Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, spent about twenty-five years studying when people feel at their best. His answer is flow: the state in which people are so absorbed in an activity that nothing else seems to matter, and which they pursue for its own sake. This 1990 book was the first time he presented that research to general readers. It draws on interviews with thousands of people, from rock climbers and surgeons to factory workers, farmers in the Italian Alps and teenagers in Tokyo, and on the Experience Sampling Method, in which people carry a pager for a week and write down what they are doing and feeling each time it signals.

The book has ten chapters. The first two explain why happiness is hard to reach and how consciousness and attention work. Chapters 3 and 4 describe what flow feels like and the conditions that make it possible. Chapters 5 to 8 show how flow can be found through the body and the senses, the mind, work, solitude, family and friends. Chapter 9 looks at how people turn hardship into a challenge, and chapter 10 at how a whole life can be given meaning. The author says it is not a how-to book: it offers principles and examples for readers to apply to their own lives.

Notes. The figures in the book, on time use, crime, happiness surveys and the like, come from studies of the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in the United States. The author himself calls his estimate of how much information the mind can handle only suggestive.