may make
it difficult for a person to find joy in everyday life. On the other
hand, there are so many examples of individuals who overcame such
obstacles that the belief that the quality of life is determined from
the outside is hardly tenable. How much stress we experience depends
more on how well we control attention than on what happens to us. The
effect of physical pain, a monetary loss, or a social snub depends on
how much attention we pay to it. To deny, repress, or misinterpret such
events is no solution either, because the information will keep
smoldering in the recesses of the mind. It is better to look suffering
straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get
busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.
To learn to control attention, any skill or discipline one can master on one's own will serve:
meditation
and prayer, exercise, aerobics, martial arts. The important thing is to
enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is
not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one's attention.
It
is also important to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be
done with concentrated attention. Even the most routine tasks, like
washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn, become more rewarding if
we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. We
must then transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don't
like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did
before, or something we enjoy doing but don't do often enough because it
seems too much trouble. This sounds simple, but many people have no
idea which components of their lives they actually enjoy. Keeping a
diary or reflecting on the past day in the evening are ways to take
stock systematically of the various influences on one's moods. After it
is clear which activities produce the high points in one's day, it
becomes possible to start experimenting, by increasing the frequency of
the positive ones and decreasing that of others.
To make a
creative change in the quality of experience, it might be useful to
experiment with one's surroundings as well. Outings and vacations help
to clear the mind, to change perspectives, to look at one's situation
with a fresh eye. Taking charge of one's home or office
environment--throwing out the excess, redecorating to one's taste,
making it personally and psychologically comfortable--could be the first
step in reordering one's life.
With time of day as with the other
parameters of life, it is important to find out what rhythms are the
most congenial to you personally. There is no day or hour that is best
for everyone. Experimenting with various alternatives--getting up
earlier, taking a nap in the afternoon, eating at different times--helps
one to find the best set of options.
Many people will say that
this advice is useless to them, because they already have so many
demands on their time that they absolutely cannot afford to do anything
new or interesting. But more often than not, time stress is an excuse
for not taking control of one's life. As the historian E. P. Thompson
noted, even in the most oppressive decades of the Industrial Revolution,
when workers slaved away for more than 80 hours a week, some spent
their few precious free hours engaging in literary pursuits or political
action instead of following the majority into the pubs. Likewise, we
don't have to let time run through our fingers. How many of our demands
could be reduced if we put some energy into prioritizing, organizing,
and streamlining the routines that now fritter away our attention? One
must learn to husband time carefully, in order to enjoy life in the here
and now.
FINDING A GOAL
Flow is a source of mental energy
in that it focuses attention and motivates action. Like other forms of
energy, it can be used for constructive or destructive purposes.
Teenagers arrested for vandalism or robbery often have no other
motivation than the excitement they experience stealing a car or
breaking into a house. War veterans say that they never felt such
intense flow as when they were behind a machine gun on the front lines.
Thus, it is not enough to strive for enjoyable goals, but one must also
choose goals that will reduce the sum total of entropy in the world.
How
can we find a goal that will allow us to enjoy life while being
responsible to others? Buddhists advise us to "act always as if the
future of the universe depended on what you did, while
laughing
at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference."
This serious playfulness makes it possible to be both engaged and
carefree at the same time. We may also discover the foundations on which
to build a good life from the knowledge scientists are slowly
accumulating. The findings of science makes us increasingly aware of how
unique each person is. Not only in the way the ingredients of the
genetic code have been combined, but also in the time and place in which
an organism encounters life. Thus each of us is responsible for one
particular point in space and time in which our body and mind forms a
link within the total network of existence. We can focus consciousness
on the tasks of everyday life in the knowledge that when we act in the
fullness of the flow experience, we are also building a bridge to the
future of the universe.
From Finding Flow by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi. Copyright 1997 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Reprinted
by arrangement with BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins Publishers,
Inc.
In 2005, artist Teresita Fernández — one of the most original and visionary sculptors of our time, whose work appears in the bewitching monograph Blind Landscape (public library)
— received one of those legendary phone calls from the MacArthur
Foundation. The mysterious caller informed her that the foundation’s
secret committee had awarded the coveted MacArthur Fellowship — a
generous $500,000 grant, with no strings attached, given solely so that
the recipient can continue pursuing her or his creative work.
Teresita Fernández: 'Fire,' 2005
Work from Teresita Fernández's 2014 MASS MoCA solo show, 'As Above So Below'
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