What is Flow and Can it Make us Happier ?

For the last week I’ve been reading about flow, and how being in flow can increase our happiness.

The first question to answer is:  What is flow?

Imagine you are are playing football, trying to surf, or playing a piece of music, or doing something else that requires a measure of skill that you love doing. You are doing something challenging, but just within your capabilities. You are completely absorbed and focussed on what you are doing. There’s no thoughts of what you are going to have for tea, or worries about what someone said to you earlier because you are concentrating on what you are doing.  Time flies and you lose all sense of how much time has passed. Your bodily needs go unnoticed as you are so engrossed in what you are doing. You feel ecstatic as you push yourself and feel yourself succeeding. You are not motivated into doing this activity for any external reward, but just the pleasure of doing the activity itself.

Hopefully you can all think of a time when you felt like that, when you were in a state of flow, or as it’s sometimes called, ‘being in the zone’ - it doesn’t have to be sport or music, you can experience flow in all kinds of activities.

Flow is good for us because being in flow gives us an immediate intense enjoyment of the activity that we are pursuing, and because it leads to growth - as we develop our skills we can take on more challenge, which increases our sense of competence and self esteem.

The concept of flow was developed as a topic in Positive Psychology in the 1970s by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, but the ideas of something like flow has existed across different cultures for centuries, most noticeably in some Eastern philosophies including Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism. A practical example of this is yoga. In yoga you are focussing on body, breathing, mind and the result is (even as a beginner like me!) you become absorbed in what you are doing and the time flies by.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi did a lot of work on flow and postulated that there were three conditions that needed to be met for a state of flow.

1. He stated that the activity in which you are involved has clear set of goals and you have a clear idea of your progress. It is easy to see how many sports and games fit this condition as they have clear rules and objectives.
2. You have to have immediate feedback, so you know how well you are doing, and can adjust what you are doing accordingly.
3. You have to have a good balance between the perceived challenge of your task and the skills that you bring to it. There is a sweet spot where these two come together, as your skills increase, so must the challenge to keep you completely absorbed and focussed.

In addition to the three conditions described, further work by other people has suggested other factors such as the need to have control over your own actions and to not be interrupted - if you were constantly being interrupted and being given instructions as to what to do next, or asked questions about something irrelevant to what you were doing, this would soon interfere with your state of flow.

So as well as games and sports, what other activities might induce a state of flow?

Doing something creative, such as drawing, painting or making something, reading a book that makes you really think, making music are all obvious examples of activities that could lead to flow. Watching TV or flicking through social media are not normally flow activities because they are passive, there is not much challenge involved.

Thinking about sources of flow in my life - the one that comes to mind is writing these blog posts! I’m completely focussed on thinking about something new I’ve learnt, how to explain it, what to say and how to put it. It sometimes takes a bit of effort to get going because it’s not easy to work out what I want to say, but once I get into it, several hours whizz past and suddenly I realise that I should have started making tea a couple of hours ago! The harder it is to put my thoughts together in a coherent way, the more satisfying it is when I’ve finished - even if no-one reads it, the joy for me is in getting my ideas together and accomplishing that particular piece of writing. 

Most of the things I’ve mentioned so far are mostly leisure activities for most people (unless you are a professional golfer, musician or writer), but we can also find flow in every day activities that we need to do including work.

Some people find it easy to find flow in the work that they do -  a friend of mine who is training to be a nurse told me about her first couple of days on the ward and about how a twelve hour shift just disappeared as she was completely absorbed in doing something new and interesting. She was definitely in flow. 

Although Csíkszentmihályi emphasises that flow occurs when you are operating at a high level of skill and challenge, it seems to me that there are some activities which make not be quite so challenging or require so much skill but are still really enjoyable and satisfying and rewarding which share some of the characteristics of flow which might be closer to most people’s experience of work. 

Thinking again about my own experience as a volunteer in my local Oxfam shop, I love my Thursday mornings sorting out the menswear department. I have a clear goal - to make sure the menswear rail is full of freshly steamed newly priced clothes. It’s not normally difficult, but it’s quite varied, so I have to adjust what I do accordingly. Sometimes there is stuff which someone else has priced and steamed waiting to be put out, sometimes I have to search through bags of donations to look for more. Every week we take out clothes that have been in the shop for two weeks - I then get to decide whether to reprice it and put it out again, pass it on to another shop, or keep stuff back for an occasional menswear sale. I also rearrange stock in the shop so that everything looks nice and attractive to customers. So I guess the skills I’m using aren’t rocket science, but I have accumulated them over a number of years and the fun is in working out how to apply them to get the rail stocked up and to maximise sales for Oxfam. I get my feedback from the way that area of the shop looks when I leave and by looking at the sales figures every week to see how well that department has done. I am motivated by an extrinsic motivation (making money for Oxfam to help end poverty) but also very much by an intrinsic motivation (I love doing what I do.) And as iI work, I become completely absorbed by what I am doing. 

This complete absorption brings another potential benefit to flow - when there is stuff going on that is upsetting or worrying, it’s great to be able to do something to take your mind off it for a while. I remember noticing this very distinctly a few years ago when I lost a very close friend to cancer. For the first few weeks after she died it was there in my conscious almost continuously. But one morning in Oxfam I suddenly realised with a shock that I hadn’t thought about what had happened for a couple of hours as I’d been completely absorbed in what I was doing, and I’d managed to temporarily put my grief on hold.

Thinking about that sense of losing yourself in your activity, does however remind me  that Csíkszentmihályi also stated that there is a potential dark side to flow. If something becomes so enjoyable for its own sake, and you lose a sense of time and other requirements on you, then something could potentially become addictive and be a cause of stress and unhappiness. Many mothers of teenage boys will be able to relate to this as it’s an extremely common problem that they perceive their son’s love of video gaming to be straying into the category of addictive. Gaming offers all the right conditions for flow. A clear set of goals and objectives, immediate feedback, and there is skills that need to be developed and honed, and always new levels and new games to increase the challenge level. On the bright side the gamer has an amazing experience, learns to manipulate a 3D world online (useful for careers in Architecture, Engineering,  Design etc.), and may also learn teamwork with online multiplayer games. On the dark side, as a mother you might also perceive that eating, sleeping and getting homework done might also be useful skills to develop, and that maybe in this case to pull of the flow of gaming isn’t helping!

Learning about flow has been interesting and has left me with more questions to think about. If flow (in the right activities!) is good for us, then how can we get more of it?

Setting ourselves the right level of challenge maybe? Looking for opportunities to push our skills a bit further and get that sense of accomplishment in that sweet spot without taking on too hard a challenge and being overwhelmed.? Maybe minimising interruptions at times when we are embarking on a potentially flow inducing activity and also by choosing activities that we enjoy and pursuing them in a way that gives clear goals and feedback to give us the best chance of flow?

If anyone has any thoughts on their experiences of being in flow, I would be interested to hear about them.

In the meantime, thank you for reading my flow-inspired blog post - I hope you enjoy reading it almost as much as I enjoyed writing it!