Happy people experience Flow State often

You've been looking for Flow State your entire life, you just don't know it.

Think back to when you were a kid. For me it was video games. My mom would yell at me to get off the TV, and I physically couldn't. I was locked in. Maybe for you it was drawing, a sport, or Lego until it got dark outside.

That feeling has a name: Flow State. Being so absorbed in what you're doing that you forget about yourself and lose track of time. My favorite way to put it: flow is when the effort to stop is greater than the effort to keep going.

I've built my life and my work around that feeling. But you shouldn't take my word for it. Here's what researchers found when they actually measured it.

Your mind is somewhere else half the day, and it costs you

In 2010, two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, built an iPhone app that pinged 2,250 adults at random moments and asked three questions: What are you doing? Are you thinking about something else? How happy are you right now?

The results:

• People's minds were wandering 46.9% of the time.
• People were less happy when their minds wandered, during every activity they measured, even the boring ones.
• What people were doing explained only about 4.6% of how happy they felt in the moment. Whether their attention was on it mattered more.

Read that last one again. It's not what you're doing that makes you happy. It's whether you're all there for it.

That's basically what flow state is: 100% focused on what's in front of you.

I know this one from the stage. Some of the greatest joys of my life have come from performing music live. On stage there's no room for anything else. Every second needs me laser focused on the music and the room. There are absolutely zero distractions, and I've rarely felt happier.

Most flow happens at work, not on the couch

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who named flow, ran a study in 1989 with Judith LeFevre. They gave 78 working adults pagers that beeped at random times for a week. Each time, people wrote down what they were doing and how they felt.

Two findings:

• The great majority of flow moments happened at work, not during free time.
• Flow mattered more than the setting. How good a moment felt depended more on whether someone was in flow than on whether they were working or relaxing.

And the twist: people still said they'd rather be at leisure. We chase the couch, but the couch isn't where our best moments are.

This matches my own life. My fondest memories from work aren't the Friday afternoons or the holidays. They're the nights before a launch, when the whole team stayed in the office late getting everything ready. It was hard work, and it was some of the most fun I've ever had.

The "rest" we crave often doesn't deliver

Robert Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi used the same pager method to study TV. People switched it on to relax. But after watching, they reported feeling more passive and less able to concentrate. And the longer they watched, the less satisfied they felt.

That research is about TV. My bet is that endless scrolling works the same way: it feels like rest, but it leaves you flatter than before.

Engagement beats pleasure

In 2005, Christopher Peterson, Nansook Park and Martin Seligman (the founder of positive psychology) surveyed 845 adults about three routes to happiness: pleasure, engagement (being absorbed in what you do, which is flow) and meaning.

All three were linked to life satisfaction. But pleasure had the smallest link. Engagement and meaning had stronger ones. And the people low on all three were the least satisfied of all.

I learned this one at parties. My favorite raves are the ones I organized with my friends. Those took a lot of work and focus: getting everything done so the night went off without a hitch. Going to a party is pleasure. Throwing one is engagement. These days I mostly say no to raves I'm not organizing, because they don't give me enough flow.

People who flow more often feel better about themselves

In 2010, Kiyoshi Asakawa studied 315 Japanese college students. The ones who experienced flow more often had higher self-esteem, lower anxiety, coped with problems more actively and were more committed to their student life.

What this means

To be fair, these studies show links, not proof that flow causes happiness. But they all point the same way:

• The happiest moments aren't the most relaxing ones. They're the most absorbed ones.
• A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
• Pleasure is nice, but engagement is what builds a satisfying life.

So the happiest people aren't the ones with the most free time. They're the ones who get lost in what they're doing, again and again.

That kid who couldn't put down the controller wasn't wasting time. He was showing me what a good day feels like.

It's not luck

Flow isn't random. It shows up more for some people because they've learned, often without realizing it, how to set the stage for it. Anyone can learn that. I'll show you how in part two.

In the meantime, that's why I started Flow State Radio: music and short talk breaks, made to help you drop into flow and stay there. Put your phone in another room, pick one small task, and press play.

Sources

• Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. Harvard Gazette summary
• Csikszentmihalyi, M., & LeFevre, J. (1989). Optimal experience in work and leisure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(5), 815–822.
• Kubey, R., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). Television addiction is no mere metaphor. Scientific American, 286(2), 74–80.
• Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: The full life versus the empty life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 25–41. Abstract
• Asakawa, K. (2010). Flow experience, culture, and well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 11(2), 205–223. Abstract