Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
This week’s Speak Out Sunday recognizes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a positive psychologist who coined the term ‘flow’, and who recently passed away at the age of 87.
When thinking about mental health and psychology, we often think of the negative: depression, anxiety, psychosis—the list goes on. We also tend to think of psychologists and therapists in terms of treating the negative by bringing people back to baseline. However, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, as well as his contemporaries like Dr. Martin Seligman, chose to approach it in a different way: instead of simply getting rid of the negative, why not encourage the positive? From this thinking, the discipline of positive psychology was born.
Now, positive psychology generally recognizes three aspects to happiness: the pleasant life (which includes positive emotions such as hope, optimism, and life satisfaction, and is what we classically refer to as ‘happiness’), the good life (which is characterized by deep concentration and engagement), and the meaningful life (which covers feeling as if you have a purpose in life and are part of something larger than yourself). Each person’s pathway to happiness involves any combination of these three elements, and happiness itself is not limited to a particular life.
Flow, which falls in the category of ‘the good life’, was one of the main focuses of Dr. Csikszentmihalyi’s career. It’s the same as ‘being in the zone’ and is the feeling of being so optimally focused that everything else seems to fall away. It’s the perfect intersection between challenge and ability—when your task is perfectly suited to your skill level without being too hard or too easy. It’s a state often referred to by musicians, athletes, and artists, but it’s one that any person can cultivate if they pay attention to that sensation and seek out the activities that bring it out. The activity doesn’t have to be anything particularly complex; driving home and finding out that the trip has gone by in the blink of an eye is a version of the flow state, and so is doing homework and finding out that three hours have gone by while you were working.
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi’s work encourages us to think outside the box on what makes us happy and what experiences we should seek out when we’re looking for happiness. It’s a lesson that’s especially important to keep in mind in the midst of modern culture, when it’s so much easier to consume things rather than interact with them. Flow—and the good life—is about seeking out what stimulates the mind, what forces us to think outside of the box and engage in ways of thinking that we might not be used to. This is a type of happiness that requires effort, but the exertion of effort itself is the happiness, even beyond the end product.
So the next time you put off a project that you’ve been meaning to work on, the next time you take the path of least resistance and scroll through social media on your phone instead—consider the alternative route. Pick up that project. Read that book. And get in the flow.
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If you’re interested in learning more about flow, here are a few resources to get you started:
Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness
Background about flow and tips for cultivating it: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-flow-2794768