The good news about Flow

What were your happiest moments in the past year? Watching a spectacular sunset while on vacation? Enjoying a gourmet dinner at the priciest restaurant in town? Ah, the question is deceptively difficult to answer. Memory distorts truth. You may think that your week of vacation was the most pleasant week of the year—you have conveniently forgotten that mosquitoes were swarming around you while you watched that sunset, making it impossible to think about anything else. Or that you had a raging headache the night of that gourmet dinner, but since reservations had been made weeks earlier, you went anyway and tried to make the best of it. Indeed, our brains are master historical revisionists.

As Jonathan Haidt explains in his tour de force The Happiness Hypothesis, a groundbreaking 1990 psychological experiment began to shed more light on what truly does make people happy—which is an empirical question as well as a philosophical one. The experiment (created by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi) goes like this: subjects wear a pager that beeps periodically. When it beeps, they quickly jot down whatever they are doing at that instant, and how happy they feel. With thousands of data points, it is possible to find out what activities people actually enjoy the most.

It turns out, rather surprisingly, that people are often at their happiest not in moments of leisure, but when they are working–or, more specifically, when they are experiencing flow. Flow, according to Haidt, is

…the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what people sometimes call “being in the zone”… it often feels like effortless movement. (p.95)

If you can maximize your chances of experiencing flow during the workday, by choosing a job that pushes you to use your natural talents without overwhelming you, and by minimizing the type of distractions that will break the rhythm of your work, you have a strong chance of feeling happy and fulfilled in your daily life. Which is, perhaps, a more uplifting way of understanding the “loss of perspective” that comes with immersion in a task. And that is the good news about flow.