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Flow : State of Optimal Experience

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In flow there is no room for self scrutiny. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

You can have a big house, a great car, a lot of money and still not happy, because that's just not how happiness works. According to a data, personal income tripled but it really didn't affect how happy people were. A person can make himself happy or miserable regardless of what is actually happening outside, just by changing the contents of consciousness. So, how can we change the contents of consciousness?

One of the best way to do that is to put ourselves in the state of the optimal experience called the Flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this term, Flow in detail in his book. He describe flow as, "The state in which people ares o involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter". He says that, concentration is so intense that no attention is leftover for anything irrelevant to that particular activity. Self-consciousness disappears and the time becomes distorted. 

We generally experience this in our life at some point, say, you are playing your favorite game or singing a song or painting and you are so involved, focused in the activity that several hours has passed and you have any idea. And you realize you haven't had any food, you haven't thought about anything else. You are so immersed in what you love doing and what you are good at that your brain simply can't focus on other things. 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Wikipedia

So hers's how you can put yourself in the state of flow. You don't want your task to be too challenging otherwise you would have anxiety, you don't want your task to be too easy for your skills either, otherwise you would be bored. But, it's when you balance these two you end up in the flow channel. You are striving towards upper right corner continuously, the more you move towards that direction the more intense the state of flow gets and that is where you will find ecstasy. 

When there is no challenge involved, there is no skill involved then you are in an area of apathy. You experience this zone of apathy when you are watching TV or scrolling your FB and Instagram feed. You are just bored and think about all the things you can worry about, of-coarse unnecessarily.

So try to spend most of the time of your life in the state of flow. Try to improve and get better at achieving this state more often and more quickly. Move away from boredom, apathy and worry and move towards ecstasy which is what you will experience when you will hit the state of optimal experience called the FLOW. 


 

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