By Jules Evans — 2017
You don’t need drugs or a church for an ecstatic experience that helps transcend the self and connect to something bigger
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“How many surf bums who can’t keep a job washing dishes will be up at 5 AM putting on a gritty, sandy wetsuit to paddle out in cold, sharky water for just one shot at a barrel? That’s motivation. If you could bottle that, then what’s possible?”
If you have ever felt completely absorbed in something, you might have been experiencing a mental state that psychologists refer to as flow. Achieving this state can help people feel greater enjoyment, energy, and involvement.
Flow state is losing yourself in the moment; when you find your abilities are well matched to an activity, the world around you quietens and you may find yourself achieving things you only dreamt to be possible.
FLOW is a state of total absorption in an activity where the individual is so focused that nothing else seems to matter. Time flies by and the activity becomes a joyful, even ecstatic, experience.
Think about the last time where you were engaged in an activity and you simply lost track of time. You were focused like a ninja, you felt amazing and it seemed as if there was nothing else on this planet besides you and your activity.
“What is happiness?” asked psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He found it in a state of mind beyond results and rewards and called it “the flow.”
In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow became the first academic to write about what he called “peak experiences,” moments of elation that come from pushing ourselves in challenging tasks.
Taking a modern look at a millennia-old concept. We experience the "flow state" when a given task becomes effortless and time slips by without our noticing. The concept has appeared in many ancient philosophies like Stoicism and Taoism, and modern research has confirmed this experience is real.
Many of us know what it’s like to be in a state of creative flow. Do you have to wait for inspiration to strike, or can you hack ‘the zone’?
The concept of the flow, or being in the zone for an artist, is very much like the state an athlete achieves (or strives to achieve) for peak performance. It’s that place beyond all the effort, where time is meaningless and everything just flows.