Effort And Flow

"The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen." Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

Athletes call it the "Zone" - an optimal internal psychological climate for peak performance. Basketball players, when they experience being "in the zone" report that the basket seems bigger, and feeling an almost mystical connection to it. The legendary hitter Ted Williams has said that sometimes he could see the seams on a pitched baseball.

A number of sports psychologists and trainers use a range of techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, concentration exercises and meditation to help access the "zone".

One of the consistent themes of these approaches is the need to "get around" the conscious mind. The winner of the 1988 Olympics in archery was a 17-year-old Korean young woman whose training included meditation for two hours a day.

Archer Tim Strickland has noted that conscious intervention is the great enemy: "Your conscious mind always wants to help you, but usually it messes you up."

Jennifer Lehman, an acting teacher and consultant, has noted, "It's difficult to achieve a consistent openness, letting things flow through you, without your own judgments, your own personal history, or how you think it should be, interfering with that. Our thinking mind is different than our feeling mind, and if we start thinking, we shut down creative expression. Thinking is very linear and one dimensional; a creative experience, is a very full experience, multidimensional. But if you're making a mental choice about something, then your experience becomes limited to only that."

Using PET scan technology (Positron Emission Tomography), researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that people learning to master a video game show a reduction in the overall metabolism of the brain - less brain activity with greater skill.

This indicates that increasing ability results in better efficiency: the brain can "relax into" the task. This may be the physiological result - or perhaps cause - of decreasing the "static" of consciousness referred to in Zen Buddhism, and in peak performance training approaches and other forms of awareness training.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced mee-high chik-sent-me-high-ee) has written extensively on the topic of flow, and his suggestions include picking an enjoyable activity that is at or slightly above your skill level; continually raising the level of challenge as performance improves; screening out distraction as much as possible; focusing attention on all the emotional and sensory qualities of the activity, and looking for regular feedback, or concrete goals to monitor progress, even if it is a large or long-term project with delayed outcome.

Very different kinds of activities can be contexts for flow experience, if you can see them as a series of short-term steps or events, each having value in engaging one's talents.

Examples of "flow activities" can include games, artistic performances, raising a child and religious rituals, but Csikszentmihalyi notes that "people seem to get more flow from what they do on their jobs than from leisure activities" - perhaps especially those kinds of jobs which demand full attention, like surgery or computer programming.

The quality of attention may be at the heart of flow experience. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., director of a major stress reduction clinic, in his book "Wherever You Go There You Are" suggests exercises in attention: "Draw back the veil of unawareness to perceive harmony in this moment... Try being present for things like taking a shower, or eating... Notice the feelings that push you toward the telephone or the doorbell on the first ring. Why does your response have to pull you out of the life you were living in the preceding moment?"

Being present and mindful in this way brings with it a quality of living with reduced effort and stress, more attuned to the flow of life, and more creative.