Researchers have
studied what are described as “peak experiences.” These times are now also known as
If you have ever
been engaged in a sport or perhaps some other type of performance and
everything happened just right, you were in the zone, and you almost felt as if
it was—in a certain sense—effortless, you were experiencing flow.
Times of flow are happy,
satisfying, deeply engaging, meaningful and significantly positive experiences.
Ground-breaking
research in the study of flow was done by a psychologist named Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi. One of the aspects of
flow that Csikszentmihalyi has noted involves this question: what were people
doing when they had these peak experiences?
This is what he
writes:
“The feeling [flow]
didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or
when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth.”
This is somewhat
counter-intuitive because based on what we see in our culture, one would think
that many believe those behaviors listed above are exactly what someone would
do to have a peak experience, especially a peak experience of happiness. But that is not what the research has
revealed.
Continuing with Csikszentmihalyi’s
quote:
“Rather it often
involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s
capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.”
In other words, peak
experiences in life, or times of great happiness do not tend to come when we
are sitting around doing nothing. They
are more likely to occur when we are involved in something challenging that
requires our complete focus and attention.
If you will stop to
ponder these findings, they actually make a lot of sense.
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