Happiness of a Flow State
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I’ve been thinking about happiness a lot recently. Happiness popped up in this book I’m reading called the Power of Wonder by Monica Parker. Where happiness or being in the flow state or being in the zone is discussed.
She talks about the psychologist Mihaly Csiksgentmihalyi who developed the concept of flow.
He said “I tried to understand : where in everyday life, in our normal experience do we feel really happy? I began to look at creative people — trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn’t expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing.
Csiksgentmihalyi found that the artists were in a type of “optimal state” that he termed flow (named as such because when he asked people to explain the experience to him, they described that the work seemed to “flow from them”)typified by a sense of effortless attention, flow is a state of peak performance in which all our abilities and attentional energies are engaged in a challenging (i.e., hard but not too hard) task, leading to deep, unyielding absorption. This absorption can be so deep that we lose time and ourselves in the work, treating primary needs like food and sleep as distractions to be ignored.
This element of hard but not too hard is crucial. Neither absorption nor flow can be achieved if the task at hand is too subjectively difficult. It must be aligned such that the task maintains a balance between too easy (boring and menial, so we bail) and too hard (outside of our skill set such that we become frustrated, so we bail). The flow sweet spot is where our abilities are stretched but not overly stressed. Csiksgentmihalyi explained, “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.”
The reason behind that enjoyment, and a central part of Csikzentamihayli’s flow thesis, is that focus and purpose allow people to be happy, as the intensity of flow fully occupies the mind, leaving no room for the noisiness of negative thoughts. When a person is in flow, they don’t have enough attention left over to monitor how their body feels, or their problems at home. They can’t feel even that they are hungry or tired. Their body disappears, identity disappears from consciousness, because they don’t have enough attention…. Existence is temporarily suspended.
I live for that flow state when I am making art. I am happy, exhilarated, and at peace. For me when I get into the flow state it’s as if I am peaking into the center of the universe. I have a lot to talk about with that. But that’s a story for another time.
Your artist friend,
Jennifer Marie Keller