A shared universe › Blog › When time flies: the state of flow · Español
Flow is being so absorbed in what you are doing that time flies and everything else fades. The psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi found that it appears above all when a task asks a lot of you and you have just the skill to meet it, and it can be found in very ordinary things. You start doing something and, when you look up, two hours have gone by. You have not thought about anything else. You felt neither joy nor sadness: you were inside what you were doing.
In the 1970s, Csíkszentmihályi and his students at the University of Chicago studied chess players, climbers, people dancing and surgeons. Many described the same thing when they talked about their best moments: a concentration so deep that time seemed to stop and other thoughts fell away.
At first he called it “autotelic experience”, something done for its own sake. In team meetings they began saying “flow”, a word they borrowed from one of the people they interviewed, a poet and climber. This is told in the University of Chicago Magazine, which also recalls that not everyone experienced it: of thirty climbers, only nine said they felt it regularly.
The key he found is the balance between what the task asks of you and what you can do. If it is too easy, it bores you. If it is too hard, it distresses you. When the demand is high and your skill is up to it, flow is more likely to appear.
That is why we do not flow with just anything or at just any moment. What absorbs you today may bore you in a few months, once you have mastered it, and ask you for one more step.
In 1989, Csíkszentmihályi and Judith LeFevre followed 78 adult workers for a week. They were signalled at random times to note down what they were doing and how they felt. Most moments of flow came while working, not in free time. And almost everything that measured how a person felt depended more on whether they were in flow than on whether they were at work or at leisure.
The curious thing is that, even so, the same people preferred their free time: they said they would rather be there than at work. The authors concluded that these results offer clues for improving everyday life. One simple reading: free time can also be filled with things that ask a little of us.
You do not need to climb mountains. You can flow while cooking, playing an instrument, mending something, looking after plants, drawing, doing sport, in a good conversation. Csíkszentmihályi observed that people flow more often when doing something than when resting, and he was critical of passive pastimes, such as spending hours in front of the television, compared with hobbies that ask something of us.
That does not mean resting is bad. Lying down and doing nothing is needed too. It is simply something else.
There is no recipe, but these simple ideas help make room for it:
Flow does not solve what worries you, but it gives you a real breather: for a while, the mind rests from itself. That is why it helps so much when you are waiting for something or going through a bad patch. Along with the small joys of the day, it is one of those moments that keep us going.
If for weeks you have been unable to concentrate on anything, with no wish for what you used to enjoy, it may be more than a bad patch. In that case, it is worth telling your GP or a psychologist.
If you have found something that makes you lose track of time, you can tell it in a star in A shared universe with “What I’m grateful for”. It may give an idea to whoever reads it.
The star carries no name or anything that says who you are, it shines for seven days, and other people can keep it company with a touch or with a few words.