The researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ( pronounced cheeks sent me high) asked the question “When are people at their happiest?” Surprisingly, he discovered it was when they were at work!   He found people reported being at their happiest, when their total attention was taken up with what they were doing, a state that he named flow.  Usually flow occurs when people engage in some task that activates and challenges their skills and strengths, something that happened a lot for people when they focused on the task at hand.

From studying the lives of people and flow experiences for over 30 years , he has observed that most people live at two extremes- they are stressed by work or obligations, or they are bored by spending their leisure time on passive activities such as watching TV. For most people, he says “A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom.  Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living against this dull background.”

The experience need not be pleasurable in itself : it  could be climbing a mountain, working out a new schedule, solving a difficult problem in our work or hobby, listening to someone’s problem, fixing a motor bike, playing sport or chess, making love, painting a house or a canvas: what matters is that we have deep, effortless involvement  in what we are doing, we don’t notice the time passing, we lose consciousness of ourselves. It often produces a feeling of exhilaration .

Researchers have called such situations in our lives “gratifications” to distinguish them from pleasures. Gratifications usually involve the exercise of our most characteristic strengths ( called signature strengths) and produce a much more lasting effect on our mood and happiness levels than simple pleasures which can be more fleeting.   

The description of flow is akin to the yoga tradition of meditation and the zen tradition of mindfulness.  Both of these traditions have at their core the training of the mind to produce an effortless absorption in everything that you do. They both emphasize being present in your life, being in the now, as opposed to living in your head and running a commentary on everything you do. For the normal person, this usually requires training, as our mind is constantly in a state of overdrive.

To avoid confusion, I should point out that the term  flow is used much more specifically in positive psychology than in yoga and meditation traditions. In yoga and zen, even the most mundane of activities can be performed in a state of flow.

It is interesting that the state of flow involves losing consciousness of yourself and is the opposite of what happens in depression. Depression has been increasing steadily and has reached almost epidemic proportions in western cultures.  One of the major symptoms of depression is self-absorption : the depressed person thinks about how he/ she feels constantly, ruminates about problems and projects their low feelings into the future, which produces feelings of hopelessness and more sadness.  The answer may not be to more closely examine their feelings, or talk about them to others,  but instead to move out of “living in your head “  and into more flow.

Or as Erich Fromm puts it: To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die, without having lived, is unbearable.