Life in the flow: how to enjoy work and everyday life

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Mihai Csikszentmihalyi devoted most of his life to the study of happiness and deduced patterns in which a person feels that he does not just exist, but lives.

Few facts: how the study was conducted

Mihai Csikszentmihalyi used the Experience Sampling Method. The technique consisted in the fact that during the week, about 8 times a day at a random time, the respondent received a sound signal. After the signal, he had to mark in the questionnaire where he was, what he was doing and how happy he was on a 7-point scale - from “very happy” to “very sad”.

Personally, Csikszentmihalyi and his colleague Reed Larson collected over 70,000 pages of data from 2,300 respondents, and researchers from other countries tripled those numbers. The respondents were teenagers and old people, adult men and women from the USA, Europe and Asia.

What is thread state

All participants noted special conditions, which were later called flow by the author of the study. States in which consciousness is filled with various experiences, and feelings, desires and thoughts are in harmony with each other. People were so carried away by some occupation that they plunged into it headlong and did not notice the passage of time.

The flow arises when you are doing what you love and give yourself entirely to it. He can overtake you both during your favorite hobby and at work. As a rule, the flow comes when a person clearly understands the goal set for him, which requires a certain reaction.

The task should not be too easy, since here you can easily slip into a routine. It should not be too difficult, since a person in such a situation becomes frustrated and begins to worry, without even trying to solve the problem. There must be a challenge in the task, so that for its solution all his skill is required from the person.

The flow state leads to personal growth. The person in the "Rise" zone is focused on solving the problem, but he is not yet very cheerful and does not control the situation very well. To achieve flow, he will need to acquire new skills.

In the “Control” state, a person feels happy, strong and satisfied, but he lacks concentration of attention, dedication and a sense of the importance of his work. He will be able to achieve the flow if he increases the complexity of the task.

People reach the flow when they are doing what they love: gardening, singing in a choir, dancing, playing board games, or hanging out with close friends. Often the flow happens at work. And very rarely the stream catches up with us when we are passive: for example, watching TV.

How to get job satisfaction

Work gives a sense of the richness of life, but at the same time we are upset about the beginning of Monday and joyfully welcome Friday on social networks.

In ancient times, leisure was a fleeting phenomenon. A person working in the field could carve out rare moments of rest for himself. The attitude to work as something heavy and undesirable is still in the minds of people, although for the most part we no longer work from dawn to dawn.

According to the survey participants' questionnaires, the beep was often triggered when they were engaged in streaming activities at work. They faced a daunting task that required the utmost concentration and creative effort.

The work has clear goals and measurable results: either we ourselves see that the company's affairs have gone up, or we hear a comment from the boss.

At work, we experience more positive feelings than we might think.

How work affects the quality of life is not determined externally. It depends on how a person works and what kind of experience he draws from the tasks assigned to him. For a job to be interesting, it must alternate between a challenge that requires maximum effort and simple tasks during which we make sure that we have achieved something in our profession.

There are many ways to accomplish the same thing. Look for alternatives and experiment until you find the best one. When an employee gets promoted, most often it is because in his previous position he was looking for non-standard paths.

Rest is the highest happiness, isn't it?

We often feel bored and apathetic and prefer to fill our brains with ready-made solutions, such as watching endless TV shows or surfing the Internet. Or we resort to more powerful stimulants in the form of alcohol or gambling.

Leisure accounts for about a quarter of our free time. Modern man, as a rule, devotes it to three main occupations: the consumption of media materials, conversations and outdoor activities. Each of these activities takes 4 to 12 hours a week.

Passive rest quickly takes up our brain, but there is no challenge in it, there is no task after the solution of which it will be joyful to remember how great it was, albeit not easy.

From active rest, the return is always greater, but a lot of effort is required to prepare.

This is why we often prefer to stay at home than call friends and go jogging or cycling.

If you are too tired or worried about something, then you may not have enough inner discipline to overcome the initial hurdle.

The first step to improving your quality of life is to get the most out of your daily activities.

Think about what activities give you the greatest happiness, what motivates you to new achievements. And come back to them as often as possible.

Plan your time, especially weekends, then during the week you will not feel that the time allotted for rest was wasted.

Human needs human

Streaming activities connect people the most because they bring happiness and the feeling that you have accomplished something important together. You immediately feel the return on this relationship.

Communication with friends gives the most positive emotions. It often happens that we lose touch with school and then university friends because we outgrow the interests that once bound us.

Friendship, like love, cannot freeze; it manifests itself in caring for another person and mutual development.

Maintain relationships that move you forward. One of the most common complaints of people in midlife crisis is the lack of real friends around.

When people pay attention to each other or to the same activity, the chance of experiencing shared flow increases.

How to achieve flow state

Globally: Find an activity that you enjoy and that presents you with an interesting challenge. Learn to let go of everyday problems when doing what you love.

Locally: You should be able to fully focus on solving the problem. You cannot be distracted by phone calls or "urgent" questions that colleagues or family members approach you with. The task should be interesting to you, have a specific goal, and its result should be measurable. In the process of solving, you apply the maximum of your knowledge and skills.

If you feel that you are too excited about the upcoming business or, conversely, you feel bored and apathetic, use special techniques.

We are about 70 years old. The quality of life directly depends on how you spend this day, month and whole year.

If you want your daily activities to bring maximum positive emotions, we recommend reading the very inspiring books written by Mihai Csikszentmihalyi.