More Leisure Does Not Necessarily Mean More Happiness: Lessons from Flow

More Leisure Does Not Necessarily Mean More Happiness: Lessons from Flow

Happiness: An Enduring Question

Some 2,300 years ago, Aristotle observed that people, regardless of gender, pursue happiness as the highest goal of life. Much has changed since then. Our understanding of the universe, the planets and the atom has advanced beyond anything earlier generations could have imagined. Yet our longing for happiness has endured.

The Modern Study of Happiness

Happiness attracts widespread interest both in everyday life and in academic research. Positive psychology has contributed greatly to its contemporary study. In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the founders of positive psychology, explores two central questions: What is happiness, and how can we attain it?

Csikszentmihalyi’s answer centers on flow, also called optimal experience: a state of undistracted involvement in an activity, in which we bring our intellect, abilities and energy fully to bear on a challenge. Mind and action become one. From this perspective, happiness lies in becoming so absorbed in what we are doing that we forget ourselves and experience a sense of inner order and peace.

Flow and the Story of Cook Ding

Freud is credited with locating the secret of happiness in work and love. Eastern culture, too, offers accounts of experiences at work that can be understood as flow.

In Nourishing Life, part of the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, Cook Ding displays extraordinary skill while cutting up an ox. Lord Wenhui marvels at his mastery, but the cook describes an intuitive understanding of the animal’s structure: he meets it through the spirit rather than looking with his eyes; sensory knowing comes to rest while the spirit continues its work. Read through the lens of flow, Cook Ding is completely absorbed in his task. Here, the Eastern account of intuitive engagement meets the Western concept of flow.

How Can We Study Happiness?

We live longer and healthier lives than people in the past, with countless scientific inventions at our disposal. Still, many people feel that their lives are being wasted. Are we destined never to feel satisfied, always wanting more than we can reasonably expect? Modern psychology offers a way to investigate this ancient question.

Csikszentmihalyi studied happiness through a simple method with an almost romantic quality: experience sampling, which captures moments of life as they unfold. Each participant carried an electronic pager for one week. It sent eight signals a day at irregular times, and at each signal the participant recorded their current feelings or mood. At the end of the week, they handed in a running log that offered a snapshot of their life. More than 100,000 such records of experience were collected, providing much of the empirical foundation for flow theory.

The Elements of Flow

Csikszentmihalyi found that people described enjoyment in broadly similar terms across very different activities, cultures, ages and genders. Consider chess enthusiasts and adolescents in a slum competing for a football championship: their states of mind can be remarkably alike. They concentrate completely, their actions unfold spontaneously with little deliberate thought, and ordinary awareness almost disappears as person and action merge. Optimal experience, and the psychological conditions that give rise to it, thus seem to have broad applicability.

Enjoyment has eight main elements:

1. You face a task you can complete.
2. You can concentrate fully on it.
3. Your goals are clear.
4. You receive timely feedback.
5. Your worries disappear while you are engaged in the activity.
6. You can freely control your own actions.
7. You lose self-consciousness during the experience, then emerge with a stronger sense of self.
8. Your sense of time changes: hours can feel like minutes, or the reverse.

When people recall their most positive experiences, they generally mention at least several of these elements.

Which Is More Enjoyable: Work or Leisure?

Why can spending a whole day lying down and watching television series—the most relaxing way we can imagine spending a weekend—still leave us feeling unhappy? This is one of the ironies of modern life: abundant leisure does not necessarily turn into enjoyment.

Take television, one of the most common leisure activities. It offers almost no opportunity for flow. By comparison, when work absorbs our full attention, matches challenges to our skills and gives us a sense of control and satisfaction, the opportunity to experience flow is four times that of watching television.

How to Experience Flow

How can we attain this optimal experience? How can we find enjoyment in the body’s various abilities? Are there personality traits that help us enter flow? Csikszentmihalyi addresses these questions in his book.

1. Cultivate an Autotelic Disposition

Why do games hold our interest while everyday activities, such as working or sitting around at home, can feel boring? Why can some people find enjoyment even in prison, while others feel bored at a holiday destination? Circumstances alone do not determine our experience. Turning everyday life into flow is far from easy, but almost everyone can improve their ability to do so. An autotelic disposition—the capacity to find enjoyment within experience itself—is especially valuable. Its defining feature is the ability to find enjoyment in circumstances that most people would find unbearable.

Reflecting on his own search for happiness, Russell described gradually becoming less preoccupied with himself and his shortcomings. More and more of his attention turned outward: toward the state of the world, different kinds of knowledge and the people he liked. This may be the best description of how to cultivate an autotelic disposition.

2. Engage the Mind in What the Body Does

Csikszentmihalyi emphasizes that physical movement alone cannot produce flow; the mind must be engaged as well. This applies even to walking, one of the simplest physical activities. The challenges a walk offers depend on its surroundings.

On a mountain path, every step presents a different challenge. You must choose each foothold carefully and adjust your movement and balance as you encounter soil, rocks and branches. The interaction between your body and these changing surfaces is like working through a succession of complex equations involving mass, speed and friction.

City streets may lack those physical challenges, but they offer other opportunities to develop skills. You can browse shop windows, observe people and consider patterns in their interactions. Some walkers seek the shortest route; others choose the most interesting one. Some favor sunny pavement in winter and shaded stretches in summer. Others deliberately adjust their pace so that they reach a crossing just as the light turns green.

By attending to the present, we can discover possibilities for flow in the smallest moments of everyday life.

3. Build Inner Order

In this account, happiness does not lie in acquiring things or experiencing a passing pleasure. It rests on managing consciousness and directing attention: choosing the goals that matter most, withdrawing attention from distractions that drain mental energy and deliberately taking on challenges slightly beyond our current abilities. Entering flow requires clear goals, timely feedback and a suitable match between our skills and the challenge before us.

These conditions allow us to give ourselves wholeheartedly to an activity, bringing our intellect, abilities and energy fully to the challenge until mind and action become one. That complete involvement is the ultimate happiness this vision of flow invites us to pursue.