Flow state
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act. ―Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
👥 Serves: 1 person
🎚 Difficulty: Medium
⏳ Total time: 11-30 minutes
🥣 Ingredients: “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” book by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (if you’re curious to find out more about it!)
🤓 Wholebeing Domains: Awareness, Meaning, Positive Emotion
💪 Wholebeing Skills: Calm, Flow, Focus, Fulfilment, Mindfulness, Pleasure, Presence
Flow state
📝 Description
Steps for achieving and benefitting from Flow.
Through this activity you will be able to experience flow. Positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes flow as a state of complete immersion in an activity. While in this mental state, people are completely involved and focused on what they are doing. The ego falls away. The state of flow has innumerable benefits such as better emotional regulation, greater enjoyment and fulfilment, happiness, engagement, performance, creativity and intrinsic motivation!
This recipe has been kindly donated by Ilaina Rabbat.
For more information about Flow, we suggest you read the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
👣 Steps
Step 1 – Balance skills and challenge
Flow state requires a balance between your skills and the challenge at hand: if the challenge is too difficult for the skills you pose, you will experience negative emotions such as anxiety. On the other hand, if a task is too easy, you will get bored. When you experience flow, you are actively engaged but not overwhelmed by a challenge. If the task is too easy for you, add an element of challenge! If it is too difficult, improve your skills and ask for help!
Step 2 – Do something you enjoy
You won’t be able to achieve flow if you are doing something you truly don’t like. It will be easier to achieve flow while working on something you love. If you are doing something you don’t like, the other steps will help you to get closer to flow, but ideally you might want to add an element to make the task more enjoyable.
Step 3 – Find focus
Try reducing distracting things in your environment so you can fully focus on the task at hand. The present is what matters. Do not worry about the past or the future, you should only be focused on the task at hand. Sometimes music helps us be in the present or even turn down all our notifications from the phone or computer.
Step 4 – Balance between the goals and the activity
Have clarity on what you are trying to accomplish; having clear goals help you enter a flow state. However, don’t just pursue the task to achieve the goal; enjoy the task for its own sake. Then, set clear goals for what you want to achieve and focus on the present tasks and bring joy.
Step 5 – Get feedback
It is easier to get into a flow state if you have feedback immediately on how much or not you are achieving your goal. You need to know if you are doing well or not as soon as possible. Set a way to measure how close you are to achieving your goal.