“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times…The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Picture this: you are driving down the Amalfi Coast in Italy, one of the most breathtaking roads in Europe, with the Spectacular Mediterranean coastline in your view. Though you have gone down this winding road before, you have never been able to ‘dominate’ it until now. You take off, striking every twist and turn perfectly, effortlessly. Your actions seem frozen in time, your movements are calculated, and every little sound becomes more intense. You are flowing down the coast, feeling like you have become one with the road.

Congratulations. You’ve had, quite literally, a peak experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this as the FLOW, a state of optimal experience where people are so immersed in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. As Csikszentmihalyi further explains it: ‘ The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.‘

Who is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the founding fathers of positive psychology and the pioneer of the scientific study of happiness. His seminal work in flow and optimal experience started to gain its initial shape in his childhood when he was put in an Italian prison during the Second World War. There, amidst the misery and loss, he discovered chess as a way to be immediately transported out of the harsh reality in which he was existing and into a reality where nothing mattered except the precise rules and goals of the game. But, more importantly, what Csikszentmihalyi discovered was that people could feel happy even when the world around them was burning.

After the war, Csikszentmihalyi traveled to Switzerland, where he attended a lecture by Carl Gustav Jung, which sparked his interest in psychology. Mihaly decided to pursue this discipline and moved to the United States, where he started his first observations and studies on artists and other creative types. He noticed that the act of creating seemed more important than the finished work itself, and he was fascinated to discover ‘the state of flow’ as he called it, in which a person is completely absorbed in an activity with intense focus and creative involvement. From that point on, Csikszentmihalyi decided to devote his life’s work to scientific identification of the different elements involved in achieving a state of flow.

What is Flowing?

In his book ‘ Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,’ Csikszentmihalyi explains

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