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Flow: how to find happiness by getting in the zone.
Back when people still carried pagers, the godfather of positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ran a large experiment to work out which experiences make us happiest.
He gave thousands of people a pager that buzzed at random moments during the day. Each time it went off, they scored how happy they felt and noted what they'd been doing and thinking. Across nationality, age and gender, one theme kept surfacing. He called it flow.
What being in flow feels like
Think back to a time you were so absorbed in something that you were completely in the zone. Time disappeared, minutes turned into hours, maybe you forgot to eat or drink. When you're in flow, your thoughts, feelings and actions are so aligned that you lose track of time and of yourself, that's how concentrated you are on the task.
Whether it's a first 5k, a piece of music, or the finishing touches on a presentation, all your mental bandwidth is taken up by the activity, leaving no room for anything else, including self-awareness. That's why you never notice you're in flow until it's over.
The conditions for flow
The biggest flow-killer is what Csikszentmihalyi called psychic entropy: conflict and distraction. How we handle distraction varies. Some people do their best work in a noisy cafe; others have to lock themselves away.
Flow also doesn't arrive instantly. Most people take twenty to forty minutes to get into the zone, provided they aren't interrupted. Beyond that, an activity needs clear goals and immediate feedback on how you're doing, otherwise there's nothing to motivate you, like playing an unplugged keyboard. And you need to be in control of the activity rather than a spectator, which is why it has to be voluntary. That last point is why so many people struggle to find flow at work: they feel they have no control over the output or the hours.
Complexity versus skill: the 4% rule
All flow activities are enjoyable, but not all enjoyable activities create flow. For an activity to do both, your skills need to roughly match its difficulty. To reach flow, you want a challenge that tests you, with your skills sitting just below the level required, so you're genuinely stretching.
There's a rough consensus that the optimal gap is about 4%. When your skill is a touch under what's needed, you hit a sweet spot where you sense you might just pull it off if you focus hard. One way to find it is to give yourself slightly less time for a task. You'll know you're there when you meet your own expectations about half the time. A middling tennis player will find flow against a slightly better opponent, but not against a seven-year-old, and this is also why doing the same thing at the same level for too long leaves us bored. As Csikszentmihalyi put it: "Flow transforms the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities."
How to get yourself in the zone
Here are eight things you can practise to build more flow into your life.
1. Deal with your baggage
Pent-up frustrations, anxieties and old wounds are major flow-killers. In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer calls them the thorns in your arm: too painful to touch, so we organise our lives around avoiding them. Rather than letting them drain your bandwidth, work through them, with a therapist if you can.
2. Develop an autotelic streak
Autotelic people feel in control of their lives most of the time and have trained themselves to draw enjoyment from all sorts of situations, with hopes of success that outweigh fears of failure. You can become more autotelic by deciding to actively enjoy what you're doing and staying curious about as wide a range of experiences as possible.
3. Pay closer attention to the outside world
Few things clear mental clutter like a decent walk. Being outside rekindles a sense of space and curiosity, and you'll find you slip into flow more easily afterwards.
4. Find intrinsic motivation
Find something to enjoy in whatever you're doing, even scrubbing the kitchen or updating a dull spreadsheet. The dullest task carries some pleasure once you set the intention to find it. That's the autotelic's superpower.
5. Get a little better at it
Cultivate a mindset of continuous improvement. Keep asking: what could I do right now to get slightly better at this? It keeps nudging you towards that 4% sweet spot.
6. Immerse yourself
Minimise distractions. You can multitask, but you can't multi-focus. Leave your phone in another room, and close the open tabs both on your screen and in your head before you start.
7. Have a warm-up ritual
A ritual helps you switch from scattered to single-pointed focus faster than waiting for it to happen naturally. Listen closely to a piece of music for a few minutes, then deliberately turn your attention to the task. I play a hang drum for a few minutes before each coaching session.
8. Practise mindfulness
This one's a little paradoxical, since mindfulness keeps you self-aware while flow asks you to lose yourself. But studies show that although mindfulness stops you fully dissolving into an activity, it sharply increases another part of flow: the feeling of being in control.
Where do we flow from here?
Real happiness isn't found in chasing moments of pure ecstasy. It's found in filling your life with flow, focusing your effort on something challenging and worthwhile. That's where the deeper joy is.
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