So you can do that and get your parents to pay for lessons on the piano, but you have to set higher and higher challenges — otherwise what was giving you flow before becomes routine and boring and that’s one of the major sources of energy for learning and growth. You take it slow and then up the ante with higher challenges — not too high for your skill level, because then you decide it is too difficult and give up.
BW: Can you give a biological explanation for this phenomenon?
MC: Neurologists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm I have studied with, some have read the book, have done some really interesting work. They find that the dopamine secretion from the striatum is very different when you are in flow — when people who are autotelic are regularly secreting dopamine from the caudal and dorsal areas of the striatum, instead of from the ventral area. Most people get pleasure when they get dopamine from the ventral part of the striatum. That dopamine goes through the receptors that make us feel good in a physical way, whereas the dopamine secreted from the dorsal and the caudal regions goes through areas of the brain that are involved in persevering in difficult activities. You feel the same joy, the same pleasure — but it is the pleasure you get from trying to solve problems, and mentally.
BW: It seems like this doesn’t happen very often. What prevents most of us from reaching flow on a regular basis?
MC: About 10 percent of the people in Germany, and 11 percent in the United States claim to have these experiences daily. Then you have about 20 percent who say they never have it, don’t know what you’re talking about — and the other cases are distributed kind of normally between never to every day. A great variety never feel it — they may actually feel it but they don’t pay attention to it — they pay attention to something else. They play a competitive game — but they are just focused on how to succeed and win, rather than just experiencing what they feel when losing. External reward only goes so far. After a while, they get bored and give up because they don’t know they can actually enjoy the activity, even if they don’t always win most of the time.
So what you pay attention to — let’s say there are a lot of children growing up who are so precarious, survivors — so they can’t always do what they want to. Hunger compels them to do one thing — or the grown-ups around them force them to do it. Those are the other reasons that they don’t always experience it — and that’s not how it should be. That’s why I always like to study people who experience flow in their work, because that’s more difficult to do — that’s why I studied the lox and bagel guy. They find a job that is not really meant to be enjoyed, and yet they find a way to enjoy it. In these cases, the enjoyment comes from you turning the job into something like a challenge where you can always improve, you want to get better at it — it takes your whole life, and you never get to do it completely well. But the whole time you feel you are improving and getting closer to your goal, but for most people it is hard to be proud from slicing fish, and that’s a real problem for a complex mental state.
We also live in a complex culture where we can never be as good as somebody else at doing something, and you really have to develop a life of your own with your own goals that very few people have — making a garden, or helping people to do something when they can’t find help anywhere else. It is fairly difficult to choose — you get distracted by things — but it’s worth trying.
BW: How do you measure flow and those who peak?
MC: One of the measures I started 40 years ago, more or less, is one that’s used everywhere in the world if they can do it. You have a wind-up alarm or an app on your phone to check random moments at the time of day — you fill out a form — write out what are you doing, what time — and rank your feelings on a scale from happy to sad; where are you from happy to sad? And other emotions — proud, ashamed — where are you? Where are you on concentration: from one being completely wiped out, to nine being fully concentrated.
That has been used very widely and there are things to learn about the culture. In some cultures it is very difficult to use it — because you fill out how happy you are when doing certain things — that they have an already prejudiced view of what moods would be. You could be happy and very concentrated, or very unfocused — you can be very happy and very strong, or very weak. Be very alert or very drowsy — but in certain cultures, people learn that happy means to be alert, concentrated, etc., etc. — but that’s not always true. If the culture’s not telling them how to feel, you can learn about people and their lives quite precisely.
You do this for about a week — get between 50 and 70 responses, feed that into the computer, and pretty soon you can begin to see patterns. You understand how this person differs from other people — but mostly people are very similar — in how they feel within the culture anyway, but there are of course interesting individual differences in cultures where people get to be who they are. Usually after a week we look at the booklets of the results of the person and anything out of the ordinary, we can interview the subject again.
One mother was very close to her baby that was just born, but one morning on the fourth day she was very upset — so we asked her why she was so sad, so irritable in the middle of the week, and so forth. Her husband went to work, the mail came an hour later, and she was very worried because an envelope was delivered in the mail — he doesn’t get envelopes in the mail, but they had been firing people at work with an envelope. She was worried that it meant her husband lost his job — it wasn’t the baby that made her worry. So you get these times when the person is answering in an atypical way but there is usually a reason for it — something that happened.
BW: If we develop our capacity to be in flow, would we be more able to solve society’s problems?
MC: I believe that more flow would indirectly benefit society in the following ways: if individuals experienced more flow at work, they would be more likely to be productive; if children experienced more flow in school, the level of knowledge would increase. Flow is contagious: the more individuals are in flow, the more likely it is that the overall level of flow would increase. But all of this will only happen if the flow is experienced in useful, prosocial activities, not just sports or entertainment.
BW: What advice would you have for young people seeking a career in psychology?
MC: Make sure you are curious about what makes people tick, and that you feel good when you can understand others and help them. Be prepared to do a lot of hard intellectual work without an assurance that it will get you a well-paying job. Otherwise, you won’t get much joy from your job, and you are not likely to do it well.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s Fall 2017 issue.
