How to achieve more Flow in our daily life

“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act”

Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi

Learning how to flow every day can greatly improve your life. Flow is the positive psychology term coined by Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi in his famous book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

He defines it as “the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment while performing an activity. It is colloquially known as being ‘in the zone.'”

We all know this feeling, where time slips away, and before we know it we have produced high-quality work. Studies show:

Flow Has These Characteristics

• Challenging but attainable goals
• Increased focused concentration
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding
• There is a sense of serenity
• Sense of a loss of time
• It increases happiness
• Provides feelings of positive emotions
• Leads to better coping
• Overall better performance on the task

The Benefits of Flow

All of this leads to a feeling of being productive while working towards a task you want to accomplish while feeling confident, happy, and satisfied while you are journeying to completion. You can see how flowing through life is much more enjoyable than just coasting in your work, or worse, begrudgingly doing performing the task.

How to Achieve More Daily Flow

1. In work, look for challenging situations that require a high level of skill

As you develop in your work life, look for activities you enjoy completing. Hopefully, while working towards your dream job. Continue to gain mastery in the associated skill and take on harder challenges in these areas. Taking on tougher work will lead to more flow as you are also developing into the skill-set you want to possess, a true win-win.

2. In leisure, avoid areas of low challenge and low skill situations.

It is easy to come home after a long day of hard work and just watch TV. Watching TV is relaxing and needed occasionally. However, as shown in the chart above, this can lead to feelings of apathy or boredom. Instead of going home and vegging out, you should build in some time for flow before relaxation. For me, this includes writing for the blog and drawing. Both are challenging tasks that require cultivating a skill. Working on your hobbies or goals before relaxing can help you get that boost in positive emotion, while also working towards accomplishing your goals.

If you don’t know where to start to focus your leisure time, ask yourself this one question and it will help you figure out where you should prioritize your time.

3. Find your peak time

For most people, the hours between 7 am-1 pm are prime productive hours studies show. Work on cultivating time for yourself to accomplish tasks you deem important during these hours (also using the prioritization question above).

You will have more energy during these times, rather than later in the evening after a stressful day. Which increases the odds of entering that hyper-focused, productive state.

4. Eliminate distractions and build in time

It takes ten-fifteen minutes to enter the flow state. This fifteen minute start-up time means two things: eliminate the distractions that can pull you out of a task initially and build time to achieve flow. Distractions include emails, texts, or any other form of notification that takes our minds off the immediate task. To make the time, block out an hour or more to capitalize on the state once you enter into the task.

5. Enjoy the process

Consciously building flow into your day to day life is a skill within itself. Give yourself time to develop this skill and enjoy the process of learning to achieve this state. Celebrate when you achieve flow, even if it is for five minutes, and do not beat yourself up if you cannot reach flow during the day. Just keep trying and improving.

Main Take-Aways:

• Flow is an important part of feeling better about ourselves while also helping us achieve our goals. It’s a win-win, feeling good while accomplishing what we want to do.
• Leisure is misunderstood. Watching two hours of TV each night will not make us happy in the long run. Building skills in areas we want to improve will lead to lasting happiness and engagement.
• Developing the ability to consciously get into a FLOW state is itself a skill. We need to give ourselves time to cultivate this ability

Action Item

What do you want to accomplish? How can you build more flow into your life to achieve these goals?