Early on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi [Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi] noticed that while some adults around him whose family and livelihood had been devastated by World War II could not find their feet anymore, others got along despite all difficulties. To find an answer to that puzzling phenomenon, he delved into philosophy, the arts and religions.

He stumbled into psychology accidentally. As a young man he went to listen to a presentation in Switzerland supposedly about UFOs. But instead of speaking of alleged extraterrestrials, the speaker spoke of psychological traits of people in Europe. He said Europeans began “seeing” flying saucers in the sky in their desperate search for order in a postwar chaotic world.

The speaker was Jung, whom Csíkszentmihályi had not heard of before. He started reading Jung’s works. After resettling in the United States, Csíkszentmihályi studied psychology and sought the causes of happiness. He found that surveys that had been made in the United States since 1956 showed that 30 percent of the respondents reported that they lived a very happy life – despite growing inflation.

Csíkszentmihályi noticed that, for example, painters are so absorbed in their creative activity that they forget about the world around them. He concluded that certain conditions need to be met for flow – finding pleasure in the activity you are absorbed in – to kick in.

One of them is full concentration on the object of your activity. Pleasure in finding out exactly what you wish to do might even cause an ecstatic state of mind. In that state you forget time and your surroundings and feel as becoming part of a something higher than yourself. In such a state you are doing what you are doing just for its sheer pleasure.

Experiments were made where the size of the challenge and the amount of skill were examined. Plotting the flow theory in a system of coordinates, skill is along axle x and challenge along axle y. On such a diagram flow can be found at intersections of control, rest, boredom, apathy, anxiety and awakening. People differ as to who and when reaches the state of flow. You are in a flow when the levels of both the challenges and skills are higher than average.

You can only enter flow if you do what you really love to do, be it playing an instrument, spending time with a friend or for that matter, work.

The more you develop your skills, the closer you might get to flow. States of excitement are enlightening because they are beyond your comfort zone. When you have full control of a situation, that is within your comfort zone but the level of challenge is low. If you wish to transfer from control to flow, you need to increase the level of challenge.

As for the above-mentioned other states – it is less easy to reach flow from them. Take boredom for instance: it makes you downbeat. It is regrettable that so many people live in a state of apathy: they think that there is nothing they can do, their skills cannot be appropriately used and there are no challenges for them. Typical periods of apathy are watching television of sitting in the toilet.

Watching television can also be a gateway to a state of flow though but only if it is a program that you really wanted to see and which offers some meaningful answer to your questions. Csíkszentmihályi wishes to help as many people as possible to reach flow.

Born in Fiume, Italy, on September 29, 1934, Csíkszentmihályi is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A laureate of the Hungarian Szécheny Prize, for many years he headed the psychology department of Chicago University. The first time he wrote of flow with scientific precision was in 1975. What direction our lives take, he says, depends on our genetic setup, culture and experiences but, most importantly, how we can utilize our opportunities. Csíkszentmihályi settled in California in 1999 and has been doing research there ever since.

Source: Magyar Nemzet

Translated by Budapest Telegraph