Flow State

Flow is a mental state of complete absorption in an activity, marked by energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity itself, typically accompanied by a distorted sense of time and a loss of ordinary self-consciousness. The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced the concept in his 1975 book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, developing it after studying artists who became so absorbed in their work that they neglected food, water and sleep; the term itself came from how his interviewees repeatedly described the experience using water metaphors, saying things such as that it was like floating or that they were carried on by the flow. Csikszentmihalyi and later collaborator Jeanne Nakamura described flow as involving intense concentration on the present moment, a merging of action and awareness, loss of self-consciousness, a sense of personal control, a distorted sense of time, and a sense of intrinsic reward in the activity itself, and identified three conditions generally needed to produce it: clear goals with a way to track progress, immediate feedback on performance, and a balance between the challenge of the task and the person's own skill level. Flow has been reported across a wide range of contexts, including musical performance, athletic competition, video games, academic work, workplace tasks, spiritual practice and other creative pursuits, and researchers have found it associated with higher performance, learning, satisfaction and overall well-being, leading it to influence subsequent thinking in education, sport psychology, workplace design and game design.