How Flow and Mind Wandering Relate to Productivity
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Think of a moment in your life when you were so involved in a task or activity that the rest of the world seemed to have disappeared. Your mind wasn’t wandering; you were totally focused on the activity itself.
According to positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, what you are experiencing in that moment is known as flow, a state of complete immersion in an activity or task. He describes the mental state of flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
Most of us, unless engaged in that which we love, are easily distracted by other musings. Our mind easily drifts…occupied by thoughts of what we’ll do for lunch, weekend plans or even why the guy across from you chose that tie. The conversation, meeting, or lecture happening in front of us drones on…..
A great majority of the psychological literature to date has presented that such mind wandering is detrimental, a “failure of executive control” or a “dysfunctional cognitive state. What if those studies were unintentionally skewed to encourage those very conclusions?
Dam(n) the Flow?
Just when you think the chapter is closed on flow, along comes a new study led by Paul Seli, Department of Psychology at Harvard University, suggesting that in some cases there’s no harm in allowing the mind to wander.
(Daydreamers rejoice!)
Seli’s first-of-its-kind study showed that, when performing a task that didn’t demand constant attention, people were able to strategically allow their minds to wander without an impact on task performance. The study is described in a paper published in Psychological Science.
The Abstract:
"We examined the hypothesis that people can modulate their mind wandering on the basis of their expectations of upcoming challenges in a task. To this end, we developed a novel paradigm in which participants were presented with an analog clock, via a computer monitor, and asked to push a button every time the clock’s hand was pointed at 12:00. Importantly, the time at which the clock’s hand was pointed at 12:00 was completely predictable and occurred at 20-s intervals. During some of the 20-s intervals, we presented thought probes to index participants’ rates of mind wandering. Results indicated that participants decreased their levels of mind wandering as they approached the predictable upcoming target. Critically, these results suggest that people can and do modulate their mind wandering in anticipation of changes in task demands."
Seli goes on to say,
“To date, the vast majority of tasks used in the literature on mind wandering have been very attentionally demanding. The problem is that, if people want to perform well on such tasks, they’re required to constantly focus their attention … because they can’t predict when there’s going to be a critical event or a target to which they have to respond.”
As an example, Seli cited studies that have used a now-common sustained-attention task for which the participants had to press a button each time they saw certain numbers on a screen (like the digits 1‒2 and 4‒9) and to withhold responding to a target digit (say, the digit 3).
“Because the series of digits is randomly presented, people don’t know when the 3 is going to be presented,” he said. “So if they want to perform well on the task, they must constantly pay attention to all the digits, because any one of them could be a target.
“But as I thought about this, it occurred to me that many of the tasks we perform in daily life are quite different from these sorts of tasks, since they don’t constantly demand our attention.” He continued, “For instance, I can be in the midst of writing an email, then take a mind-wandering break, then return to the email without impairing the quality of that email. Or I can ride my bike to the grocery store without having to constantly think about navigating my way there.”
To explore whether it was possible for people to mind wander strategically, Seli designed a new kind of task for participants, one that would strategically increase their rates of mind wandering, knowing they could afford to do so without incurring any performance costs.
Participants realized that, after each critical event, they could increase their rates of mind wandering without hurting their performance, since the next critical event wouldn’t occur for some time.
In analyzing participants’ accuracy on the clock task, how much their minds wandered did not affect how well they performed on the task, although Seli and colleagues found variation in how much or little people mind wandered throughout the task.
“Whether a person mind wandered 90 percent of the time or 10 percent of the time didn’t seem to matter,” Seli said. “Mind wandering wasn’t associated with any detectable performance costs. That is, people who frequently mind wandered performed just as well as those who infrequently mind wandered.”
Still Need the Flow?
A first step would be to ditch your phone.
It’s important to note that one can’t experience flow if other distractions disrupt the experience (Nakamura et al., 2009). Thus, to experience this state, one has to stay away from the attention-robbers in our modern fast-paced life.
Also, the balance of perceived challenges and skills are important factors (Nakamura et al., 2009). On the one hand, when a challenge is bigger than one’s level of skills, one becomes anxious and stressed. On the other hand, when the level of skill exceeds the size of the challenge, one becomes bored and distracted. Since the experience of this state is just in the middle, the balance is essential.
“Inducing flow is about the balance between the level of skill and the size of the challenge at hand.”
The experience of flow in everyday life can be an important component of creativity and well-being. Indeed, it can be prescribed as a key aspect of ‘’eudaimonia’’ or self-actualization in an individual, a contradictory term to “hedonia” or pleasure. Since it is also intrinsically rewarding, the more you practice it, the more you seek to replicate these experiences, which help lead to a happy life and increased well-being.
The 8 Characteristics of Flow
Complete concentration on the task
Clarity of goals and reward in mind and immediate feedback
Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down of time)
The experience is intrinsically rewarding, has an end itself
Effortlessness and ease
There is a balance between challenge and skills
Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination
There is a feeling of control over the task
References and additional reading:
Oppland, M. (2016) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: All About Flow & Positive Psychology, Positive Psychology Program.
Reuell, Peter (2018) When wandering minds are just fine, The Harvard Gazette.
Walker, C. J. (2010) Experiencing flow: Is doing it together better than doing it alone? The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(1), 5–11. doi: 10.1080/17439760903271116 Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013). Flow: The Psychology of Happiness: Random House. KOEHN, S., MORRIS, T. & WATT, A. P. 2013. Flow state in self-paced and externally-paced performance contexts: An examination of the flow model. Psychology of Sport & Exercise, 14, 787–795.
Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: the transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and cognition, 12(2), 231–256.
Dietrich, A. (2004). Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow. Consciousness and Cognition, 13(4), 746–761.
Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit.Neuron, 84(2), 486–496.
Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow theory and research.Handbook of positive psychology, 195–206.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
Ullén, F., de Manzano, Ö., Almeida, R., Magnusson, P. K., Pedersen, N. L., Nakamura, J., … & Madison, G. (2012). Proneness for psychological flow in everyday life: Associations with personality and intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(2), 167–172.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013). Flow: The Psychology of Happiness: Random House.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2004). Flow: The secret to happiness. TED Talk.
Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: the transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and cognition, 12(2), 231–256.
Dietrich, A. (2004). Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow. Consciousness and Cognition, 13(4), 746–761.
Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit.Neuron, 84(2), 486–496.
Koehn, S., Morris, T. & Watt, A. P. 2013. Flow state in self-paced and externally-paced performance contexts: An examination of the flow model. Psychology of Sport & Exercise, 14, 787–795.
Lickerman, A. (21 April 2013). How to reset your happiness set point: The surprising truth about what science says makes us happier in the long term. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201304/how-reset-your-happiness-set-point.
Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow theory and research.Handbook of positive psychology, 195–206.
Ullén, F., de Manzano, Ö., Almeida, R., Magnusson, P. K., Pedersen, N. L., Nakamura, J., … & Madison, G. (2012). Proneness for psychological flow in everyday life: Associations with personality and intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(2), 167–172.
Walker, C. J. (2010) Experiencing flow: Is doing it together better than doing it alone? The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(1), 5–11.