Going with the flow

Imagine you are skiing down one of your favorite slopes. Powdery snow flies
up
on both sides of you like white sand. Conditions are perfect.
You are entirely focused on skiing as well as you can. You know exactly how
to move at each moment. There is no future, no past. There is only the
present.
You feel the snow, your skis, your body, and your consciousness united as a
single entity. You are completely immersed in the experience, not thinking
about or
distracted by anything else. Your ego dissolves, and you become part of what
you
are doing.
This is the kind of experience Bruce Lee described with his famous “Be
water,
my friend.”
We’ve all felt our sense of time vanish when we lose ourselves in an activity
we enjoy. We start cooking and before we know it, several hours have
passed.
We spend an afternoon with a book and forget about the world going by until
we
notice the sunset and realize we haven’t eaten dinner. We go surfing and
don’t
realize how many hours we have spent in the water until the next day, when
our
muscles ache.
The opposite can also happen. When we have to complete a task we don’t
want
to do, every minute feels like a lifetime and we can’t stop looking at our
watch.
As the quip attributed to Einstein goes, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a
minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it
seems
like a minute. That is relativity.”
The funny thing is that someone else might really enjoy the same task, but we
want to finish as quickly as possible.
What makes us enjoy doing something so much that we forget about
whatever
worries we might have while we do it? When are we happiest? These
questions
can help us discover our ikigai.
The power of flow
These questions are also at the heart of psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi’s
research into the experience of being completely immersed in what we are
doing.
Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow,” and described it as the pleasure,
delight,
creativity, and process when we are completely immersed in life.
There is no magic recipe for finding happiness, for living according to your
ikigai, but one key ingredient is the ability to reach this state of flow and,
through
this state, to have an “optimal experience.”
In order to achieve this optimal experience, we have to focus on increasing
the
time we spend on activities that bring us to this state of flow, rather than
allowing
ourselves to get caught up in activities that offer immediate pleasure—like
eating
too much, abusing drugs or alcohol, or stuffing ourselves with chocolate in
front
of the TV.
As Csikszentmihalyi asserts in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity
that
nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people
will
do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
It is not only creative professionals who require the high doses of
concentration that promote flow. Most athletes, chess players, and engineers
also
spend much of their time on activities that bring them to this state.
According to Csikszentmihalyi’s research, a chess player feels the same way
upon entering a state of flow as a mathematician working on a formula or a
surgeon performing an operation. A professor of psychology,
Csikszentmihalyi
analyzed data from people around the world and discovered that flow is the
same
among individuals of all ages and cultures. In New York and Okinawa, we all
reach a state of flow in the same way.
But what happens to our mind when we are in that state?
When we flow, we are focused on a concrete task without any distractions.
Our mind is “in order.” The opposite occurs when we try to do something
while
our mind is on other things.
If you often find yourself losing focus while working on something you
consider important, there are several strategies you can employ to increase
your
chances of achieving flow.