What Is Flow? The Psychology of Being Completely Absorbed
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
Most people have had the experience of looking up from something, a piece of work, a game, a climb, a page of music, and finding that two hours have passed unnoticed. Attention was total, effort felt effortless, and the self that usually keeps up a commentary had gone quiet. The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent forty years studying that state, named it flow, and found that it appears under conditions that can be described and, to a degree, arranged.
How it was found
Csikszentmihalyi began in the 1960s by interviewing painters who would work for hours without eating or sleeping and then lose all interest in the finished canvas. The reward, plainly, was in the doing. He went on to interview chess players, rock climbers, surgeons, dancers and factory workers, and they described the same state in strikingly similar terms, in several languages. The word flow came from the interviews: people said it felt like being carried by a current.
In the 1970s and 1980s his team developed the experience sampling method, giving people pagers that beeped at random moments through the day and asking them to record what they were doing and how they felt. The data showed flow was common, that it happened more often at work than in leisure, and that people were happier during it than during the passive activities they said they preferred, such as watching television.
The conditions
Flow needs a particular balance. The task must be challenging enough to demand full attention but not so hard that it produces anxiety; too easy and the result is boredom. The sweet spot is a challenge slightly above the person's current skill, which is why the state is common in games, sport and music, where difficulty is adjustable. It also needs clear goals, so the person knows what to do next without deliberating, and immediate feedback, so they know how they are doing. A climber knows at every hold whether the last move worked.
When those conditions are met, several things follow, and Csikszentmihalyi listed them as the marks of the state:
- •Complete concentration on the present task
- •A merging of action and awareness, so the doing feels automatic
- •Loss of self-consciousness: no inner critic, no worry about how one looks
- •A sense of control, without strain
- •Distortion of time, usually passing faster, sometimes slowing at key moments
- •The activity feeling worthwhile in itself, regardless of outcome
What the brain seems to be doing
Flow is hard to study in a scanner, since lying still in a noisy tube is not conducive to it, but the evidence points to a state called transient hypofrontality: reduced activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex that handle self-monitoring, planning and the sense of time, while the regions handling the task itself run at full stretch. That would explain the missing inner critic and the vanished clock. Studies of jazz musicians improvising and of expert video game players show the pattern.
It is also a state of high but focused arousal, distinct from relaxation. Heart rate and breathing are elevated; what is absent is the scatter of attention that normally accompanies effort. People in flow can work for hours and feel drained only afterwards, which is one reason it is prized and one reason it can be overdone.
The dark side and the limits
Flow is not the same as virtue. Gamblers at slot machines and players of well-designed video games report the same total absorption, because the machines are engineered to deliver exactly the conditions, a clear goal, instant feedback and a difficulty that tracks the player's skill, and a state that feels this good is easy to chase for its own sake. Csikszentmihalyi was clear that the value of flow depends on what it is attached to; a surgeon in flow and a safe-cracker in flow are having the same experience.
It also resists being summoned directly. Trying to feel flow is a form of self-monitoring, which is the thing that has to stop. What can be arranged are the conditions, and the state tends to follow.
Making it likelier
For work and study, the practical advice that comes out of the research is concrete. Choose a task, or a slice of one, that is slightly beyond your current ability rather than comfortably within it. Set a specific goal for the session and a way of seeing progress as you go, a page count, a problem set, a passage to play cleanly. Remove the interruptions that break concentration, since flow takes ten or fifteen minutes to enter and seconds to lose. And accept the first uncomfortable stretch, because the state arrives after the effort of starting, not before it. People who report flow most often are not those with the easiest tasks but those who have learned to set themselves the right ones.
The takeaway
Flow is the state of complete absorption in an activity that is challenging but within reach, with clear goals and immediate feedback, during which self-consciousness and the sense of time fall away. Named by Csikszentmihalyi from interviews with artists and athletes, it can be made likelier by choosing tasks just above your skill and protecting attention, and it is worth having only when the activity is.