Flow & Wellbeing
topic
Flow — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of the optimal experience of complete absorption in a skillfully challenging task — produces a distinctive psychological state (loss of self-consciousness, altered time perception, intrinsic reward, and effortless concentration) that represents the apex of positive engagement and is associated with peak performance, deep satisfaction, and the subjective sense of aliveness that most people report as among their most memorable positive experiences. Flow is produced by the specific challenge-skill balance in which the difficulty of the task precisely matches the current capacity of the person engaging with it.
Role
Flow is the experiential goal of which mindfulness is the training ground — with the present-moment absorption of flow being the natural extension of the present-moment awareness that mindfulness develops, applied to engaging activity rather than to meditative non-activity. The design of life for regular flow access — identifying the activities in which flow occurs, creating the conditions (challenge-skill balance, freedom from distraction, clear goals) that enable it, and protecting the time for those activities — is the positive psychology intervention with the most consistently reported impact on subjective wellbeing and the deepest experiential sense that life is worth living.