Guide
What is flow state, and how do you get into it?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named flow and spent a career measuring it across more than 8,000 interviews. This is his own account: the seven conditions, why your sense of self disappears, and the one rule that predicts when you will be in flow.
The short answer
Flow is the state of complete absorption in what you are doing, where time and self-awareness drop away and the activity becomes worth doing for its own sake. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who named it, found seven conditions present every time across more than 8,000 interviews: intense focus that becomes a kind of ecstasy, knowing exactly what to do from one moment to the next, immediate feedback, knowing the task is possible though difficult, the disappearance of time, the disappearance of yourself, and the feeling of being part of something larger. The rule that predicts it is simple: you enter flow when the challenge in front of you is higher than your own average and your skills are also higher than your average. Both have to be above your personal set point, which is why flow is specific to the person and not to the activity.
Step by step
Find your own set point, not somebody else's ▶8:01
Csikszentmihalyi's team measured this directly, paging people ten times a day and asking what they were doing, how they felt, and how much challenge and skill they experienced at that moment. From that they could establish an average level of challenge and skill for each person — different for everybody — and then predict fairly accurately when that person would be in flow. The practical consequence is that there is no universal flow activity. The question is not what puts people in flow, it is what sits above your own average on both axes.
Raise the challenge above your average, and the skill with it ▶8:01
Flow arrives when challenge and skill are both higher than your personal average. If only one is high you land somewhere else: high challenge with lower skill is where you are pushed past your comfort zone, which Csikszentmihalyi calls the place most people actually learn from — you can move into flow from there by developing a little more skill. High skill with low challenge is control, which he describes as comfortable but not very exciting; from there you get to flow by increasing the challenge. Both of those are one step away. The rest get progressively worse, ending in apathy, where there is no challenge and your skills go unused.
Expect the work first — there is no shortcut into it ▶6:12
His account of the composer is not of someone who simply relaxed into it. Csikszentmihalyi is blunt that you cannot create anything with less than ten years of technical knowledge and immersion in a particular craft, whether mathematics or music. The effortlessness people describe — the hand that seems to move by itself — arrives on top of that training, not instead of it.
Build clarity and feedback into the task ▶8:01
Two of the seven conditions are structural rather than psychological: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the next, and you get immediate feedback. Most ordinary work supplies neither. If a task leaves you unsure what the next move is, or tells you nothing about whether the last one worked, you can be skilled and willing and still not reach flow — the conditions are not there to be met.
Judge work by whether it produces flow, not by what it pays ▶2:28
This is the finding his career started from. About 30% of Americans surveyed since 1956 have said their life is very happy, and that figure has not changed at all, while personal income held constant for inflation more than doubled. His conclusion for work was to define success as something that helps others and makes you feel happy while you are doing it, and to build a place of work where people can feel the joy of innovation.
“our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second”
Nick Standlea, in the video
Key moments
Questions people ask
what is flow state
The state of complete absorption in an activity, where your sense of time and your sense of self drop out of awareness and the activity becomes worth doing for its own sake. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named it after a composer described a session that was going well: once he reaches the point of creating something new, the music, in his words, just flows out.
who came up with flow state
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian-American psychologist who coined the term and wrote Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in 1990. He founded the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University in 1999 and died in 2021. This guide is drawn from a lecture he gave on flow, which is on the show's channel.
what are the seven conditions of flow
In Csikszentmihalyi's own list: a focus that becomes intense enough to leave a sense of ecstasy; clarity, where you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the next; immediate feedback; knowing that what you need to do is possible, even though it is difficult; the sense of time disappearing; forgetting yourself; and feeling part of something larger. When those are present, the activity becomes worth doing for its own sake.
why does time disappear when you are in flow
Because you run out of attention for anything else. Csikszentmihalyi's explanation is that the nervous system cannot process more than about 110 bits of information per second, and simply listening to and understanding someone speak takes about 60 of them. Someone deep in a demanding creative task has no attention left over to monitor their body, their hunger, their tiredness or their problems at home. In his words, the body disappears and the identity disappears from consciousness.
how do i get into flow state
Put yourself where the challenge is above your own average and your skills are above your own average too. Csikszentmihalyi's measurements showed that both have to clear your personal set point, which differs from everyone else's. If you are currently bored, the move is more challenge; if you are anxious because the task is beyond you, the move is a little more skill. Both of those positions are one step from flow.
does more money make you happier
Not according to the data that set Csikszentmihalyi on this path. About 30% of people surveyed in the United States since 1956 have said their life is very happy, and that proportion has not changed at all, while personal income on a scale held constant for inflation more than doubled and almost tripled over the same period. His reading was that increases in material wellbeing do not seem to affect how happy people are.
how was flow actually studied
By interrupting people in their ordinary lives rather than asking them to remember afterwards. Csikszentmihalyi's team gave people electronic pagers that went off ten times a day; at each signal the person recorded what they were doing, how they felt, where they were, what they were thinking about, and how much challenge and skill they were experiencing. He reports over 8,000 interviews, from Dominican monks and blind nuns to Himalayan climbers, and found the same conditions regardless of culture or education.
what is the opposite of flow
Apathy, in his scheme. Flow sits where challenge and skill are both above your average; apathy is the corner where there is no challenge and you are not using your skills, and he calls it very negative. Between them sit relaxation, which he says still feels okay, and boredom, which he describes as beginning to be very aversive. His point is that a lot of people's everyday experience is apathy, and the research question is how to move more of ordinary life into the flow channel.
This guide is drawn from a full conversation on the show.
Full episode: How to Find Flow and Unlock Creativity · All guides · Sponsor the show