What is flow and how to reach it, or simply how to be happy?!

"Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

One of the most impressive book that I have ever read is the book FLOW, The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian-American psychologist, who recognized and named psychological concept of flow.

Flow is a state in which person while doing some challenging or hard activity is fully present in it, feeling focused and performs it as it was something easy. My example of hard activity that makes me feel good and experience a state of flow is running a marathon, and everyone nows that running 26.2 miles isn't easy whether it's slow or fast.

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in his book:

"The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen."

Happiness is not something that happens, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, but it is rather something that one needs to be prepared for.

Happiness and joy can be found in every activity one does. The secret is to find how to occupy your mind and make it more fun. For example, I do not like running on the treadmill because usually it is very monotonous and such a boring repetitive motion. To make it more fun I have developed a system im my mind to keep it occupied. I do my warm up for about a mile and then I start playing with speed and grade by going little bit up and down for certain amount of time and distance. With this new method my treadmill running is not as boring and monotonous, it's more like a game.

Another interesting moment mentioned in the book is that life without challenge has no meaning. For example, Indian people from Shurwap region considered the place they lived in a rich place with a lot of food and good land. With the time the territory became well developed and the elders said, that "world becomes too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life". Therefore the elders decided that entire village should move to a different part of the Shushwap land every 25-30 years, so they could find new challenges.

People without challenges lose their focus, they stop appreciating what they have, because there is no more effort needed. When ones mind is not occupied boredom occurs.

Every single activity in our life can be considered as a flow, even boring work or the same road. The task of the person who looks for happiness is to master activity and then increase challenge and so on.

"If person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together - and each activity will "make sense" in the present, as well as in view of the past and of the future. In such a way, it is possible to give meaning to one's entire life." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Happiness is not a goal, happiness is a state of flow and it happens in the present. When we pursue material things they makes us happy just for a moment and then we want something else, and so on and so on...

If we can find something that we can master and enjoy while performing it, it can become our happiness. And the whole life can become a state of flow.

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