Below are the best articles we could find on Creative Well-Being and peak performance.
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What is the key to creativity, and how does it help our mental health? Beverley D’Silva speaks to Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron and others about ‘flow,’ fear and curiosity.
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’?
You have to “turn it off” to “turn it on” when it matters most.
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.
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.
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.
“What is happiness?” asked psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He found it in a state of mind beyond results and rewards and called it “the flow.”
Some people just seem to excel when the situation calls for it.
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.
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.
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