Living in flow - the secret of happiness with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at Happiness & Its Causes 2014

what uh kind of um occurred to me when I read the title of this uh conference here happiness and its causes I

suppose what we are doing here and trying to interpret what the causes of Happiness are it seemed to me that there is a very short answer to what the cause of

happiness is and the answer is that the causes of Happiness are sitting here there's each

one of you is sitting in a chair where the cause of your happiness is um

sitting before you in other words um we can't really tell you nobody can tell you what how to reach happiness except

yourself and uh happiness doesn't exist as an entity that somehow we are chasing and trying to reach because there is no

happiness except for what's inside of yourself and that and nobody can really make you

happy just as in many ways nobody can make you unhappy either but then the question of course becomes okay if each one of us

is responsible and in control of their happiness how do you get it because

unfortunately not everybody's happy in fact um even though all the surveys show that most people are above a kind of

middling level of happiness and very few people are completely unhappy the fact is that very few people

also are really as happy as they expected to be or or could be so the

question is about the caes of happiness is really how do we

make um it possible for ourselves to feel this level of full fully living

that has been called Happiness and uh from time in Memorial people distinguished between being Fully Alive and feeling depressed

feeling anxious and there is a a a level of of uh experience that we we all recognize as

being okay this is seems to be happy and it's represent in many forms

the dance and uh songs that preceded this more boring lecture is an expression of Happiness trying to

express something that we all recognize and we all would like occasionally to to experience

um there there was a a a poet you all heard about Dante aligi who in Italy

wrote uh one of the most famous epic poems called The Divine Comedy and he wrote once this is 700 years ago so a

long time ago he wrote that people really feel uh that any any living

thing feels most uh uh Fully Alive and enjoyed uh living when he or she is able to

express who they are they who they can express what they feel what they would like to feel and

they they act that out and the expression of life in a sense is what we would call

happiness it's what uh we are when we are fully expressing our strengths whether the strength is

a a strength of creating beauty or a moral strength or a physical strength somehow we are able to say yes this is

who we are this is what I am and this is what I can do and when when you are able to do that the um you experience

something that makes life suddenly uh matter that you feel that yes this is what I I'm supposed to do this is who I

am now that uh um realization is one that came to me

partly from my own experience of World War II which I spent in Europe which made me aware that uh some

people even under the worst circumstances seem to maintain their integrity their purpose their

Joy whereas others once they lose uh their uh supports of um Financial

well-being or status or their property is lost they kind of crumble and they become empty shells in many ways they

they become bitter and and unable to to function um so I I became as a child already interested

in trying to figure out what makes the difference between people who have an inner strength or or habits that they

have cultivated in in the life that make them able to enjoy life regardless of the external

circumstances and those who survive essentially by um uh leaning on the supports that

their society provides them and once those supports disappear they themselves are uh

helpless so um when I studied psychology I became interested in answering those questions and

um what the kind of uh result was uh what I tried to present in 18 minutes from now uh

although it took me about 40 years to get here but anyway um uh flow is this is a kind of a a

summary of what I tried to say in the past few minutes that you can uh live either as

a a pawn of external forces or you can live uh you can master your own destiny

to a certain uh extent and this act of living under your own control rather than being pulled by the strings of

Fortune and Fai that's what I call Flow and this is something I

simply uh learned by talking to people who seem to have some passion about life

that differentiated them from everyday people and uh I call this flow because uh the people

themselves start to talking when they described how it felt to be truly alive to be uh completely uh functioning they use the metaphor of

being like carried by a river carried by a current and um and feeling that there is no necessity to worry or make choices

because you're carried on by a force almost a internal force that works

outside and as I say this happens in uh when we sing We Dance AS happened just a

few minutes ago here when we do sports but then um very quickly I realized that it's the interesting part

is not about flow is not that you can do it when you separate yourself from everyday life and you do something artistic or

athletic but you can do flow when you're studying when you're working when you're at home and with the family and that's

really the um the best application of FL is how you can use it in everyday life now but today I will talk about our work

with athletes and artist because that's where it's easier to see what flow is about so um the first

um okay let's see the first condition of flow is is that um you

are focusing your attention on a very restricted field of stimuli until you you get fully

concentrated and completely involved now that is in contrast to what happens to us in everyday life where there are distractions constantly pulling and

pushing on our attention with the fact that with the uh to the extent that we

lose control over our attention because we we have to move it pulled by outside

forces or stimuli I mean just uh the cell phone or the the traffic on the road or whatever or the telephone or the

people who stop us at work and all of that results in our confusing attention but more importantly

a feeling that the control over our life is being uh taken over and now this

um so in in uh games or Sports you get to the point where you can really focus for hours sometimes like in chess for

instance where you can spend um um half a day without having to change your

focus uh obviously there's a lot of things happening in your head when you playing in a tournament you you are

anticipating hundreds of possible moves and um the consequences over time of those moves and how so you are very active

mentally but you are concentrated and as it says you could in fact we we had people for who whom the ceiling was fell off and

they didn't notice until afterwards and the people were cleaning their their jacket from the plaster that fell down

but so it's not it's not an exaggeration that you can achieve that concentration in any any game form or any aesthetic

artistic form you get there in everyday life we would like to have this too occasionally at least but it is

much harder and the question is how to organize life so that you can have that concentration in every day there comes a

point when you are no longer um focusing attention consciously you are simply the attention gets so

involved in the activity that it moves by itself without conscious control over it and that's um for instance this rock

climber who is up uh in yuse in

California and uh he's saying that you know you you get to the point when you forget that you are climbing you are

part you feel that you're part of the Rock you're part of the winds that are blowing and the Sunshine and all of this

is you're you have a role of trying to to move up but you are you're doing that because this

is what you have to do if you want to experience this um this feeling and you are in harmony with what you're doing uh

you're not under obligation it's an inner feeling of being part of this activity um the other thing is that people

say that you have when you are so involved in these activities you are not worried anymore about things uh that

could go wrong because as we uh see later you are um prepared for it this this kind the flow experience rarely

happens by itself is the culmination of having prepared yourself in some way or the other either by learning music or by

climbing or by in this case for instance this is um former student of mine uh Susan Jackson who teaches here in

Australia and she has interviewed many uh Olympic athletes cyclists

favorite and here is are this Pelon moving together and being a um the the chances of falling or or interfering

with each other are there but you don't feel them because you said okay I learned how to do this I'm good at it

and now it's going by itself and people say I'm um climbing a rock like the ones before we saw

is uh I feel safer there than trying to cross an intersection in a big city um where I don't know a taxi driver may run

into me or whatever here I in control I have my life in my hand so to speak then you get to the point where your attention is so taken by what you're

doing that you really start forgetting yourself as a separate uh person um for instance one of the first the

first profession we studied where flow seems to be very uh widespread is surgery surgeons uh usually if you ask

them how does it feel to to do surgery they will use they uh they find analogies from sport they

say oh it's like skiing a lot or it's like sailing or it's like um whatever sport they they know about that they use

that analogy to describe surgery because it requires this great concentration and

very very fine uh muscle coordination in and holding the scalpel and so forth but you're not aware of anything

else you are not aware of the problems you have as a citizen as a father as a uh mother as a whatever you are in other

roles in in life now you are simply there purely as a surgeon who has a a difficult task to

accomplish and um the other thing is that you forget time here is a disco dancer describing

how it is to uh and she this description is very common actually that um in retrospect when you look back on what

happened it seems like um like just a few minutes what you did lasted a few minutes only and um by what you're doing it

you're not even aware of time at all it's not not an issue you're just moving along with what's happening that that's partly why we call this the flow

experience and um and when all of these conditions are present

you uh the activity becomes aoic and autotelic means that uh the Greek word

two words AO means self and tell Us's goal Auto the goal is just to do the activity you're not concerned

about even succeeding or uh getting paid or any of those things are even the surgeon gets paid a lot of money of

course and has a high status but the fact is that unless the surgeon experiences flow he will soon become sloppy and

uninterested in doing the best of what he's doing if he's in it only for the money but usually surgeons begin to to

find in Precision EX of performance the the goal not in what happens after in the however much money they may make as

a result of it um here is for instance a quite well-known American composer who

also trains young people uh to play in Orchestra and and this is what he says when he I asked him you know why what do

you tell young people about what they can expect uh in the future as musicians and this what he

says uh don't expect a damn thing do it because you love it and that is a uh definition of being autotelic and and

the goal is to just do it because you love it and then hope that you can make some money out of it if that's how you want to make a

living um so so these are the conditions of flow now the question is how how does flow happen Okay um one thing is

that uh flow occurs not when you have a long-term goal uh the long-term goal is necessary often but that's not where

flow comes from flow comes from being able to do right the next thing if you are playing a musical instrument you don't play it in order to

get to the end you play it for the next note the next chord and then when it's over when you finish you said Gee I wish it would

continue but uh the the song ends but you don't play to end in and and the r

climber here again um says that uh climbing is uh you have to decide every

move what the the next move is and that process of deciding do I put my fingers up here or down here it makes a big difference here you have to pull

yourself up and spend energy here you don't go as far up and so you have to to decide which is the best way to do the

next move and that that is very important um then after the goals is you get feedback to what you're doing you

hear that the music you're playing or you notice that you're still on the wall instead of Falling Down The Rock you're

still there so that's good feedback and uh um and then the final uh condition which is very

important is the balance between what can be done and what you can do there is what the challenge of this situation and Europe

ability to meet up with it and this was the original way I I tried to describe that you have skills going this

horizontally and challenges vertically and the flow occurs in the diagonal when the two are in Balance since then

um uh anxiety is high challenge low skill boredom is uh high sk Kow Challenge and

a person starts at a playing something very simple but after a while you get bored and playing that and then if you

want to continue enjoy playing you have to up the challenge play something more difficult and then you're back in flow

and you can stay there for a while unless your parents are uh tell you to play chaen when you just started and then you're up in anxiety and at that

point you can quit because it's too difficult or you can say well if I develop my skills I can back go back

into flow so this is um the U the progression of flow over time and um I can tell you that this is how we

live our life uh between this different aspects of how much skill and challenge

uh relate to each other and arousal flow and control are all very positive in a sense and then it gets worse as we go

apathy is worse for some people and anxiety for others but um it's because that's when you can't really Express who you are in apathy you

have nothing to do and you have no skills you feel you are just a lump on with nothing to do you're out of life

and anxiety you feel overwhelmed so time left zero minutes okay sorry uh I hope we have a chance to talk

outside of this the this venue thank you very much