Though we live longer and have more material wealth than ever, many people feel anxious rather than happy. In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an antidote: “Flow.” In this summary, we’ll explore what flow is, how it influences our happiness, and how to cultivate it.
People are happy when they feel a sense of control over their thoughts and feelings. When this happens, we experience a “flow” state: We enjoy ourselves, we feel a sense of purpose and meaning, and other things don’t seem to matter as much. Csikszentmihalyi also refers to these states as “optimal experiences,” glimpses into a life we wish we could live all the time. For example, an artist immersed in creating a beautiful painting is experiencing flow (an “optimal experience”). It can also happen when you gain an important insight during tough times.
Optimal experiences occur most frequently when you’re voluntarily working hard to achieve something important. For example, a swimmer competing in the most difficult race of her career may experience muscle cramps and fatigue, but she may look back on the experience as worthwhile because she directed her actions and accomplished something admirable.
To better facilitate flow experiences, you need to understand what your consciousness is and how it operates.
Consciousness is a mental state of awareness in which we perceive, process, order, and act on sensory input and information—feelings, ideas, and perceptions. You evaluate every piece of information you encounter to determine whether it supports or threatens your goals.
When you get feedback that doesn’t align with your goals, you experience fear and anxiety, making working on your goals difficult. Csikszentmihalyi calls this “disorder in consciousness” or “psychic entropy”: Your attention is divided, making it near-impossible to achieve a flow state.
In contrast, when you get feedback that affirms your goals, such as seeing you’re on track to completing a marathon, you’re in a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi calls these kinds of experiences flow experiences because people describe feeling like they’re floating and that their energy is flowing in the direction they want.
To reach a flow state and accomplish your goals, you need to direct your attention. When your attention is so focused that everything else fades into the background, you achieve what Csikszentmihalyi calls “inner order” or “order in consciousness.”
Because all of your thoughts, feelings, and memories are shaped by how you direct your attention, attention is the most important tool you have to order your consciousness and improve your quality of life.
Doing activities that produce flow as frequently as possible has three main benefits:
This section describes the characteristics of enjoyable flow experiences. First, you’ll learn what distinguishes a merely pleasurable experience from an enjoyable one that creates flow.
You experience pleasure when you meet biological needs or needs you’ve developed through social conditioning. But pleasure alone can’t provide happiness. For example, eating restores the body’s sense of balance (a pleasurable experience), but it’s often passive and doesn’t help you grow as a person or make you more complex. Pleasure helps order your consciousness, but it can’t create new order. In other words, pleasure doesn’t foster personal growth.
In contrast, enjoyment can create new order in consciousness because it requires effort. Enjoyable experiences occur when you satisfy a need or desire, and you:
To reorder your consciousness and feel happier, you need to seek new, challenging goals and work toward them frequently.
When people describe an enjoyable experience conducive to flow, they mention one or more of the following nine components:
Flow-producing experiences unfold in stages. This section explores the stages of flow and the personality characteristics that promote flow.
Your consciousness becomes more complex in several stages. When engaging with an activity, you enter and exit a flow state depending on whether you’ve reached your current goal. The stages are:
Your ability to experience flow may depend on the experiences you had growing up and the habits you’ve acquired. If you’re naturally inclined toward finding flow in everyday experiences, you have an autotelic personality. People with autotelic personalities habitually do four things:
To transform an activity into a flow activity, create a framework for what you want to do and how you’ll measure progress. Here’s how:
Just as physical activities and those involving the senses can produce flow, so can activities that require deep thinking.
Writing provides a way to understand your experience and remember it in the future, giving order to your consciousness. Here are three kinds of writing to try:
Studying history—your own or someone else’s—has the following benefits:
This includes going to museums, reading books, or writing an account of your family history.
This section explores what makes work feel worthwhile.
To examine people’s relationship with work and leisure, Csikszentmihalyi paged study participants eight times a day for two weeks and asked them to report what they were doing and feeling, how many challenges they were dealing with, and how many skills they were using. A person was said to experience flow when they were dealing with an above-average number of challenges for the week, and they were using an above-average number of skills. Here were the main results:
The more regularly a person was in flow, the more likely they were to report a high quality of experience. When in flow, they described feeling “active,” “creative,” “concentrated,” “motivated,” and “strong.” In contrast, people experiencing apathy—facing a below-average number of challenges and using a below-average number of skills—described feeling “dull,” “dissatisfied,” “passive,” and “weak.” People were apathetic:
There are two ways to find flow through work:
In addition to enjoying your work, the second biggest influence on your happiness is your relationships. Transforming your relationships into flow experiences makes them more enjoyable and fulfilling.
In contrast to relationships with family members, it’s easier to enjoy friendships because you’re able to choose friends who have similar goals and interests—your friends affirm your current goals. People report their most positive moods with friends and tend to associate friendships with adventure and excitement.
Friendship can be a flow-producing experience because it’s one of the only relationships in which you can fully express yourself. With your family, you may have to fit a certain role, such as being respectful to your parents, or if you’re a parent, providing care to your children. At work, your behavior may be expected to reflect your role. In contrast, with friends, you can show your true self because your goals are similar. Like other flow experiences, for friendship to be enjoyable, you have to find new challenges to work on together.
Each time you face a difficult situation, it creates disorder in your life, and it may affect your ability to concentrate on your goals and achieve flow. Three factors affect your ability to deal with challenges: psychological resources (such as an extrovert’s ability to make friends), outside support, and transformational coping.
Transformational coping has three components:
Finding flow in one or more activities doesn’t mean that your life will feel unified and purposeful. To live a balanced, meaningful life, cultivate a sense of purpose to guide the goals and activities you pursue and relate them to each other, making your life into one large flow experience. There are three stages of finding meaning:
Finding meaning that gives order to your consciousness and life is the meaning of life. This involves alternating between focusing on yourself and focusing on the world around you, differentiating yourself from others in your community, and becoming more integrated into your community. Here are the four stages of developing your life’s purpose:
Once you know what your purpose is, find the time and energy to dedicate yourself to a goal that’ll help you fulfill your purpose. Here are two challenges that may surface during this stage and how to deal with them:
Finding your purpose and dedicating yourself to specific goals helps you achieve inner harmony in two ways:
Throughout human history, people have sought happiness for its own sake, and have sought other things, such as wealth and power, to achieve happiness. Though we live longer and have more material wealth than ever before, many people think their lives are being wasted and spend time feeling anxious and upset rather than happy.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote Flow to offer insight on cultivating happiness that he learned from researching when people feel the most enjoyment and happiness. Though it’s not a prescription, he hopes people can use this knowledge to structure their lives to feel happier. This chapter provides an overview of what happiness is, how our genetics and culture shape our quest for it, and how to cultivate it.
Understanding what happiness is requires understanding where discontent comes from. Csikszentmihalyi offers two reasons it’s difficult to find happiness:
1. The universe is a harsh place. Cold temperatures and darkness make the universe inhospitable to life. On Earth, disease, natural disasters, and famine have made survival challenging for millions of years.
To weather chaos, humans created myths, religions, and cultural norms. For example, as kids, we’re taught how the world is, and we think living will be better and easier when we’re adults. We also may think that struggle in the present will bring happiness in the future. For example, a teacher might reassure you that a boring class will help you land a job as an adult.
Discontent occurs when our reality doesn’t match how we’re told the world should be, making happiness feel difficult to achieve. This happens when people in an established, successful culture think their continued progress is inevitable, but they experience a setback. For example, the Chinese thought their culture would keep advancing until they were conquered by the Mongols.
When we realize life isn’t as easy as we thought, we may:
None of these reactions provide long-lasting solutions to the problems we face.
2. When we solve challenges, new challenges appear. For example, finding cures for diseases means people are living longer and overpopulation is harming the planet. Also, when your basic needs are met, you tend to develop new needs. For example, if you achieve a certain level of wealth, you’ll likely want to continue growing it rather than feeling content with what you have.
There’s nothing wrong with continuously working to improve yourself and your life as long as you’re not so fixated on the outcome that you don’t enjoy the present. People who prioritize enjoying the present are able to enjoy whatever they do, even if it’s hard.
Csikszentmihalyi found that people are happy when they feel a sense of control over their thoughts and feelings. When this happens, we experience a flow state: We enjoy ourselves, feel a sense of purpose and meaning, and other things don’t seem to matter as much. Csikszentmihalyi also refers to these states as “optimal life experiences,” experiences that become a reference point for how life should be. For example, an artist who feels immersed in creating a beautiful painting is experiencing flow. It can also happen when you gain an important insight during tough times.
Optimal experiences occur most frequently when you’re voluntarily working hard to achieve something important. This requires being in control of your circumstances, which is often difficult work. For example, a swimmer who’s swimming the most difficult race of her career may experience muscle cramps and fatigue, but she may look back on the experience as incredibly worthwhile because she directed her actions and accomplished something admirable.
You may think your thoughts and feelings indicate what will bring you happiness, but this isn’t always true. Your thoughts and feelings may be influenced by biological needs, genetics, or how society has taught you to react in certain situations. According to Freud, socialization persuades people to follow social norms even if they don’t want to—it manipulates our biological needs to make us react predictably to punishments and rewards, thereby maintaining social order. For example, people will likely comply with a dictator’s rule because they’d prefer not to be killed.
Though it’s okay to seek what feels good and avoid what feels bad, it’s best to think independently so you don’t fall victim to manipulation. Plus, to consistently overcome life’s challenges, you need to break away from needing external rewards or punishments to achieve success—you have to provide rewards for yourself regardless of your circumstances.
Different disciplines have used different approaches to address this—for example:
Although we’ve developed ways to control our inner thoughts, it’s still difficult to apply this knowledge because:
We’ll discuss specific ways to achieve flow throughout this summary.
To answer the question of what happiness is, Csikszentmihalyi recruited people around the world to participate in surveys about what made them happy. First, he looked at people who spent a lot of time doing the things they most enjoyed and excelled at it, such as chess players and surgeons. Later, he and his fellow researchers developed a sampling method where participants were asked to write what they were thinking about and feeling when prompted by a pager. Participants received about eight prompts per day. The ideas presented in the book are based on the results of these surveys. The concept of flow has inspired research around the world to understand what makes people happy and improve their quality of life.
Each chapter explores a principle of flow and achieving control over your inner life:
Just as it takes effort to be happy, it’ll take effort to apply the concepts in this book to your life. But the effort is worth it.
At different points in human history, such as Republican Rome, having control over the inner workings of your mind was considered necessary for fitting into and succeeding in society. People preferred thinking things through rather than acting on instinct. Today, it’s more popular to act on instinct, and we consider people who seek control of their emotional states uptight or operating outside of the norm. Yet evidence shows people who master their inner life are generally happier than those who don’t.
To control your consciousness, you’ll first learn about what your consciousness is and how it operates. Then, you’ll learn how controlling it facilitates flow experiences.
Consciousness is a mental state of awareness in which we perceive, process, and act on information and sensory input. Information includes feelings, ideas, and perceptions. Because consciousness gives you the ability to process and prioritize information, it can be thought of as “intentionally ordered information.” Having the ability to act is also key: If you weren’t conscious, you could still process information, but your body would only be able to react in a pre-programmed way rather than by deciding how to act. For example, if you dream that a relative had a car accident, you can’t act on that information, for instance by verifying it, because you’re unconscious.
Having the ability to filter information means you can learn to control your reactions regardless of whether you’re happy about what’s happening or not. For example, if you’re not chosen for a promotion at work, you can choose to feel defeated by the experience, or you can view it as an opportunity to learn and further hone your skills until you’re promoted.
Research can help us estimate how much information the brain is able to process. Here are some figures:
Yet it’s unclear whether we regularly reach this capacity. Some experts think we’ve evolved to facilitate information intake so that we focus only on important information and constantly expand our processing capacity. For example, when you learn to drive, it takes all of your concentration at first, but eventually becomes easy, freeing your attention for other things. We’re also able to compress information for ease of processing. For example, a story in the Bible might contain a lesson distilled from the experience of many people that we can learn readily with one reading.
But Csikszentmihalyi is skeptical that consciousness can be constantly expanded. First, despite our ability to compress information intake, we still spend 15 percent of our waking hours eating and doing basic bodily maintenance, such as showering. Though these tasks don’t require much concentration, we don’t have the capacity to focus on much more while doing them. And while we may be able to process a considerable amount of information, we tend to seek leisure experiences that require less information processing.
For example, in the one-third of our waking hours that aren’t spent working or tending to bodily functions, we tend to seek out activities like watching TV. When watching TV, we take in some visual and auditory stimuli, but taking pleasure in it doesn’t usually require much memory or thinking—you don’t have to concentrate to watch TV like you do for other activities, like learning a language. Other leisure activities, like looking out the window, are similarly undemanding on our consciousness.
So while it’s possible we have the capacity to process 185 billion bits of information in our lifetime, the amount we actually process could be much lower based on the activities we choose to do. Also, because there is so much information to perceive, only a select amount of everything you’ve felt, perceived, suffered, and so on becomes part of your consciousness. When it does, it becomes part of your life—how you reflect on the world and understand it.
Consciousness means having an awareness of many experiences and ordering them. This order can come from intention: what you want.
For example, if you’re hungry, you may feel agitated or your stomach may growl. Thinking about food may start to order your consciousness until you satisfy your hunger. However, someone could perceive their hunger and decide not to act on it. They might be dieting, trying to save money, or participating in a political protest. In this way, our intentions are prioritized and organized as goals. Most people’s intentions are basic, like trying to live a healthy life. But people whose intentions break from the social norms of their times, such as artists or poets, show it’s possible to have intentions that differ from those we’re conditioned to seek.
Achieving your goals requires directing your attention. Your attention is the process your consciousness uses to take in and evaluate information. Here’s how it works:
This complex sequence of events happens in seconds or less, repeatedly, every day. You can also think of attention as an investment of energy, or psychic energy. Doing work requires energy, and you need to replenish it regularly to do work consistently.
Because our thoughts, feelings, and memories are shaped by how we direct our attention, it’s the most important tool we have to order our consciousness and improve our quality of life. Successful people cultivate the ability to focus their attention on exactly what they want to focus on so they can achieve their goals. This means not getting distracted and focusing on the goal for as long as it takes to achieve it.
A variety of factors affect how people choose to focus their attention:
You evaluate every piece of information you encounter to determine whether it supports or threatens your goals. When you encounter information that doesn’t fit with your goals, it can cause psychic entropy, or disorder—when your consciousness is diverted from your goals. You may experience emotions like fear, worry, or jealousy, that make it difficult to work on your goals. You have to divert part of your attention to dealing with the information so that it no longer poses a threat. Long-term disruptions to consciousness may cause you to abandon a goal entirely.
Note: The information that you receive may not be inherently positive or negative, but you may evaluate it through the lens of your goals, attach a negative meaning to it, and decide you’re under threat.
Example 1: Julio Martinez, a factory worker, discovered that his vehicle had a flat tire. He needed to get it repaired, or get a new tire. Either way, he wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the repair until his paycheck came through the next week. He depended on the car to get to work, and maintaining his job was of utmost importance to him because all of his goals depended on earning money. On the factory floor, he could usually do his part and have time to talk with his coworkers on the assembly line before the next item came down the belt. But during the time he had the car trouble, he felt distracted, could barely finish the work on each item before the next one came along, and he snapped at a coworker who commented on his slowness that day. If Julio had had more self-confidence and trusted himself to overcome the issue, he might not have considered the situation as threatening and wouldn’t have been so distracted and irritable.
Example 2: Jim Harris was a high school sophomore whose parents had divorced a year before. Jim lived with his mother during the week and spent the weekend with his dad. There were two problems with this arrangement. First, Jim’s friends were too busy to spend time with him during the week, but his dad lived too far away for Jim to spend time with his friends on the weekends. Second, Jim’s parents got angry at him whenever he expressed a positive sentiment about one parent in front of the other. One day, Jim’s sister found him lying in bed with an empty bottle of aspirin nearby. They were able to get Jim to the hospital in time to save him. From then on, his parents were more careful about how they treated Jim and how they talked about each other. If Jim’s identity hadn’t been so tied up with his relationship with his parents, he might not have felt so threatened by the split.
When you get feedback—information—that affirms your goals, working on them is easier: You feel you’re doing well and making progress, which dissipates your worries. This is the opposite of psychic entropy, or disordered consciousness. Your experience is in line with your self and its goals, and you can devote attention where needed.
Csikszentmihalyi calls these kinds of experiences flow experiences because people describe feeling like they’re floating and their energy is flowing in the direction they choose. It still requires concentrating on directing your attention where you want it to go, but it feels right and takes less effort because it’s in line with your goals. Doing activities that produce flow experiences as frequently as possible has three benefits:
Example 1: Rico Medellin is a factory worker who enjoys optimizing how quickly he can do his task, which should take 43 seconds. By refining how he moves and uses tools, he has improved his time to an average of 28 seconds per unit. He does it partly so he can receive a bonus, but mostly to prove to himself that he can. Knowing that he’ll eventually reach the lower limit on how quickly he can do the work, he’s taking courses on electronics to find other work where he can enthusiastically apply himself.
Example 2: Pam is a young lawyer at a law firm. She spends most of her days doing research or making action plans for more senior partners. She is so immersed in the work that she loses track of time and forgets to eat. Though she frequently encounters obstacles, she views them as challenges she can overcome.
Some people think of consciousness as an entity with mystical powers waiting to be unlocked. For example, they believe that with the right training, they can use consciousness to work miracles or look into the past or the future. People who claim to have such powers aren’t necessarily liars; they’re often self-delusional—their mind is overly receptive and tells them they have special powers. Some people—for example, professional musicians—may appear to have special powers, but their ability stems from advanced training and practice. Though it may be possible to accomplish additional feats of consciousness in the future, like bending spoons with brainwaves, we should focus our energy on learning to order our consciousness—a useful but underutilized skill.
Using Consciousness to Its Fullest: “E” and “R’s” Story
Csikszentmihalyi offers two peoples’ stories to illustrate the power of using consciousness to achieve your goals.
A European scholar and businesswoman, “E” is an accomplished professional who fills her days with business meetings as well as active leisure tasks, such as reading, writing, and being curious about the world around her. For example, she enjoys going to art galleries and talking with her chauffeur about their impressions. She takes time to recharge using simple means, such as standing in the sunshine on the lakeshore with her eyes closed, or taking a nap when she has a gap in her schedule. She manages to live life to the fullest despite facing extreme hardship growing up: Her family became impoverished during World War I and in World War II, “she lost everything, including her freedom.” Her trick is refusing to give her attention to unproductive thoughts and activities.
“R” is a scholar and author, but is E’s opposite in terms of personality. He’s not a memorable person, but is intensely curious about the world and strives to learn what he can about the way the world works, exploring things that others take for granted. He likes understanding the world and perhaps expressing what he has learned, but he isn’t looking to make judgments. He is well-regarded by the select people he is close to and has a calmness with which he approaches the world.
Both E and R are just two examples of how people can efficiently direct their limited attention. Whether your life is enriching and rewarding or poor and unhappy depends on how you focus your attention.
Reflect on a recent time you felt upset through the lens of psychic entropy (a disordered state where you feel stuck).
Describe a time that upsetting information entered your consciousness. What was the information?
How did the information conflict with your goal(s)?
How did you decide to act in response to the information?
Knowing that feeling upset is a reaction to receiving information that’s incompatible with your goals, how would you act differently in a similar situation?
So far, you’ve learned how flow experiences benefit your growth and well-being. In this chapter, you’ll learn two strategies to improve your quality of life, and what distinguishes a merely pleasurable experience from an enjoyable one that creates flow.
Generally, there are two ways to improve your quality of life:
Most people are conditioned to adjust their environment to align with their goals and achieve success. For example, when you see people with power, status, or wealth, you might assume they’re happy and that you’d be happier if you had those things, too. If you go on to acquire these symbols, you might feel happier initially, but true happiness doesn’t come from what you own or what other people think of you; it comes from how you think about your experiences. In a survey of people in the U.S., the wealthiest participants reported being happy 77 percent of the time, while people with average wealth reported being happy 62 percent of the time. This isn’t a large gap, especially given that the wealthiest participants were selected from a list of the 400 most wealthy people in the U.S. So, to improve your quality of life, focus less on changing your environment (such as increasing your wealth) and more on changing your perception of your experiences.
Example: Learning to feel secure is part of a healthy life. There are different ways to achieve this. One strategy is buying stronger locks for your home, or persuading your city council to increase policing in certain neighborhoods. A second strategy is changing your mindset about the safety in your neighborhood. For example, you might realize that some risks are inevitable and therefore feel less on edge.
The key is to use both strategies together. If you just adjust your environment by buying locks, you haven’t done anything to address your tendency to be fearful of your surroundings, and you’ll likely experience new fears.
To adjust your experience of life, it’s important to keep in mind the difference between pleasure and enjoyment.
You experience pleasure when your biological needs or needs you’ve developed through social conditioning are met. When you experience psychic entropy, or a disruption of your consciousness by something inconsistent with your goals, you may seek pleasure to restore your body’s equilibrium. Some common ways people seek pleasure are through buying things that provide comfort, eating, and having sex. For example, watching television and having a drink to relax from a hectic workday can be pleasurable. Traveling can be pleasurable because it’s a departure from your routine.
But pleasure alone can’t provide happiness. Pleasurable activities like eating restore the body’s sense of balance, but they don’t help you grow as a person or make you more complex. In other words, pleasure helps order your consciousness, but it can’t create new order. Plus, pleasure is often passive: As long as the right parts of your brain are stimulated by an activity, or by drugs, you can feel pleasure without any effort.
In contrast, enjoyment can create new order in consciousness because it requires effort. Enjoyable experiences occur when you satisfy a need or desire, and you:
Experiences don’t have to be enjoyable in the moment, but when you look back on them, you feel accomplished and want to repeat them. Examples include playing a tennis match against an opponent who pushes you to the limits of your skills, or reading a magazine article that makes you think about the world differently.
To reorder your consciousness and feel happier, seek new, challenging goals and focus on them consistently. Young children are wired to do this: They constantly practice new skills, from talking to walking. A child’s concentrated expression when trying to learn something new is a good example of what enjoyment looks like. Yet over time, it’s easy to lose sight of the connection between enjoyment and learning. This could be because we associate learning with going to school rather than something we can do and enjoy on our own time. It can be hard to feel motivated to learn if we don’t associate it with an external reward, such as getting a good grade. This can lead to relying on pleasure for your positive experiences, which doesn’t help you grow as a person and ultimately can’t bring you happiness.
In addition to seeking new challenges, find ways to preserve the enjoyment of things you do. For example, the author knew an Italian antiques dealer who once refused to sell a pair of putti, or wooden cherubs, to a customer because she wouldn’t bargain with him. Though he would have made a great deal of money from the price the customer was willing to pay, he preferred the challenge of negotiating, which involved dealing with the buyer’s attempts to trick him or persuade him. He felt that the customer had disrespected him by not attempting to bargain.
Csikszentmihalyi conducted two surveys to identify eight characteristics of enjoyment. The first survey focused on people who were very good at what they did but received no incentive (such as money) for doing it. Examples included rock climbers and non-professional athletes. He later surveyed average people about what made them feel the most fulfilled and happy. Examples included mothers, teens, professors, and surgeons.
In both surveys, people described how they felt while doing an enjoyable activity using nearly identical language—the activities people described varied, but the language used to describe them was the same. For example, someone swimming the English Channel used similar language to that of a skilled chess player describing an enjoyable match. The use of similar language to describe enjoyment also held true despite differences in age, class, gender, culture, and other variables among the participants.
When people describe an enjoyable experience conducive to flow, they mention one or more of the following elements:
Next, we’ll explore these components in detail.
In day-to-day life, you’re bombarded by distractions. For example, your brain might wonder why you’re focusing on a certain activity, and it might distract you by wishing you were doing something else. But during a flow state, you’re too absorbed in what you’re doing to be distracted. The activity is challenging enough that it requires your complete attention, and because you feel so absorbed, your actions are automatic.
Example 1: In the survey, a dancer described feeling completely immersed in dancing. Her mind wasn’t able to focus on anything else, and it was simultaneously relaxing and energizing.
Example 2: A mother described feeling totally absorbed while reading to her daughter—her full attention is on her daughter.
Example 3: A chess player described steady, effortless concentration during a tournament. A section of the roof could have fallen, and they wouldn’t have noticed it.
When you have a clear goal with instant feedback, you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve and whether you’re making progress.
The goal has to be significant for it to be enjoyable. For example, if your goal is merely staying alive watching TV on your couch for as long as possible, you’ll likely meet this goal easily. In contrast, a rock climber can make a goal of climbing a rock face uninjured and alive, and she will feel exhilarated by the challenge because of the challenge and risk involved.
Activities don’t have to involve risk, but they should involve effort and feedback. By deciding what feedback you’re looking for ahead of time, you can make any task more enjoyable. For example, a painter might not know exactly what he wants to paint, but he may set out with a goal to start painting and decide after each brushstroke, or at a certain point, whether he’s on track to achieving his goal.
What feedback looks like varies depending on the activity—for example, feedback for a surgeon (vital signs) will be different from feedback for a psychiatrist (body language). Different people may be motivated by different types of feedback, and people’s natural abilities or life experience may influence how they like to spend their time and the type of feedback they prefer. For example, if you’re sensitive to sound, you might be drawn to becoming a musician and hearing certain types of sounds. The author’s surveys found additional examples of enjoyment tied to feedback:
Example 1: An Italian farmer described her enjoyment of tending her crops. Even though it took time to grow crops, she got consistent feedback that showed her she was on track to achieve her goal.
Example 2: An ocean sailor described the thrill of navigating open water using the position of the sun and different charts, and the satisfaction of seeing land emerge on the horizon, thanks to his skills and effort.
In a flow experience, you’ll be able to complete a task because you have the right skills. A skill is the ability to manipulate symbolic information. For example, reading includes not only knowing the letters and words on a page, but also understanding the cultural and historical context of what you’re reading, making predictions, and asking questions about the work.
If you don’t have the right skills for the task, it won’t affect you in the same way as it affects someone who does. For example, setting up a chessboard will exhilarate someone who has the skills to compete in the game, whereas someone unfamiliar with chess might not feel anything at all. Similarly, a rock climber will look at a cliff face and be able to recognize the specific challenges it presents, while someone unfamiliar with climbing may just see an interesting rock formation.
It’s common to worry about losing control of parts of your life. But during an experience of enjoyment or flow, you feel in control of a situation and free from your usual worries. Though you may not have true control over the situation, you have the skills and abilities to reduce the risks involved in the activity, giving yourself a sense of control.
For example, a rock climber faces two kinds of dangers: objective and subjective. Objective dangers include avalanches and falling rocks. The climber can prepare for them, but she can’t predict when she’ll face them. In contrast, subjective dangers are dangers the climber may face because she doesn’t have the skills to successfully navigate a challenge. For example, if a climber doesn’t have the ability to judge whether a certain route is suitable to her skill level, she may attempt to do the route and be unprepared to complete it safely. By focusing on building her skills, she’ll succeed in reducing her risk of being harmed by objective risks and eliminate the risk of subjective dangers entirely, enabling her to feel more in control in any situation.
One major exception to this rule is people who enjoy playing games of chance or gambling. Some people who play these games become convinced that they’re in control when playing, or that they have skills that help them control the situation. For example, people who play roulette may develop elaborate theories of how the wheel ultimately lands on a given slot. If a poker player loses, they may blame bad luck, but they’ll also try to see if they made a mistake that resulted in the loss.
Regardless of whether you’re in control or not, the feeling of control can be addictive. If you depend on one activity for your enjoyment, you lose the ability to control your consciousness: Instead of your participation being a conscious choice, it becomes a necessity. For example, chess players may feel such a strong sense of control over the world of chess that they use the game as an escape from their problems in the real world.
When you experience flow, your sense of time changes. People often report time passing faster than usual. But some report time passing more slowly. For example, ballet dancers report feeling as though time slows down when they’re doing a complicated turn—instead of the turn taking seconds, it seems to take minutes.
There are exceptions to this rule. Some people experience a flow state but can still keep perfect track of time. For example, one open heart surgeon may be involved in doing a specific, difficult part of the surgery on three different patients whose surgeries are taking place at the same time. To succeed, the surgeon has to keep track of the time and arrive at each surgery room within thirty seconds of when he needs to be there. Runners also develop the ability to sense time because it helps them keep the pace they need to win or break records.
In the course of your life, you spend a lot of time thinking about yourself. You face constant threats to your sense of self that consume your psychic energy and attention. For example, if people start laughing at you and whispering to their friends, you might feel self-conscious and wonder whether you have a smudge on your face. But during flow experiences, you’re so absorbed that you don’t have time to feel self-conscious. For example, a violin player is so focused on her fingers and where they need to be while playing a complicated piece of music that she’s not wondering whether her makeup is smudged.
Escaping self-consciousness allows you to feel a sense of connection with the world outside of yourself. When you look back on the experience, you’ll feel that you’ve expanded your boundaries and feel a sense of achievement in doing so. In this way, your sense of self emerges expanded and stronger after flow experiences.
An important note: It’s possible to feel you’ve grown as a person just from participating in religious activities or mass movements. These activities require your participation and loyalty, but you’re not engaging with the belief system if you let yourself be passively absorbed into it. The system may provide order, but it’s given to you rather than defining it for yourself and the sense of achievement that brings.
We often do things because we have to or because we think doing them will benefit us. For example, you may not enjoy your work or feel it improves your life. And as we’ve discussed, many people use their free time in ways that are pleasurable, but not enjoyable. Experiencing more activities that are inherently enjoyable will help you live a more satisfying life.
How can you tell the difference? An exotelic activity is one that you do because you anticipate experiencing certain benefits or consequences as a result of doing it. In contrast, an autotelic activity is one that you do because you enjoy doing it. (“Auto is the Greek word for self, and “telic” is the word for goal.) For example, being a teacher because you want to help develop the next generation of young minds isn’t autotelic, but being a teacher because you like working with children is. Autotelic experiences tend to feel more meaningful: You feel involved, energized, in control, and that you’re growing as a person.
Most activities are both autotelic and exotelic, and sometimes, an activity that you dislike can become enjoyable in time. For example, Csikszentmihalyi had a friend who was gifted at reproducing the melodies played by a symphony orchestra. His friend had begun going to the symphony at age three with his father, but he hated it. Eventually, at age seven, he found he could pick out the melody he heard at a concert. Suddenly, the world he’d detested transformed into one he could appreciate.
Csikszentmihalyi’s friend was lucky: Some children never learn to appreciate an activity and end up disliking it for the rest of their life. Sometimes, it’s necessary to incentivize children and adults with external rewards so they have a chance to connect with an activity that will benefit them but isn’t enjoyable at first. Eventually, if the person engages with the activity enough, they may start to receive feedback that lets them know they’re gaining skill, which can make the activity more enjoyable.
Flow is energy that can be used for constructive and destructive purposes: It can help you become more complex and enrich your life, but just because the outcome is good for you doesn’t mean the effects of that activity are universally good or beneficial.
For example, people may be attracted to violence, which is harmful to others, particularly if they haven’t learned how to enjoy more complex, stimulating activities. In Victorian England, for example, members of the upper class gathered to watch terriers kill rats. And Romans enjoyed watching gladiator fights at the Coliseum.
More modern examples include:
If society can’t offer fulfilling, complex autotelic experiences to everyone, then crime and violence will continue to be attractive. Plus, people need access to flow experiences that help them enjoy their lives without taking away the opportunity from others to enjoy theirs.
Examine your habits around pleasure and enjoyment. (Remember, pleasurable activities, such as watching television, can help order your consciousness, but they can’t bring new order and don’t require concentration the way enjoyable activities do.)
This chapter discusses how pleasure is a way to order to your consciousness when it has been disrupted. What is an activity you do regularly that gives you pleasure and orders your consciousness? Why do you do it?
Have you experienced any downsides to choosing this activity?
Can you think of a more enjoyable activity that would both reorder your consciousness in a new way and provide enjoyment?
Though you can experience flow unexpectedly, you’re most likely to experience it when you deliberately take part in certain activities and possess the skills or traits necessary to facilitate it. In this chapter, we’ll explore the activities and personal traits that facilitate flow in detail, as well as obstacles to experiencing flow. First, we’ll discuss how culture shapes flow experiences.
The culture you live in can influence how you experience flow. Cultures are structured to minimize disorder with norms, beliefs, and opportunities for fulfillment. For example, successful governments convince people that supporting the government will help them achieve happiness. While cultural structure can limit people’s opportunities, it can also streamline their success by helping people channel their energy into achieving a narrow set of goals. When people work toward specific, challenging goals, they’re more likely to enter flow.
The degree to which cultures actually help people succeed in pursuing their goals and experiencing flow varies widely. It’s easy to judge the success of a culture based on your own culturally shaped values about what success means. To avoid this, and focus on the goals of the people living in a given culture, evaluate success based on:
Some cultures provide ample access to flow experiences. Here are two examples:
Why do some cultures fall short in offering flow experiences? Here are five scenarios:
We don’t have a definitive way to measure how successful different cultures are at providing flow experiences, but surveys offer clues. For example, development, wealth, and the stability of a government increase the likelihood that a country’s residents will report living more fulfilling lives. Despite high rates of divorce and crime compared to other developed countries, the U.S. ranks high for the level of satisfaction among its residents. Csikszentmihalyi attributes this to how much time and money we spend on happiness-enhancing activities—the average U.S. resident spends their waking hours each week in the following ways:
Note: Leisure time doesn’t translate to time in a flow state. As we’ve discussed, the leisure activities many gravitate toward, like watching TV, don’t produce a flow state. You’re four times more likely to experience flow doing your work than watching TV. This is one of the biggest paradoxes of our times: We have more time for leisure activities, yet we don’t seem to enjoy our lives more than previous generations. This is because having opportunities for enjoyment isn’t enough—developing the skills to enjoy opportunities and developing the ability to control consciousness are just as important. Without these abilities, we can end up overwhelmed with the resources available to us or bored because we don’t push ourselves to develop our skills. We’ll discuss these concepts further, particularly in Chapter 7: Find Flow at Work.
Many activities have been developed around helping participants and audiences achieve flow. Games, sports, religious rituals, and art are examples. Regardless of the activity, every flow experience Csikszentmihalyi studied helped people become more complex through:
Your consciousness becomes more complex doing activities in several stages. When engaging with an activity, you enter and exit a flow state depending on whether you’ve reached your current goal, and you never stay in the same state for long. The stages are:
Each time you return to flow to pursue a new goal, you’ve become a more complex person with new skills that enable you to take on greater challenges.
There are four categories of games and activities; each offers optimal experiences for different reasons:
In addition to culture and the activities at your disposal, your ability to experience flow may depend on the experiences you had growing up and the habits you’ve acquired. Some people seem able to take advantage of all kinds of opportunities, while others are unmoved. If you’re naturally inclined toward finding flow in everyday experiences, you have an autotelic personality. But even if you don’t have an autotelic personality, research suggests that most people are able to increase their ability to find flow with practice.
If you have an autotelic personality, you likely habitually do four things:
1. Observe the environment and decide what opportunities you have to act.
2. Set goals. Setting goals can occur in one of two ways:
Once you’ve set the goal, monitor feedback as you develop new skills and adjust your behavior accordingly. In the nurse example, you might need to take additional chemistry classes. If you get a low grade on a quiz, this might indicate that you need to use a different technique to study the material. On the whole, you recognize that pursuing the goal is your choice and feel empowered to make it suitable for you; you don’t feel forced to work on it for external reasons, such as the wishes of your parents.
Sometimes, people set goals that are too ambitious and become disillusioned when they don’t succeed. For example, if you try to become a millionaire before you’re 20 but don’t succeed, you might respond by drastically scaling back your ambitions. Or you may doubt your potential from the start and set the achievement bar low to avoid failing. To avoid these pitfalls, choose realistic opportunities that match the skills you have or will soon develop.
3. Concentrate on activities. Your ability to enjoy an experience and successfully do something depends on your ability to concentrate and sustain your attention. People with autotelic personalities focus their attention so they’re immersed in an activity. For example, a basketball player is so focused that she can make a basket without being distracted by the crowd.
Concentrating on an activity involves becoming less self-conscious: Rather than worrying about what you’re doing, you neutrally look at the situation and adjust accordingly. Thinking so deeply about the activity you’re doing may naturally push your worries about yourself out of your mind, or you may naturally be unselfconscious, which allows you to immerse yourself in the activity. Either way, deep concentration helps you enjoy the activity and feel part of a system bigger than yourself.
4. Enjoy a variety of experiences. People with autotelic personalities are able to enjoy a variety of activities, even when life is objectively harsh. This includes diligently seeking enjoyment instead of thinking things will just work out.
Even if you’re predisposed to focus on your shortcomings and focus inwardly when circumstances get tough, it’s possible to cultivate a more autotelic personality with practice. This requires first understanding the personal and familial obstacles people face when seeking flow experiences.
Personal obstacles can be mental or genetic.
There are four neurological reasons you might have difficulty experiencing flow:
In sum, all mental obstacles to flow involve attention: For people with attention disorders or schizophrenia, attention is too scattered, but for self-conscious and self-centered people, attention is too focused on the self.
Some people may be genetically predisposed to ordering their consciousness and enjoying life. In one study, participants were asked to look at an image of an ambiguous shape popping out of a background and reverse it in their mind so that the shape receded into the background. Participants who reported enjoying their lives had to look at just a few points on the image to complete the task, whereas those who reported less enjoyment needed to look at more points.
The findings support the idea that happier people need fewer external cues to complete tasks. They’re able to control their thoughts and experiences independently from their environment, which leads to more enjoyment.
In a similar study, participants were divided into two groups based on whether they regularly experienced flow. First, a machine measured a participant’s baseline brain activity, or cortical activity. Then, each person was asked to concentrate on tones and flashes of light while the machine continued to monitor cortical activity. In participants who reported not experiencing flow regularly, brain activity increased from their baseline activity when exposed to the stimuli. But in the group that reported regular flow experiences, cortical activity actually decreased below their baseline.
These results suggest that people who experience flow regularly have flexible attention: They filter out irrelevant information, focusing only on what’s needed to complete the task. This is different from people with schizophrenia and others with attentional disorders and could be the defining characteristic of an autotelic personality. However, though it’s clear that flow and the ability to focus attention are related, more studies are needed to determine whether:
How your parents interacted with you, starting from a young age, can affect your ability to order your life and experience flow as an adult. There are five things parents can do to encourage flow, which parallel the nine elements of enjoyment:
In some families, a lot of time and energy is spent negotiating what children spend time on and what they do at any given moment, making children feel at the whim of others’ goals for them. In contrast, in families that apply the five previous principles, children know what is expected and feel supported pursuing activities and goals that matter to them. One study demonstrated that teenagers whose parents provided this framework were more content overall and resilient in different situations. Children who experience abuse, or whose parents threaten to stop loving them, have to dedicate their energy to keeping themselves whole, and they don’t have energy to dedicate themselves to many outside pursuits. As adults, they may seek pleasure however they can.
Evaluate whether you have an autotelic personality.
Autotelic people habitually achieve flow by doing four things: observing their environment and acting on opportunities, setting goals, concentrating on activities, and enjoying a variety of activities. Based on this list, do you think you have an autotelic personality? Why or why not?
If you have an autotelic personality, what are two or three personal and/or familial conditions that have helped you become autotelic? If you’re not autotelic, what are two or three personal and/or environmental obstacles you’ve experienced?
What steps can you take to enhance the autotelic elements of your personality?
Everyone experiences highs and lows, but many people haven’t learned techniques to escape the lows. This chapter discusses how to reorder your consciousness using physical activity and the senses to find flow and improve your experience of everyday life.
There are a variety of enjoyable ways to use your body. Every sense we perceive—such as tasting and hearing—and movement we’re capable of making corresponds to one or more flow experiences. The ability to run, throw, swim, or sing could all yield flow experiences if you work on them in the context of a goal or social setting that offers structure and challenge. Yet many of us don’t use goal setting to actively cultivate our senses or physical ability to maximize our enjoyment of life, leaving the senses, to provide us with chaotic, disordered information.
For example, if you don’t train yourself to run efficiently, you might feel clumsy or move in inefficient ways that make it less enjoyable. Training gives order to your consciousness and helps you feel more in harmony with the world around you. To achieve this, find the motivation and discipline to set goals and develop the skills to achieve them.
To find the right physical or sense-related activity for yourself, such as running or listening to music, pick something you have a genuine interest in. Otherwise, you may do something because you think you “should.” Though you may successfully stick with the activity, you won’t enjoy yourself. For example, don’t do pilates just because you think it’ll make you healthier; do it because you want to be healthier and you think it’ll help you be healthier and overcome a challenge.
To transform an activity into a flow activity, create a framework for what you want to do and how you’ll measure progress. Here’s how:
Example: An activity as simple as walking can be made into a flow experience using the previous principles. For instance, your walking goal could be following a specific route, seeing a new sight, or finding the most efficient way to move your body. You might create challenges for yourself such as interpreting the activities of people you see, getting from one point to another using the shortest route possible, or observing the architecture of buildings you pass. Walking is a simple activity, yet there are many ways to make it more enriching for yourself following these principles.
We’ll now discuss some of the most tried-and-true physical and sensory activities that produce flow.
Yoga and the martial arts are examples of physical activities developed in the East that encourage mastering your consciousness.
Hatha Yoga was developed 1,500 years ago by Patanjali. “Yoga” is the Sanskrit word for “yoking,” or the practice of becoming one with God. This occurs over eight stages, each building on new skills. Note: Stages three and four correspond to physical activities, while stages one, two, and five through eight correspond to mental activities.
Stages 1 and 2: Change your attitude. These stages focus on reducing your mental chaos before you attempt to control your consciousness. In the first stage, called yama, or “restraint,” you reduce thoughts and actions that could harm others, such as lying and stealing. In the second stage, called niyama, or “obedience,” you build discipline through doing routines, such as studying, worshipping God, or cleaning. Organizing activities into patterns makes it easier to control your attention.
Stages 3 and 4: Develop physical habits to overcome your senses. Developing physical techniques to work through the demands of your senses helps you focus your attention and find flow. These are the stages westerners know best. Stage three, called Asana, or “sitting,” consists of holding postures or positions without getting tired. Stage four, called pranayama, consists of controlling your breathing in order to relax the body.
Stage 5: Redirect the senses. In this stage, called pratyahara, or “withdrawal,” you learn to withdraw your attention from senses so that you’re only aware of the sensory input you choose. This mirrors flow because it’s a form of controlling your consciousness.
Stage 6: Concentrate on one thing. This stage, called dharana, or “holding on,” is the opposite of pratyahara: You learn to concentrate your attention on one stimulus for a sustained period of time.
Stage 7: Forget yourself. In Dhyana, or intense meditation, you learn to focus on one thing without needing an external stimulus. In the process, you don’t focus attention on yourself.
Stage 8: Become self-collected. In this stage, known as samadhi, you become one with a universal power. People who achieve this stage describe it as one of the most joyful experiences of their lives.
People disagree on whether Yoga is a true flow experience. Though it contains many elements required for flow, such as concentration and self-forgetfulness, some argue that whereas flow is focused on strengthening your sense of self, yoga is about getting rid of the self. But Csikszentmihalyi argues that yoga is a well-structured flow experience because you have to control your consciousness up to the final stage, and you have to be in control of and aware of your self in order to break from it. Only people who have reached a certain level of control over their instincts, desires, and actions achieve this.
Like other practices, yoga is a product of the time and place it was developed in. Though it may produce flow, consider whether the investment of time and energy required to achieve it through this method is worth it to you.
Martial arts are an assortment of sports that were developed for controlling consciousness in Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Examples include karate, jujitsu, and kung fu, which don’t require a weapon and originated in China; and kendo, or fencing, which originated in Japan. These sports are designed to improve the spiritual and mental health of the person doing them. Over time, practitioners are able to do them without having to think about each individual move: Mind and body act together in a harmonious way.
Dance is one of the oldest flow activities. It’s complex and appeals to people of all ages. Both informal dancing, such as dancing in a club, and specific genres of dance, such as ballet, can create flow experiences. Teenagers who went clubbing reported a sense of connection with the people around them, and they enjoyed the challenge of producing movements that matched the music and the movements of other dancers. Professional dance requires dedicating yourself to grueling training. Many professional dancers forgo marriage and having children, yet they feel dance is something they can’t live without.
Acting is another example of a flow-producing activity that doesn’t necessarily require professional dedication. Just playing charades allows you to break from your normal behavior for a short time, adding variety to your life that can produce flow.
Having sex, discovering your sexuality, or who you are as a sexual being, and developing romantic relationships are some of the most universally rewarding activities. Sex in particular guides a lot of our behavior: You may dress and groom yourself to find a partner or keep an existing one, and you may work to earn money to support a relationship. The urge to have sex is rooted in human evolution, and it can be so powerful that it redirects attention from other activities. As a result, cultures have devised a variety of methods and institutions to keep this urge in check.
Generally, sexual stimulation is pleasurable. However, the same sexual act in different contexts can bring any emotion, from pleasure to disgust, or even terror. Overall, sex is like any other activity: If you don’t make it enjoyable, as opposed to just pleasurable, it can become boring. For instance, people in long-term relationships may get bored having sex with the same person. Many people find their first love the most enjoyable, and don’t feel as fulfilled in later relationships.
How have different cultures made sex enjoyable? Here are two ways:
Note: Both of the above techniques were typically limited to people who had the time and resources to enjoy them. And, improving sex alone won’t make a relationship last. To do so, include the following two elements:
Like physical activity, different senses have corresponding flow experiences. This section offers an overview of the flow experiences associated with tasting, hearing, and seeing.
Note: Enjoyment comes from the process of engaging or disengaging the senses at will, and activities associated with either course of action can be enjoyable. For example, you could meditate in the afternoon, then go to an art gallery in the evening and both could provide enjoyment.
Like sex, eating tends to be naturally pleasurable because we’ve evolved to do it for survival. In Csikszentmihalyi’s studies, people tend to feel most relaxed at mealtimes, and every culture has developed ways to make eating enjoyable. Until recently, U.S. food culture consisted of preparing food without delighting in the sensory experience it can provide. Now, “foodies” and others are making enjoyable eating more commonplace.
The world’s cuisines developed as a flow activity. People looked at the ingredients available and learned how to cook using the best techniques and combinations of ingredients. This kind of experimentation with food happened in all classes. Here are some examples:
But there are plenty of ways to not enjoy food. If you eat just to get the calories to live, you may find food pleasurable, but you won’t enjoy it. To find flow in eating and cooking:
Most cultures use music as a way of ordering consciousness. For example, hearing music can direct people to feel a certain way—solemn at funerals or energized at political rallies. It also helps restore order to our consciousness when a piece of information isn’t compatible with our goals. For example, one police officer reported listening to the radio to soothe himself after stressful workdays filled with making arrests.
These days, music is widely available on our smart devices and some argue that this wide availability improves our quality of life. But like other flow activities, it’s about paying attention to the activity, not your access to it—just because you can play music 24/7 doesn’t mean it’ll be a flow experience. If you take your access to it for granted, you might not enjoy it as much.
On the other hand, anticipating a concert for weeks and engaging with it deeply for the few hours it happens could be a flow experience. You might have a sense that the performance is special and won’t ever be repeated in exactly the same way, or you may feel a sense of belonging with a large group of people. Emile Durkheim refers to this as “collective effervescence”; concerts and religious events are two examples. Witnessing the same event, processing the same information as the group, and potentially feeling the same feelings are all ingredients for producing a flow experience.
Though listening to live music has the ability to focus your attention, it’s possible to find flow by listening to recorded sound, too. To do so, people tend to:
There are three different levels of engagement with listening to music:
Learning to make music can also provide enjoyment. You improve your sense of self through ordering sound with pleasing orders of notes, harmonies, and rhythms. For example, playing a symphonic instrument or singing in a choir are two easy ways to produce something orderly and pleasing while relating to your fellow musicians and an audience. You can also create music through software in real time. It’s best to learn to make music when you’re young, but it’s never too late to begin.
There are two main barriers children face to playing music:
Seeing is one of the most overlooked ways to cultivate enjoyment. We typically use this sense for basic tasks, like finding our sunglasses or staying on a paved path. Sometimes, we’ll pause to admire an especially beautiful sight, but most people don’t train themselves to use their vision in more enjoyable ways.
Some seeing activities that produce flow include:
Reflect on enjoyable, flow-producing activities mentioned in this chapter.
Consider flow-producing physical activities and activities that engage the senses. Which of these activities have you done and enjoyed?
Choose one activity from the previous question to think about in more detail. Which characteristics of that activity made it enjoyable?
Think of a physical activity or activity that engages the senses that you didn’t enjoy. Based on the list of how to order a flow activity—setting a goal, measuring your progress, concentrating on the activity, understanding the challenges involved, developing the skills needed to act on new opportunities, and not getting bored—identify one or two ways that the activity fell short for you.
Which flow-inducing activities would you like to do more often? What pleasurable activities can you modify to be more enjoyable or flow-inducing?
Just as every movement and sense is associated with a suite of skills and activities that can provide flow, there are many activities associated with thinking that can produce flow. This chapter discusses the mental activities capable of producing flow: wordplay, history, science, and philosophy. First, we’ll revisit the general state of mind.
As we’ve discussed, our mind is disordered and chaotic when left to its own devices. Most people can’t focus for more than a few minutes at a time without some kind of external stimulus. Giving order to your mind through mental flow activities is a way to find enjoyment without depending on external circumstances.
We’re not aware of how uncontrolled our minds are because we build routines and habits that make our attention move smoothly from one activity to the next throughout the day. For example, when you wake up, you make breakfast and do other tasks to get ready for work. You work, come home, relax, and get ready for bed. But if there’s a moment that your attention isn’t focused on something external, your mind wanders to what is most bothersome or worrisome to you. For example, you may think about the state of the world, worst-case scenarios, fears, grudges, pain (real and perceived), and general frustration.
To avoid focusing on unpleasant feelings and ideas, people often fill their minds with easy-to-access information from sources such as television. This helps structure your thoughts with little investment of mental energy. But if you rely on external input for structuring your mind, it can be hard to find contentment without it.
The rest of this chapter focuses on learning to order your mind without depending on external stimuli.
It may seem illogical to distinguish mental activities that produce flow from physical activities that produce flow—all activity, whether primarily physical or not, requires some thinking to be enjoyable. For example, athletes have to practice mental discipline to be successful, and recognizing their achievements requires thinking. But the activities discussed in this chapter require symbolic thinking, or mentally manipulating language or concepts.
One of the most important ways humans can structure their minds is with words. We’ll discuss:
Memory is one of the most important mental skills. It allows us to retain knowledge, build on it, and share it with others. Before the development of writing systems, remembering information and sharing it orally was the only way to communicate information. For individuals, memory helps build knowledge that orders the mind and life and builds confidence in our skills and abilities.
Here are two common activities that depend on memory:
1. Recounting your ancestry. Before we had writing systems, recalling our ancestors was one of the oldest ways of ordering our life. Detailing the members of your family from past to present develops or reinforces your identity and is enjoyable because you have a specific goal that requires effort. Even today, when many feel disconnected from their ancestral past, it’s still enjoyable to think about where you’ve come from.
2. Riddles, sayings, and verses. Our ancestors remembered information by packaging it into riddles, sayings, poetry, lists, and more. Information included health tips, edible plants, and inheritance customs.
In some cultures, elders held riddling competitions. One elder would sing riddles in front of the whole community and ask another elder to guess what they meant. Solving the riddles required logical reasoning and the riddles themselves conveyed useful information to the community at large.
In addition to memory, solving a riddle requires possessing some problem-solving ability and specialized knowledge—things memory enables you to learn and retain.
The oldest records show that having a good memory has long been held in high esteem. But in the past century, studies of children determined that memorization isn’t the most optimal learning device, and the emphasis on memorization was phased out of schools. Later, the widespread availability of written and electronic records made having a good memory even less important. Today, a good memory is considered most useful for competing on game shows or doing trivia.
Memorization may not be the best learning device, but it’s a great skill to have to create an ordered mind: Regardless of your circumstances, you can enjoy revisiting the stories, concepts, chemical formulas, song lyrics, or whatever you choose to memorize without needing external stimulation. But you have to want to learn and share the information for its intrinsic value; if you learn and share information just to boost your own ego and control your environment, you won’t feel as satisfied as if you do it to order your consciousness.
To select the right information, decide what interests you and pay attention to it. Learn what specific information interests you most and plan to memorize it. For example, if you’re interested in the history of the Civil War, you might discover that you’re most interested in the battles that involved artillery. Structuring memorization around tasks you care about gives you a sense of control and makes it less of a chore.
Consider carrying snippets of information that interests you in order to review it when you’re feeling out of sorts, or have a free moment and want to commit it to memory. This can boost your mood.
In addition to memory, giving something order requires two steps:
1. Naming and numbering. Giving something a name, or a corresponding word, helps you mentally categorize things and think in the abstract. Numbering something gives it a quantity.
2. Creating concepts. With names and numbers, you can create concepts to help you understand how things relate to one another. For example, in the 6th-century-B.C.E. in Ancient Greece, Pythagoras and his students tried to discover “numerical laws” that could apply to multiple disciplines, such as music, geometry, and astronomy. Their effort is similar to religion, which seeks to explain how the universe works. The formulas and proofs created during these times supported activities such as map making and predicting seasonal changes, and gave rise to experimental science.
Imagining hypothetical situations helps people create concepts in a similar way to solving riddles. For example, Archytas was a 4th-century-B.C.E. town leader who wondered what would happen if he walked to the edge of the universe and stuck out a stick. He reasoned that he’d be able to extend the stick past the edge, which meant that the universe was infinite. Later, Einstein developed his theory of relativity in a similar way by imagining seeing the time on a clock tower from two trains going different speeds.
People developed disciplines such as mathematics and the sciences because thinking and the order it provides was pleasurable—if it weren’t, they might not have developed these disciplines.
But many historians disagree, contending that material determinism—the materials available—dictate how people live. For example, they’d argue that geometry and arithmetic were invented because civilizations such as the Ancient Egyptians needed them to build irrigation systems. In other words, external phenomena, such as needing a new technology, were responsible for the creative feats a society achieved.
But Csikszentmihalyi thinks this is too simplistic. While external phenomena may determine the ideas that members of a society focus on, it can’t always explain where those ideas came from. For example, though World War II accelerated research around the development of atomic bombs, the idea of creating such a weapon was developed during more peaceful times by European physicists at a Danish brewery. Put simply, people like thinking so much that they often develop ideas without thinking about the rewards they could gain from them, or their consequences.
Being familiar with a subject and thinking about it can grow your knowledge of as well or better than developing it through external inputs. Philosophers especially are famous for seeming absent-minded when they’re actually hyper-focused thinkers. For example, Democritus, a Greek philosopher, was sometimes seen sitting for days lost in thought and people thought he was ill. Hippocrates, a doctor, tended him and determined he wasn’t going out of his mind; he was dialed into thinking about how the world worked.
Now that we understand the role of memory and ordered systems, we’ll explore how conversation and different writing forms can elicit flow.
Conversation has traditionally helped us communicate information, but more recently, the focus on conveying information efficiently has made people lose the skills to enjoy small talk. However, conversation isn’t just about accomplishing something—it’s a means of confirming that everything is well in the universe, thereby improving the quality of experience for yourself and others.
For example, if you’re on a walk and say something as simple as, “great weather we’re having today,” to a stranger, you’re not just offering a commentary on the weather—you:
If the person replies, “Gorgeous, right?” that affirms for you that things are in order, too. Another example is small talk from TV or radio hosts—they discuss what’s going on in the world, reaffirming that it’s in order as it should be. Some researchers think that without obvious statements of how the world is, we’d start to doubt its goodness or order.
Though many conversations are short, creating quality conversation is a beneficial skill. One way to teach children to become attuned to words is to encourage wordplay with puns. For example, when the child uses a word or phrase that offers two different meanings, pretend to understand the phrase in light of the meaning they didn’t intend. For example, if the child says, “having Aunt Theresa for dinner,” you could feign shock that they’re discussing eating Aunt Theresa herself rather than having her over for dinner. It may encourage them to learn to enjoy commanding language and develop the skills to do it.
Writing is another way to use language creatively. But like conversation, good writing has fallen out of style in favor of conveying information efficiently. Yet it provides a way to understand your experience and remember it later, giving order to your consciousness. Here are three kinds of writing to try:
Though history doesn’t have as many rules as other disciplines, its framework of placing events in chronological order is enough structure to make it enjoyable; you don’t have to be a historian.
Studying history—your own or someone else’s—has the following benefits:
There are two methods to study history:
The sciences offer a wide array of interesting topics, questions, and problems to explore. There are rules that limit possible solutions or answers, and the scientific method is a framework for testing ideas. What motivates people to solve problems is the challenge of solving them, and the satisfaction of having discovered something no one has before, while considerations such as improving the world come second.
People tend to think it takes an advanced degree, a research lab with expensive equipment, and the ability to manage intricate experiments to be a scientist. Though being part of a research institution can help with securing funding, publishing papers, and receiving recognition, you don’t have to be a trained scientist to enjoy studying science.
Here are the characteristics you need to study science as an amateur:
Here are some examples of modern ways you can interact with science:
As with the sciences, there are many opportunities to be a philosopher (philosophy originally meant “love of wisdom”) without being part of an elite institution, such as a university or think tank. Here are the basic steps:
If you don’t make an effort to learn and think for yourself once you’re out of school, you’ll be at the whim of what others around you think. Once you’re done with school, cultivate a desire to learn that comes from internal motivation rather than external motivation to get a passing grade. Learning what you’re about and how the world around you works is one of the most enriching things you can do to have a fulfilling and meaningful life.
Since you spend a large portion of your life working, whether you enjoy your work can greatly affect your quality of life. This chapter explores what makes work feel worthwhile. First, we’ll look at some of work’s negative connotations. Then, we’ll discuss people’s relationship with work in the U.S., and some examples of people—real and fictional—who successfully make the most of work.
To understand our relationship with work, we first need to understand the function of it in our life. One reason we work is to satisfy basic needs. If we were content to use our income to meet our basic needs, then work might feel more worthwhile. For example, nomadic peoples of the Kalahari desert hunt and gather for sustenance, but they don’t invest as much energy in maintaining a dwelling or acquiring material goods. As you widen your ambitions to include acquiring expensive material goods, you’ll likely have to invest even more energy into work to afford them.
What work consists of and how different cultures view it varies widely. Many cultures view work as a necessary part of life, but one to avoid as much as possible. For example, in the Bible, Adam is sentenced to doing work, which is depicted as an integral part of living in a civilization, yet still undesirable. Work also has negative connotations because some groups of people have been forced into slavery to do work that benefits people in power. For example, slaves built the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids.
To examine people’s relationship with work, leisure, and flow, Csikszentmihalyi paged his study participants at eight random times during the day for two weeks and asked them to report several things:
A person was deemed to be experiencing flow when they were dealing with an above-average number of challenges for the week, and they were using an above-average number of skills. Here are the results:
The more regularly a person was in flow, the more likely they were to report a high quality of experience. When in flow, they described feeling “active,” “creative,” “concentrated,” “motivated,” and “strong.” In contrast, people experiencing apathy—facing a below-average number of challenges and using a below-average number of skills—described feeling, “dull,” “dissatisfied,” “passive,” and “weak.” People were apathetic:
The type of work and role also affected the percent of the time people experienced flow:
Lastly, as part of the study, Csikszentmihalyi asked people whether they would rather be doing a different activity. Their response indicates how motivated they feel about their current activity. This question revealed a paradox: When working, people were more likely to say they would rather be doing something else, even if they were in flow; when in leisure, they were content to keep doing what they were doing, even if they weren’t in flow. In other words, even though people reported better quality of experience while working, they still wished they had more leisure time.
There are several ways to explain why someone might strive for more leisure time and less work time, even when work offers higher-quality experiences:
1. The work is too challenging. It’s possible that people’s jobs are so demanding that they prefer to do less-challenging leisure activities, such as watching TV. However, there are plenty of people, whose jobs are demanding, but who still seek out challenging leisure activities, so this isn’t the most viable explanation.
2. The work conflicts with your goals. You might perceive working as being in conflict with your goals in two ways:
3. Job dissatisfaction outweighs the benefits of working. Though you may enjoy some parts of your job, these may not be sufficient to balance the parts you dislike. Ideally, you’d work to improve the dissatisfying elements. Here are three categories of dissatisfaction and their solutions:
There are two ways to find flow through work:
We’ll now discuss the first option in detail. Note: Neither of these strategies alone guarantees that you’ll find flow in work. Ideally, jobs everywhere would be structured to help workers find flow and workers should learn to recognize opportunities to adapt their work into an optimal experience.
You don’t need glamorous or exciting work to find flow: Master the work’s challenges, build complexity into it, constantly develop new skills, and immerse yourself fully. The rest of this section offers examples.
Serafina Vinon is a 76-year-old farmer in a remote alpine community in Italy called Pont Trentaz. Each day, she wakes up at 5 a.m. to milk her cows, after which she cooks breakfast and cards wool or tends her orchard. In the summer, she cuts hay and carries it down the mountain. She could take a direct route, but she prefers to take a winding one to minimize erosion. When she’s not working, she spends time with her great-grandchildren or plays accordion with family and community. And she doesn’t distinguish between work and leisure time: When asked what she likes doing best, she listed both work activities and leisure activities. Other older residents of Pont Trentaz responded similarly, as did their children.
But their grandchildren’s responses tended to reflect a greater interest in leisure activities, such as seeing shows, traveling, and reading. Younger generations are typically less content with the status quo and may settle into tradition over time, but it’s more likely they’ll continue to stray from the meaningful work structure developed by the generations before them in favor of leisure instead.
Joe Kramer works in a factory that assembles railroad cars. Instead of climbing the ranks from welder to manager, he learned how to perform every task on the assembly line, allowing him to fill in where he’s needed. He also has a knack for fixing equipment, which he developed by repairing household appliances, such as toasters, during childhood. For his skills, he’s widely considered the most valuable employee in the factory. In his free time, he builds intricate gardens on the two empty lots he and his wife purchased next to their property. The gardens include pathways, terraces, and a sprinkler system. Because he was mostly free to enjoy the gardens at night, he devised a lighting system to shine on the water and illuminate the rainbows created by the spray.
Kramer has an autotelic personality: He turns ordinary experiences into flow experiences by making use of the opportunities available to him. In contrast, most other welders interviewed in the study shared the view that work was something impossible to enjoy.
Examine whether your work provides sufficient flow opportunities.
Do you enjoy your work? Explain your answer, using concepts from this chapter such as preferring leisure, the work being too challenging or too easy, or work conflicting with personal goals.
Regardless of your answer to the previous question, there are probably opportunities to make your work more enjoyable. Describe one or two ways that you could make your work more enjoyable and reflect on how this fits into the concept of flow.
After enjoying your work, the second biggest influence on your happiness is your relationships with friends, family, and community. This chapter discusses techniques to transform your close relationships into flow experiences. First, we’ll discuss relationship challenges and the pitfalls of solitude.
From an evolutionary perspective, being together provides safety in numbers, allowing for the survival of more group members. Having people around tends to improve any activity, even tedious work, such as working on an assembly line, and boosts positive emotions. However, some of our most severe upsets come from relationships. For example, unresolved disagreements with your significant other can erode the quality of the relationship. Like most important things in life, relationships are amazing when they work out and distressing when they don’t. Interacting with the same person can be positive or stressful. For example, you might receive a compliment from a supervisor on one of your projects, and later that day, receive criticism from that same supervisor for how you’re managing another project.
Because we depend on people’s affirmation, learning to improve the quality of your relationships will improve the overall quality of your life. You might feel motivated to do this simply in hopes of manipulating people. However, learning to appreciate people for their inherent qualities rather than how they can help you achieve your goals is more important.
When you’re alone with nothing to do, it’s common to feel a sense of emptiness or lack of direction. People report that their worst experiences and moods occur when they’re alone. This is because your mind harbors your fears and insecurities, and when you don’t have an activity or external input to focus on, your mind drifts toward worry and disorder.
People who live alone and don’t attend church report their worst moods of the week on Sunday mornings: With no one around, and without things they need to do, they feel anxious and restless. Typically, by midday, people decide to do something to fill the rest of the day, such as watching a football game or visiting with a relative—they create a new goal that allows them to focus their time and feel purposeful.
Here are some other responses to solitude:
Since it’s so much easier to order your consciousness with other people around, how you use your alone time is the ultimate test of whether you’ve achieved order in consciousness: Do you choose an activity that merely distracts yourself from your worries, or an activity that promotes flow and allows you to grow without external inputs? If you don’t need a favorable environment to feel stable, and you don’t get bored easily, you’ve likely developed healthy creative habits and practices.
Learning to enjoy healthy solitude as a teenager can help you as an adult. If you don’t, you might grow into an adult with little patience or discipline. To avoid this, look at each challenge as an opportunity to improve your skills and learn. Specifically, judge whether your solitude provides an opportunity to work toward a goal you wouldn’t be able to work toward if you’re spending time with others. This will help you enjoy solitude rather than dreading it, and as you pursue opportunities, you’ll likely develop new skills and abilities.
Example: A woman named Dorothy chooses to live on a remote island in Northern Minnesota near the U.S. border with Canada. During the winter, she can go for months without seeing anyone. To make the most of her solitude, she has personalized the grounds with flower tubs, trees adorned with cheesy joke signs, and other decorations. She keeps herself busy with activities such as fishing, collecting eggs from her chicken coop, splitting wood, and sewing. She doesn’t mind company, but she enjoys living this lifestyle and controlling her surroundings.
Now that you understand the function of solitude, we’ll discuss how to improve your relationships with your family, friends, and community.
Three factors shape our connection to our families:
Maintaining a relationship is similar to playing a game: You agree to abide by a certain set of rules. Though these rules limit your behavior, they allow you to focus on something specific. For example, choosing to have a monogamous relationship limits your romantic and sexual activity to one person, but it also frees you to invest in creating a thriving relationship with that person rather than wondering about potential others.
If you aren’t willing to adjust your behavior to suit your partner, then the relationship might be marred by your reality clashing with your expectations. For example, as a single person, you may have wanted to vacation in Hawaii for a few weeks a year. When you marry and have children, you may not be able to afford this vacation, and it might not make sense to be away from your family for so long. If you don’t modify your old goal to better match your new reality, you’ll feel conflicted. Changing your goals involves reordering your consciousness, and changing yourself.
Turning family relationships into a flow experience is similar to other flow experiences: You and your partner need to have a unified goal that is complex and meaningful. Deciding to be married and/or have children because you know lots of people doing it might compel you to do those things, but they may not be enough to keep the relationship enjoyable and sustainable. If you do have a child, you need short-term and long-term goals that focus your energy and theirs. For example, you might want to lead a household that adheres to a specific religion, or you might want to help your children excel in school.
Goals should have these characteristics:
Making an effort to increase challenges and skills applies to your relationship with your kids, too. This tends to be easier prior to the teenage years—as a baby develops new skills, such as crawling, parents adjust her surroundings to accommodate, making her life more challenging and more enjoyable.
But when the child enters the teenage years, it becomes harder to provide adequate opportunities. Society isn’t well-structured to help teens challenge themselves either. For example, what challenging opportunities are there for teenagers—apart from school—in a typical suburb? This is why sports can provide an important outlet—it’s one of the only ways suburban teenagers can share their talents and skills outside of the school environment. However, teens still need opportunities to exercise their creativity in a relatively unstructured environment.
Parents can help their teens find meaningful opportunities in four ways:
In contrast to relationships with family members, it’s easier to enjoy friendships because you’re able to choose friends that have similar goals and interests—your friends affirm your current goals. People report their most positive moods with friends and tend to associate friendships with adventure and excitement. In contrast, people tend to associate family with warmth and comfort.
Friendship can be a flow-producing experience because it’s one of the only relationships in which you can fully express yourself. With your family, you may have to fit a certain role, such as being respectful to your parents, or if you’re a parent, providing care to your children. At work, your behavior may be expected to reflect your role. In contrast, with friends, you can afford to show your true self because your goals are similar.
Like other flow experiences, for friendship to be enjoyable, you have to find new challenges to work on together. Intimate friendships are much more likely to provide these experiences. For example, working to understand each other’s uniqueness can be enjoyable. You have to share yourself, and pay attention to them when they do the same.
Note: You’ll have more enjoyable experiences with friends who challenge you and help you grow than with casual friends. If your friends affirm you without questioning you at all, it won’t be as enjoyable. For example, regularly going out with drinking buddies and shooting darts or playing cards might be a pleasurable way to affirm your identity and ward off loneliness, but it won’t bring the same enjoyment that more complex, growth-producing activities do. With drinking buddies, you can participate in the group’s banter and joking, but a lot of the dialogue is predictable and doesn’t produce flow like a more original conversation would.
Developing meaningful friendships takes effort. In childhood and adolescence, when you have ample free time, finding friends can feel easy compared to having to do it as an adult. Many adults express nostalgia for the friends they had growing up but fell out of contact with. You can still find meaningful friendships; just put in the same effort you do with other flow experiences.
Finding belonging in the greater community is a great way to find meaning while helping to make the world a better place. (However, not everyone will have the time and energy to do so; some people are focusing on merely surviving.)
Politics is one avenue that can provide flow. In Ancient Greek society, the term “politics” referred to anything apart from your personal or family life. Though personal and familial challenges can provide flow experiences, successful involvement in politics requires relating to people beyond your immediate circumstances, a much tougher, and potentially more satisfying, challenge. Unfortunately, many politicians tend to seek power, but achieving power is relatively easy compared to helping your community, which means it’s less enjoyable—for optimum enjoyment, help your community.
Other community engagement can produce flow experiences, such as leading a union or starting an initiative to pick up trash. Just make sure to match the experience with your skill level and concentrate on realizing it.
Note: It’s hard to promote social change if you yourself don’t have your own consciousness in order. People who attempt to do so often end up making things worse rather than better. To avoid this, work to order your personal life first.
Examine the quality of your relationships with family members.
Choose a family member or romantic partner whom you wished you had a better relationship with. Write two to three sentences describing the quality of your relationship.
Which of the concepts in this chapter help you understand this relationship’s shortcomings? (For example, you might realize that your mother struggles to show an interest in your goals, or that a romantic partner wasn’t willing to adjust their lifestyle to spend adequate time with you.)
Now that you understand this relationship better, describe one way you could approach it differently so that it’s more fulfilling for you and the other person. (For example, if you realize your relationship with your brother isn’t fulfilling because you don’t seem to share any common goals, perhaps you plan to regularly try new activities together that are outside both of your comfort zones. Or you could make plans to do something your brother enjoys together and then do something you enjoy.)
Everyone encounters challenges and obstacles to their health and happiness, some of which are so severe that they make living difficult. And yet, many people who experience difficult circumstances survive and thrive. This chapter discusses how people create optimal experiences and find flow despite difficult circumstances.
People deal with challenges differently. The same challenge may completely overwhelm one person, while it may galvanize another to action. Three factors affect your ability to deal with challenges:
1. Psychological resources. Having certain mental skills helps you overcome challenges. For example, making friends at a new job may feel easier for an extrovert than an introvert.
2. Outside support. Even if you face challenges, having support from family or friends can help you overcome them successfully. For example, if you’re diagnosed with colon cancer, having family or friends you can confide in and insurance that covers the cost of treatment would help you weather it better than you would without those resources.
3. Coping style or coping ability. People have different strategies, or styles of coping with challenges. There are two main styles:
Example: Jim is a financial executive who gets laid off from his job. If he regressively copes with the situation, he might turn to excessive drinking or express anger or frustration at his spouse. If he transformationally copes with the situation, he might calm himself down and use logic to redefine the problem and outline his next steps. He might decide to search for a job where he can use his existing skills, or he might seek new skills to land a different job. But most often, people use both positive and negative coping strategies. For example, Jim might use regressive coping first, such as drinking excessively and getting in a fight with his spouse, but the next day, he may feel ready to assess the situation and decide what to do.
People who are able to use positive coping strategies are often admired for being courageous and resilient in the face of hardships. Even just the act of admiring people with these qualities is a helpful exercise because it means you pay close attention to how they do it so you can replicate it for yourself.
The rest of this chapter will discuss coping styles in more detail because it’s the easiest to adjust of the previous three factors—your psychological resources are determined by genetics, while outside support is only helpful if you already have appropriate coping skills. We’ll first examine the three qualities that allow people to successfully cope.
Transformational coping consists of three main components:
1. Unconscious self-assurance. No matter what happens, you feel in control of your destiny and able to adapt to whatever environment or situation you encounter. For example, a pilot is trained to navigate any weather conditions, and because of their training, they’re confident that they can tackle any challenge.
2. Focusing on the world instead of yourself. If you’re narcissistic, and your environment becomes adverse, you shift inward to protect yourself and don’t have the energy to keep engaging with the outside world. Since psychic disorder occurs when you focus on internal challenges, pay more attention to the world to feel part of your environment and overcome challenges. For example, if you’re headed to work for a meeting, but you discover that your car won’t start, you may be overwhelmed by frustration instead of seeking an alternative, such as taking a taxi to work, or working from home. Continuously paying attention to what’s happening in your environment can help you avoid becoming immobilized by frustration or fear.
3. Creating solutions. When you face obstacles to your goals, you have three possible courses of action: Remove the obstacle, alter your goals, or create new goals. For example, if you are hoping to get a promotion at your company and realize that a coworker might be selected instead, you can either work to convince the person making the decision that you’re the best candidate (removing the obstacle), or create new goals and solutions. For the latter option, you might pursue work in a different department, pursue a different career, or adjust your life to invest in non-career goals that could offer enjoyment, such as quality time with your family or spiritual development. Choose a solution that makes your life more enjoyable and is in harmony with your overall goals.
Though it’s impossible to say that anyone can overcome any tragedy, we can learn a lot from people who survive and thrive in extreme circumstances. People who thrive feel in control with goal-setting: Instead of letting themselves be immobilized by fear and worry, they make a plan to direct their attention. They may not be physically free, but they’re mentally free.
People who thrive:
To better understand how people thrive in difficult circumstances, we’ll explore several examples.
In a study of people with paraplegia in Italy, many participants described the accident that caused them to lose the use of one or more limbs as both the most negative and positive experience of their lives. Despite new challenges, they described having clear goals and an improved sense of what mattered in life compared to before the accident. As they adapted to their new lives, they felt a sense of purpose and pride.
For example, one of the study participants, Franco, described the initial devastation he felt when he lost the use of his legs. Before the accident, Franco had found flow through acrobatic dancing on the weekends, which he could no longer do. Instead, he found enjoyment through counseling other people with paraplegia, helping them navigate despair and make the most of their new lives.
Another study centered on how people who were blind—those who were born blind and those who develop blindness—adapted to new challenges. People who became blind tended to view the event as both negative and positive. One participant, Paolo, became blind when he was 24. Though the event itself wasn’t positive, it changed Paolo’s behavior, allowing him to better control his consciousness in three ways:
Many people have experienced homelessness around the world. This situation can be extremely stressful, yet people find flow even within these circumstances. Reyad, a 33-year-old Egyptian man, decided to leave Egypt and hitchhike into Europe to understand himself and the world better. He described his life since then as one giant flow experience: He experienced war, natural disasters, watching friends die, sleeping in roadside ditches during thunderstorms, and finding food and occasional work along the way. These experiences showed him that his purpose on Earth is to be tested so he can better understand himself and his connection with God. In other words, Reyad found more meaning in difficult circumstances than many find in comfort.
Many survivors of solitary confinement found creative ways to keep themselves mentally engaged during their confinement instead of succumbing to worry and despair.
Example: One person who survived solitary confinement in a Nazi internment camp described devising the challenge of studying each of the few objects in their environment in detail—the weave of the blankets on the bed and their warmth, who made them, where they had seen blankets like these before, and so on. Research has shown that this process is common for survivors of solitary confinement around the world.
Reflect on your coping style.
Think of a recent time you experienced a major setback. How did you react at the time and in the days and weeks that followed?
What coping style does your behavior reflect: Negative, positive, or a mix? How does your behavior reflect this style?
In a similar future situation, is there anything you’d do differently to push yourself toward a more positive coping response? Why or why not?
Achieving flow in one or more activities doesn’t mean your life will feel unified and purposeful. For example, Bobby Fischer was an outstanding chess player, but didn’t function well when he wasn’t playing. To live a balanced, meaningful life, cultivate a sense of purpose to guide the goals and activities you pursue and relate them to each other, making your life into one large flow experience.
This chapter describes how to accomplish this, and includes three stages of finding meaning:
We’ll now go over each of these and what they mean in detail.
Although there isn’t one universally accepted meaning of life or supreme being, you can give meaning to your own life by choosing an overarching goal that has a clear outcome, rules of engagement, and requires significant energy. For example, you might want to raise children capable of living successful lives, or you might seek a cure for pancreatic cancer.
This section will discuss types of life purposes and how individuals and cultures shape them.
Note: Having an overarching purpose that consumes most of your energy doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have a good life. Mother Theresa dedicated her life to helping the poor, while Napoleon dedicated his to amassing power. Though both had purpose and likely experienced flow, how Napoleon spent his life raises ethical questions. This summary defines the purpose of life as finding meaning that gives order to your consciousness and life.
There are three kinds of life purposes:
Finding and realizing your purpose involves alternating between focusing on yourself and focusing on the world around you, differentiating yourself from others in your community and becoming more ingrained in your community. Here are the four stages of developing your life’s purpose:
Not everyone has the opportunity to progress through these phases. For example, if you’re focused on just getting enough to eat for you and your family, you may stay in the first phase for most of your life. Most people make it to the second phase, finding value in conforming to the communities around them but not attempting to differentiate themselves within them. Fewer still reach the third or fourth stages.
In Chapter 9, we discussed how difficult circumstances can shape your life purpose. Additionally, culture can shape your purpose in life in two ways: valuing a certain life purpose, and offering art that imparts useful knowledge about life.
Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin identified three western cultural phases, each offering different meanings of life. Western societies rotate through the phases, though a phase can range from a few decades to a few centuries.
Sorokin’s three phases are:
Elements of sensate and ideational cultures are present in most societies at any given time. For example, in the U.S., influencer culture focuses on selling products to consumers by marketing them as something that will enhance peoples’ lives, while more conservative religious groups encourage eschewing everyday pleasures to satisfy God’s will. Individuals can embody the ideals of each, as well. Entrepreneurs who try to make the world a better place embody sensate culture, while people like Hugh Heffner, founder of Playboy Magazine, embody the more indulgent aspects of it.
As we’ve discussed, enjoyment also depends on adding complexity to tasks, so this is another way to evaluate the effectiveness of these cultures. For example, a sensate culture that is materialistic but thoughtfully ordered and provides opportunities for reflection is more valuable than an ideational culture that’s focused on conformity to religious ideals without offering time for reflection.
You may think you need to develop meaning and knowledge from scratch. While this can work, you can also find them through art that provides ways to order consciousness, or conveys lessons you can apply to your own life. Dance and drama are examples of enjoyable activities in which you may experience a flow state, while reading books may provide an enjoyable experience, and provide useful knowledge about how to live your life. For example, in Csikszentmihalyi’s research, a social scientist described how the fraught social and political circumstances in A Tale of Two Cities motivated him to research the roots of conflict. Learning about people who overcame challenges can offer you a guide for overcoming similar challenges.
Even having a parent or other trusted figure read to you or tell you a story at a young age could shape your life’s purpose. In Csikszentmihalyi’s research, people who didn’t develop goals or adopted a goal without asking questions didn’t remember their parents reading to them at a young age.
Once you know what your purpose is, find the time and energy to dedicate yourself to a specific goal that’ll help you fulfill it. Here are two challenges that may arise, and how to deal with them:
Finding your purpose and dedicating yourself to specific goals helps you achieve inner harmony in two ways:
Reflect on your progress (or lack thereof) toward finding and pursuing your life’s purpose.
Is having a life purpose important to you? Why or why not?
Describe a life purpose that you think could add meaning to your life. If you already have one, describe what it is.
Describe a goal you could set to help you work toward your life’s purpose.